Waldemar Cordeiro. Auto retrato probabilístico , 1967.

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RACHEL PRICE

“From Waldemar Cordeiro one always expected a contrarian position” begins one obituary, titled “Cordeiro: O não afirmativo” (Cordeiro: The Affirmative No), about the Brazilian artist Waldemar Cordeiro (1925–1973). 1 The obituary refers to Cordeiro’s vigorously polemical career as a critic and artist, a career shaped by his early training in , where he was born and lived until his mid-twenties and where he read , a lasting influence. The title of the review also puns on Cordeiro’s 1967 Auto retrato probabilístico (Probabilistic Self- Portrait), a photograph of the artist reproduced on a grid of movable pieces that bear the words não (no) or sim (yes), thus creating a pixilated self-portrait stamped with references to binary logic. But Cordeiro espoused a “ não afirmativo ,” an affirmative negativity or, per - haps better, an affirmative virtuality, in at least one other way. Cordeiro was the first artist in Latin America to make computer art, which he created with physicist Giorgio Moscati on an IBM 360/44 in the physics department at the University of São Paulo in 1968. He was the first to embrace a digital post - Fordist moment after a solid career in abstract then concrete painting in the 1950s and readymades and landscape architecture in the 1960s. In his last years, after the waning of ’s object-oriented philosophy and artworks, he moved toward an affirmative nonobjectivity. During these years concretism’s obsession with objects and readymades (poet termed Cordeiro’s works in this vein “ popcretos ”) ceded to happenings, processes, and ephemerality. In the move away from making things to heeding pro - cesses, Cordeiro joined many of his contemporaries, such as Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica. But Cordeiro was singular among his peers in his pursuit of the digital. His theoretical interest in the potential of computers and in both postsubjective and postobjective (i.e., postconcrete) art is highlighted in the enigmatically titled computer art piece from 1971 A mulher que não é B.B. (The Woman Who Is Not B.B.), which depicts a woman identified only as “not Brigitte Bardot.” The image is a digitized version of a newspaper photograph of a crying young Vietnamese woman, processed to produce a pixilated effect (the pixels were ASCII characters

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 Left: Waldemar Cordeiro, José Luiz Aguirre, and Estevam Roberto Serafim. Source photo for A mulher que não é B.B ., 1971. Opposite: Waldemar Cordeiro, José Luiz Aguirre, and Estevam Roberto Serafim. A mulher que não é B.B ., 1971.

layered to create varying degrees of darkness) into which noise—randomly assigned dark dots— has been introduced. The resulting image is clearly not the same as the original photograph, which is itself defined negatively: “not B.B.” The artwork’s title also plays on a 1925 essay by Brazilian poet, critic, and musicologist Mario de Andrade titled “ A escrava que não é Isaura ” (The Slave Who Is Not Isaura ), a modernist parody of the romantic “realism” of Bernardo Guimarães’s 1875 novel A escrava Isaura (The Slave Isaura) .2 Parts of Andrade’s essay were first written for São Paulo’s seminal 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna and attempt to define modernista poetry, emphasizing in van - guard style the importance of creation over imitation. The text describes “the slave that is not Isaura ”: in Andrade’s fable, this new “slave,” or muse, is poetry, sheer creation. Borrowing from the 1920s modernists in its title, Cordeiro’s artwork is also apophatic—that is, defined negatively—in many other ways: not romantic, not realist, not modernist, not subjective, not of the (passing) industrial age. Moreover, not only was the image manipulated by the introduction of random - ness, but the move from analog-indexical photography —in which the subject literally bears upon the print—to a digital format means the image has no “real” human referent. This negation is in keeping with Cordeiro’s distrust of naive representation. For much of his career Cordeiro railed against both naturalism (art as mere rep - resentation of worldly objects) and subjectivism (expressivism) in art, in mani - festos, essays, talks, and when discussing his own work. Yet his computer art corpus, whose production process should have made it in some ways the most objective of his work, comprises mostly (hand-)digitized photographs of the human figure or face, some of which convey typical depictions of affect, such as Valentine’s Day silhouettes of couples in love or the image of a face in pain. That is, just when computer algorithms promised to remove subjectivity from representation, “the human” reentered Cordeiro’s oeuvre both on the level of the making of the art—in the choices made to alter analog images and in the actual human labor needed to digitize the images—and on the level of subject matter. 3 The human visage and its affect, as well as the sensory processing that these portraits are intended to elicit in the spectator, represents a central but hitherto underexamined aspect of Cordeiro’s computer art. 4 Electronic and biological

