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Artists: Roy Ascott, David Rokeby, Stelarc et al.
Edited by professor Diana Domingues. Published by Laboratorio Novas Technologias nas Artes Visuales, Universidade de Caxias do Sul, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Languages: English and Portuguese
Interface: PC only. Adapted for small screens.
Reviewed by Fred Andersson, Ulvsbygatan 29 (6), 654 64 Karlstad, Sweden. E-mail: konstfred@hotmail.com


The exhibition and conference "Art of the 21st Century" was arranged by the media lab (laboratorio novas technologias nas artes visuales) at the Universidade de Caxias do Sul in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1995. It brought together distinguished international media artists and theorists such as Roy Ascott, Monique Nahas, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, David Rokeby and Stelarc, as well as younger figures and representatives of less known art scenes in Latin America and Southern Europe. In the exhibition were presented, for example, stereoscopic animations by the Brazilian Tania Fraga (see www.lsi.usp.br/~tania/tania/html), the "infinite poem" by the Brazilian Philadelpho Menezes (see www.pucsp.br/~phmenez/index.htm), a 3D video-poem by the Spaniard Julio Plaza and a laser installation by the Italian Ruggero Maggi. The themes of the conference were: 1. Robotics: Man-Machine Scenario, 2. Art, Technology and Utopia, 3. Numeric Revolution, 4. Perspectives for a History of Art and Technology, 5. Interactivity and 6. Planetary Communication.

In this newly released CD-ROM, the exhibited works and the conference papers are sparsely documented with photos, video clips and short quotations. Today, this is already an historical document, and it might be of interest for everyone looking back into the rapid flow of ideas and technology during the nineties - a decade in which many hitherto utopian ideas were starting to become reality. Suddenly there was a real Internet, various kinds of AI and VR (Monique Nahas: "The era of algorithmic wholes") and a general breakthrough of a non-linear way of structuring information for utilitarian or aesthetic purposes. These aspects were all reflected in the exhibition, and I think that Arlindo Machado's words in the conference about Hypermedia expresses a great deal of the inter-disciplinary spirit of this international meeting: "If we understand consciousness and imagination as processes of conscious association and of restructuring of images and concepts selected inside the memory, it's not hard to realize that hypermedia is a much more adequate representation of this vary conscience or this very imagination than sequential, restrictive, stable and linear codes of the previous meaningful forms".

And when talking about the achievements of modern information technology, Edouardo Kac stated that: "There are things that you can do today, there is a new sense of human potential that we are perhaps not fully aware of". Are we now, in 2001? Among the things lacking in the CD presentation is, I think, some kind of summary or explanation to place the conference in a wider context of earlier and later developments. The documentation is too fragmentary, and the CD interface is rather clumsy and complicated. Given the international character of the visual material, though, I think it could be useful for pedagogical purposes in museums or in classes of art history or media studies. If one wants to read the conference papers (note: in the native languages of the speakers) they are however available in a printed publication from the media lab (a href="http://artecno.ucs.br/">http://artecno.ucs.br/).

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