Waldemar Cordeiro (organizer) — Arteônica — first Latin American computer-art exhibition

1971

Artists: Waldemar Cordeiro (organizer) · Year: 1971 · Medium: Exhibition of computer-generated art — international scope, Latin American framing · Substrate: Plotter prints and computer-generated works from artists across the Americas and Europe · Place: São Paulo, Brazil · Institution: Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP) Arteônica, organized by Waldemar Cordeiro at the Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado in São Paulo in 1971, was the first exhibition of computer art held in Latin America. The show brought together works by Cordeiro himself, by Brazilian colleagues, and by international contributors — prints and documentation from artists Cordeiro had identified through correspondence during his period of computer-art research. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalog with essays framing computer art in terms specifically relevant to the Brazilian concrete-art tradition. Cordeiro's curatorial argument was that computer art was a continuation of the concrete-art project, not a departure from it — that the same compositional and systematic concerns that had animated Brazilian concrete poetry and concrete painting for two decades were now being explored through a new medium. This framing placed computer art within an existing Latin American aesthetic lineage, rather than treating it as an imported North Atlantic phenomenon. Arteônica is less well-known in English-language histories of the field than Stuttgart 1965 or Cybernetic Serendipity 1968, but it is the comparable institutional moment for the Latin American computer-art scene. The exhibition catalog, along with Cordeiro's subsequent essays, remains a primary source for the period. His death two years later, in 1973, left the Latin American computer-art community without its most active institutional figure. The Arteônica catalog is held at MASP and at Itaú Cultural in São Paulo. Lore Cordeiro had been corresponding with Stuttgart and Bell Labs figures since the late 1960s but had been forced to work largely in isolation in São Paulo because of the Brazilian military dictatorship's restrictions on international travel and academic exchange. The Arteônica exhibition was funded with personal money and a small grant from Faap; Cordeiro served as both organizer and exhibitor and worked through the night before opening to install pieces by hand. He died of a heart attack in October 1973, less than two years after the exhibition, at age 47 — the dictatorship's continued repression and the financial strain of the show had reportedly contributed to his ill health. His widow Lygia Cordeiro and his daughter Analivia preserved the archive at home through the 1980s and donated it to MAC USP in 1995. The Arteônica catalogue is now one of the rarest and most-cited Latin American computer-art primary documents. Sources • Cordeiro, Waldemar (ed.) — Arteônica exhibition catalog (FAAP, 1971) • Itaú Cultural — Cordeiro archive • Fabbri, Analívia (ed.) — Waldemar Cordeiro: Fantasia Exata (Itaú Cultural, 2014)