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 artist Eduardo Kac, in a 1997 introduction to Cordeiro’s work for English-speaking audiences, notes that “in [Cordeiro’s] computer art, math - ematical abstraction (as digitized and processed imagery) and political and emotional concerns (as content-oriented art) came together in a truly original and challenging way for the first time in his career.” 5 But how did Cordeiro arrive at what Kac suggests is a singular syn - thesis, and why? Cordeiro’s prescient insights about the relations between affect, embodiment, and digital and nonsubjective art inhere in the não of A mulher que não é B.B . To understand the multiple ways in which the image is “not” B.B., we must consider Cordeiro’s career from his early days as a painter through his work as a landscape archi - tect in São Paulo to his computational collaborations with Moscati.

Against Naturalism Cordeiro was born in 1925 in to an Italian mother and a Brazilian father. He moved to São Paulo in 1946 and quickly began working as an art critic and illustrator, bringing with him from Italy not only his readings in Gramsci but the influence of Piet Mondrian, Kasimir Malevich, and constructivism more generally. Throughout his career Cordeiro’s aesthetic philosophy would anchor itself in that of Konrad Fiedler, the nineteenth-century German scholar of aes - thetics who argued that art does not express but simply is and who believed in an objective, “pure” vision beyond subjective impressionism. In 1952, Cordeiro joined other Paulista artists in forming the , which launched itself with an antinaturalist manifesto. Here and elsewhere Cordeiro’s critique was levied against naturalism’s concept of art as an “imita - tion of the appearance of fauna, flora and the human figure,” one that disavowed the organizing power of the frame, of color, of convention—in short, all the arti - fice that produces the illusion of realism. 6 More than a decade later, as he was making popcretos , Cordeiro would write that even “Pop-Art runs the risk . . . of a new naturalism.” 7 Throughout the 1950s Cordeiro was an avid advocate of concrete art. In “Concretismo como arte de criacão contraposta à arte de expressão” (Concretism as an Art of Creation as Opposed to Expressive Art) Cordeiro cites the Dutch artist and theorist Theo van Doesburg, who coined the term concrete art in 1930 , reiterating that concretism was “an entirely creative art” different from both fig -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 urative and nonfigurative art, both of which Cordeiro felt were “expressive” and subjective. 8 Because both represent sentiments or emotions, both are opposed to an art of the object. 9 In the early 1950s Cordeiro began to augment his work as a painter and critic with work as a landscape architect. Although Cordeiro’s work in this field has been, with recent notable exceptions, less appreciated than his fine art and although it was principally a means to make a living, Cordeiro approached land - scape architecture as an extension of his theoretical and artistic interests more generally. 10 The 1950s were, moreover, a time in which landscape architecture in was understood as of a piece with developments in other arts: Roberto Burle Marx, the country’s most famous artist-turned- paisagista , had been given an important and well-publicized show at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP; São Paulo Art Musuem) in 1952, the same year Cordeiro began work as a paisagista .11 In sketches made from close observation, Cordeiro discovered in plants and leaves the same serialization dear to concrete art. As poet and critic Décio Pignatari recollects, bringing together nature and machine, [Cordeiro] placed himself in the position of a Gramscian organic artist: the serialized form was a universal icon in montage, through whose perception the operator could perceive the process of the passage from quantity to quality, the pure visuality . . . for the construction of a new revolutionary artistic order. 12 Thus, although Cordeiro’s faithful observations resemble something closer to a nineteenth-century naturalists’ botanical sketches, his approach was consis - tently constructivist, influenced by the Bauhaus-inspired landscape architects of the 1950s. 13 In a 1956 interview Cordeiro notes that paisagismo , once a valid “mode of art,” succumbed in the nineteenth century to naturalism’s logic, ending up simply “imitating nature.” 14 Cordeiro’s 1960s landscape work was less interested in cre - ating illusions of natural wildness than in borrowing from the geometric, even algorithmic work of concrete painting. As Helouise Costa notes, Cordeiro’s tran - sition from concrete to more information-based work coincided with his work in landscape architecture. Costa argues that although Cordeiro’s first years as a paisagista borrowed from concretism, his main influences by the 1960s were information theory and semiotics. 15 As early as 1957, Cordeiro wrote that he was undertaking the construction of “a new landscaping dictionary.” 16 Although information theory and semiotics might seem to be strange fields to combine with landscape architecture, the combination makes more sense

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 when one recalls that Cordeiro had an abiding interest in artificial languages. Time and again Cordeiro would emphasize the importance of what Abraham Moles calls “artificial channels” of information. 17 Not coincidentally, Cordeiro’s first computer- based project was Beabá , a program written with Giorgio Moscati in 1968 to generate plausible but randomly synthesized Portuguese words out of a data - base of common phonemes and letters assembled according to their fre quency in Portuguese. 18 This experiment with artificial languages preceded Cordeiro and Moscati’s first computer art principally because the programming was easier than the visual art they were already planning, but their work with language continued, embedded not only in the programming needed for the later visual art but in the very images themselves, which use characters to create pixels. In a 1964 article Cordeiro proposes to understand landscape architecture itself as a form of communication in industrial society. 19 Far from a “naturalist” example of landscape architecture—Cordeiro worked in the rapidly expanding and industrializing São Paulo—urban landscape is inevitably “artificial com - munication, even if it is natural.” 20 Landscape for Cordeiro was part of urbanism, which has at its heart questions of organization of space and of transport, both physical and electronic. 21 Cordeiro believed that the ongoing revolution in telecommunications (television, radio, telephone, and, most significant, com - puter) would radically transform inherited Renaissance notions of the city, encouraging networks over centers (changes the Internet has realized). 22 Cordeiro soon pronounced concretism over and with it the regime of the machine. He believed object-oriented concretism had run its course along with the industrial era, to be superseded by the electronic in the post-Fordist era (in 1953 Cordeiro diagnosed a “Fordist Expressionism” among U.S. artists in an eponymous article; in the 1970s he updated his observations on the relations between art and society for a postindustrial world). 23 Yet Cordeiro recognized the connections between the two traditions: in his 1971 essay Arteônica , written to accompany a computer art exhibition, he connects the first Brazilian digital art to earlier concretism. 24 Annateresa Fabris perceives a distance between Cordeiro’s constructivist era and his final digital phase, suggesting that though constructivism was a “pre - decessor of digital art, Cordeiro felt the two disciplines nonetheless do not share any heuristic and structural attributes”; however, in Arteônica Cordeiro points to strong continuities between the two traditions. 25 He writes that concrete art is the only “to utilize digital methods of creation. Coinciding with the period marked by the greatest degree of industrialization, concrete art in Brazil furnished algorithms of ongoing use.” 26 In a 1968 letter to Božo Bek of Zagreb’s New Tendencies group Cordeiro writes,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 I take the view that the entire effort of the avant-garde is characterized by a digitalization of artistic language. The difference between the avant-garde of the first Industrial Revolution and the current avant-garde is a techno - logical difference, not a difference of method. Both are aiming to translate the work into numbers. Digitalization and binary coding are the obvious ways for using computers in art. 27 Objectivism led to the post- or nonobjective period that came after it. In a move still more prescient, Cordeiro saw the new computer age as a deeply embodied one, a notion that, although crucial to the very emergence of cyber - netics, has been emphasized by media theorists (such as Mark Hansen and Kate Hayles) only since around 1999. 28 Here Moscati is important. The physicist early on believed that he and Cordeiro’s art experiments were closely correlated with research into vision and perception. 29 Cordeiro and Moscati’s understanding of the connection between new electronic media and the body is also crucial for understanding how Cordeiro’s digital art engages with both the human figure and the artwork’s spectator/participant.

The End of Centers and Beginning of Networks Computing was still incipient in Brazil when Cordeiro asked physicist and art critic Mário Schenberg to connect him to someone working with the University of São Paulo’s IBM 360/44 so that he might begin some experiments with com - puter languages. At the time only a few institutions, including the University of São Paulo, São Paulo’s Water Department, and, in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian Geographic and Statistical Institute possessed computers. As was the case else - where in the Americas (e.g., Cuba), computers were first used for betting and gambling: the São Paulo Jóquei Clube had a computer for calculating payouts. 30 Schenberg introduced Cordeiro to Moscati. The two agreed to a profound col - laboration: neither wanted simply to lean on the other’s expertise to produce computer art. Cordeiro visited the physics laboratories and collaborated in designing the programs, and Moscati attended art exhibits with Cordeiro. 31 They exchanged articles in each other’s fields and fashioned their work as a fusion of art and technology. Although not actively involved in the arts, as was Schenberg, Moscati had experience creating images on a computer from his work plotting physics particles—work that although not designed to be art nonetheless bears a similarity to 1950s concretism. 32 Their shared interest lay in the process of treating the images they digital - ized. After considering many possible processes that the original analog images might undergo—from anamorphosis to image mixing—Moscati opted for the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 scientifically most significant transformation, the derivative. Derivatives mea - sure rates of change, and change, Moscati reflected, produces more information than static states. Moscati has recently argued that these early experiments in art unwittingly preceded what would become an important use of derivatives in medical and scientific image processing in subsequent decades. 33 The empha - sis on change and new information coincided with the pair’s determination to use new media to produce a correspondingly new art, “avoiding the attempt to use new media to substitute older media without changing the message.” 34 Part of the computer’s promising capabilities had to do with the scale of information processed (quantitatively and in terms of speed). Computers could analyze large data sets to reveal how the most apparently subjective traits were part of objectively measurable trends. “Style,” for instance, could be seen now as a kind of fingerprint, at once unique to an artist and also measurable, depen - dent upon tendencies, repetitions, or in Moscati’s words, “rhythm”: one could now perceive recurrent patterns in Bach or analyze literature according to “the distribution of the length of paragraphs, of the occurrence of certain words, of sentence length, of the use of commas and so on. Every author’s personality and style are reflected by certain rhythms.” 35 Moving in the opposite direction, Moscati and Cordeiro speculated that ana - log images might also lose their signature elements once noise was introduced. Cordeiro was less interested in simply reproducing photographs in digital form (that might have been the kind of naturalism against which he had long been opposed, as well as a waste of a new technology) than he was in the meaning observers made of images that had been altered by the translation process. Referencing the basic tenets of Claude Shannon’s theory of information, Cordeiro wrote in 1963, the need to diminish the probable (meaning) in favor of the improbable (infor - mation) is increasingly clear to me. Not the control of the aleatory, but the sur - prise, disorder and unforeseeability of the aleatory. From the increase in meaning, per information theory, to a theory of communication . . . such that the increase of information is directly proportional to its nonprobability. 36 Such a preference is consonant with Cordeiro’s insistence on the new. Cordeiro believed digital media implies its own aesthetics. He wrote during this period that manufacturing economies had yielded objects, the industrial revolution had yielded programming, and the incipient “paleocibernetic age” was yielding “the numeric analysis of images.” 37 In calling the late 1960s and early 1970s a “paleocibernetic age,” Cordeiro recognized that computing was still in its infancy (certainly so in Brazil) but that the changes it would bring

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 were almost ontological, defining not only an era but altering our consciousness and experience of the world and of aesthetics. Early computers were large and slow. To speed information processing, scientists devised a type of parallel processing—“time sharing”—in which some computations, too large for a single computer, are simultaneously distrib - uted among various machines. In his 1971 Arteônica , Cordeiro, like others in the period, extrapolates from the collective structure of time sharing (or incipient packet switching) the potential for something like an Internet. He writes, the “Time-Sharing” system, with a great number of terminals, which via satel - lite can attain an international scale, creates a network of interlinked pro - cessing through simple, economical machines: a new type of telephone, which not only transports information but treats it as well. Centers, as a physical place for information or where something is exchanged, are quickly losing their function. 38 This prescient consignment of the center to a precomputational past is not, however, Cordeiro’s main point: perhaps again inspired by cybernetics, he goes on to claim that the real exchange of information today is happening not in centers but within the body itself : via “the senses, the nervous system . . . it is electric means [ meios ] that furnish our perception with the greatest number of ‘bits.’” 39 Art could not but respond to such changes in the body; it would have to channel new research in neurology and psychology. 40 At the same time, machines would become more embodied (reminiscent of philosopher of science Gilles Simondon’s thesis of “individuation”). 41 Literature professor Myriam Correa recalls having witnessed Cordeiro present some of his art in Belo Horizonte in the early 1970s, shortly before his death. In the presentation Cordeiro claimed— whether playfully or seriously one cannot know—that because the IBM 360/44 was a machine not designed to produce art, it had “groaned” when processing Cordeiro and Moscati’s images. The labor of the computer also demanded much labor from Cordeiro. First he digitized a selected image, entering the information on punch cards. Cordeiro and Moscati decided on eighty points/pixels per line, with seven degrees of darkness. 42 Cordeiro assigned a number from zero to six to each of the 9,600 points into which the image had been divided, depending on the point’s rela - tive darkness. 43 The first image Cordeiro and Moscati made, Derivadas de uma imagem (Derivatives of an Image) required 120 punch cards with the informa - tion for the 9,600 points making up the image, or 9.6 kilobytes of information. 44 Then Moscati wrote a program in FORTRAN to process the images. Cordeiro once remarked that the aspirations of concrete art and poetry to machinic pro -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 duction remained more desire than reality because the actual production of concrete art remained artisanal. In his early digital art, too, the promise of com - putation’s speed and scale was partially tempered by the human labor that was necessary: the images were examples of radical “digitization” insofar as they required the artist to work with his own fingers. 45 Cordeiro retained from cybernetics and information theory an interest in the ways in which the human body and machines shared in circuits of feedback. In “A física da arte” (The Physics of Art) Cordeiro wonders whether future discov - eries will eventually explicate the “relationship between an artistic experience and the nervous system’s ten billion cells.” After all, he concludes, both avant- garde aesthetics and electrophysiological research had grasped that “impulses in the human body are accompanied by an electric effect: nerve firings are inseparable from electronic changes.” 46 Electronic art ( arteônica ) was as its core “motivated by the need to explore human nature with new resources to reach objective art.” 47 Cordeiro, although critical of subjectivism, was nonetheless a humanist inter - ested in new media’s potential for greater democracy and political change. This potential must have seemed more urgent after 1964, when Brazil suffered a right-wing coup. The new regime’s crackdowns on intellectuals and the left intensified in 1968, and pressure from the regime forced Moscati, then head of the physics department at the University of São Paulo, to leave Brazil for England in 1971. Cordeiro was attached to the idea of an objective humanism against any naturalist subjectivity. He believed biology would furnish a new universal lan - guage to replace 1950s universalism (i.e., concretism) based on what all human beings share, both across the globe and through time; namely, the physiology of perception (Cordeiro here eschews a Marxian historicization of the senses). 48 But Cordeiro’s humanism is rooted in the body and is closer to an understand - ing of emotions as chemical reactions than as the expression of inner sentiments of a beautiful soul. A new kind of “naturalism”—or at least nature—could suddenly be redeemed. Cordeiro writes that modern art had found it necessary to bring about “the death of sentiment and other subjective experiences” in order to perform a veritable “autopsy” of the body. Modern art produced a new, no longer denigrated, natu - ralism that did not “imitate the external world, did not represent nature, but inquired objectively” into human perception. 49 Cordeiro’s biological view of the body’s communication, a continuation of his interest in concretism, is the objec - tive counterpart to subjectivity.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 Derivadas de uma imagem The debate between objectivity and subjectivity, creation and expression that Cordeiro held over from the concrete and neoconcrete art movements proves important to analysis of his digital images, especially as concerns their address of affect, figuration, and digital manipulation. But if Cordeiro was opposed to romantic expression and sentiment, how should we interpret his choice for Derivadas de uma imagem (Derivatives of an Image) , digitized photographs of faces altered by producing increasingly “noisy” derivatives of the original image’s information? The world’s first digital image (1957) shows American researcher Russell Kirsch’s baby son; it is figurative and has strong affective connotations. 50 Neither Moscati nor Cordeiro was aware of this image at the time, but their first derivada was also figurative, based on a poster for the Dia dos Namorados (Valentine’s Day) that shows the profiles of a man and a woman apparently gazing into each other’s eyes, with a more distant and less distinct couple standing in the back - ground. (With just a couple of exceptions, all of Cordeiro’s computer art features human figures or faces.) Moscati claims Cordeiro deliberately chose “an image with strong human and affective content to be transformed by a ‘cold and calculating machine.’” 51 Moscati’s recollection of Cordeiro’s motivation coincides with the reception the work received at the time it was produced. In one interview Moscati recalls British critic Jonathan Benthall singling out Cordeiro’s work at a group show of computer art as the sole example of art that moved “in the direction of bringing back human emotions into the cold and cerebral world of the computer.” 52 The language of Benthall’s review is in fact less definitive, but it does single out Cordeiro and Moscati’s work and emphasizes the importance of representa - tion—especially of the human figure—for the then-nascent field of computer graphics, which Benthall otherwise dismisses as having reached “something near a dead end.” 53 Of Derivadas de uma imagem Benthall writes, What makes me feel that this is art rather than contrivance is the evocative choice of image. When I first saw this series I for a moment did not detect that the image depicts a male and a female head on the left, and still more ambiguous are the two standing figures on the right. Cordeiro and Moscati seem to be interested . . . in what Richard Morphet describes as “the knife- edge border between legibility and illegibility.” The possibilities of effect - ing this kind of modulation in films seem very hopeful. Cordeiro’s and Moscati’s series seems like so many stills from a film sequence, exploring, perhaps, an elusive human relationship without the need for actors. 54

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 Waldemar Cordeiro and Giorgio Moscati. Derivadas de uma imagem , 1969.

The brief review picks up on two aspects of digital art as they bear on observers: first, Benthall notes Cordeiro and Moscati’s interest in how derivatives degrade legibility, requir - ing the viewer to quickly and instinctively size up increasingly noisy images; second, Benthall implies the importance of “human relationship[s]” for the successfully “evocative nature” of the Derividas de uma imagem , in contrast to other works he critiques for being “tragic in [their] misdirected” move of applying “mathematical principles to art and poetry.” 55 In a separate interview Moscati again states that Cordeiro was “intent on the fact that the initial image [be] figurative,” reiter - ating that in his opinion “what [Cordeiro] was really trying to do was to associate something very human with something very technological,” and again, what Cordeiro “was really after was to contrast the cold, predictable machine with the human thing. He was concerned with emotional contents. He did wish to explore new media, but retaining the human aspect”—what Benthall might have called the human aspect without actors. 56 In my own exchanges with Moscati, the physicist noted that at the moment when the two began their collaborations it was “unthinkable” to use computers for art. He suggested to me that in order to gain recognition from the art world Cordeiro had insisted on including “human context” in the original image used for Derivadas de uma imagem . But the question remains whether this use of figuration was employed solely to offset the apparent coldness of the computer or whether it also was designed to continue Cordeiro’s critique of expression and of mass orchestrated affect, such as that exemplified by Valentine’s Day visions of romantic love manufac - tured by the “culture industry” (a term Cordeiro explicitly used, echoing not only the Frankfurt School but his early readings of Gramsci). 57 Although keenly interested in mass media’s potential for democratizing art and information, Cordeiro also cautioned in an era of “mass consumption” against conflating “mass consciousness” and “massification,” poles he defined as, on the one hand, a multitude-like “liberty of the individual-mass—who aspire to a democratiza - tion of access to the most important experiences and information,” and, on the other hand, “directed coercion, attempting to impose pre-established conduct that ends in conformism.” 58 The gradual degradation of the clarity of the image in Derivadas de uma imagem , achieved by processes such as “feature extraction” and “edge detec -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 Left and opposite: Waldemar Cordeiro. Beijo , 1967.

tion,” can be seen as a way to counteract the aggressive marketing of “love.” By introducing in each iteration amplifica - tions of darkness (by taking a series of derivatives, which measure the change in gradient of darkness or lightness), the advertisement for love is stripped of its legibly commercial aspect and demands of the viewer her or his own interpreta - tion, inciting biological operations such as pattern recognition. As Moscati sug - gests, something in this treatment of the image was “aggressive”: “when we were discussing the possibilities o[f] the use of the computer in art, we had an extended map of possible works. One of them was to introduce noise in an image by introducing random dots in the image, corrupting the image, as an aggression symbol.” 59 For Moscati, one of the most interesting aspects of the processed digital images is their connection to biological information processing, or how human beings make sense of changing or partial information: “the working[s] of the human vision that performs time and space derivatives of the images seen, are used to perceive changes in the environment,” alerting human beings and animals to information important to survival, such as a fast-approaching car on a road. “The brain recognizes change over staticity,” he writes. 60 Processing the Derivadas therefore implies not only the laborious data entry by Cordeiro but interpretation by the viewer. This relation anticipates Hansen’s evaluation of new media as dependent upon a new relationship between bod - ies and the digital image: “the image has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body. . . . [T]he image . . . now demarcates the very process through which the body, in conjunction with the various apparatuses for rendering information perceptible, gives form to or in-forms information.” 61 Hansen is referring to 1990s new media art, but one hears a similar message in Mario de Andrade’s attention to the bodily expe - rience of art in the 1925 essay to which Cordeiro’s A mulher que não é B.B. alludes. Although Andrade is more invested in expression than is Cordeiro, he, too, emphasizes art’s aesthetic (i.e., bodily) essence. Andrade’s “ A escrava que não é Isaura ” claims that art is created when “man receives a sensation through the senses. According to the degree of receptivity and productive sensibility he feels without here entering the smallest bit of intelligence the NEED TO EXPRESS the sensation received through the gesture. . . . cries, musical sounds, articu -

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 lated sounds, facial contractions and gesture itself.” 62 For Andrade, creation is pure gesture, pure bodily movement, understood as facial contraction or cry. This attention to the senses and to facial expression emerges as a central concern in Cordeiro’s later works.

Not B.B. Brigitte Bardot’s lips are the subject of a 1967 blason by Cordeiro titled Beijo (Kiss). The blason is a type of medieval and Renaissance verse in which a woman is rendered not as a whole being but bit by bit through poetic evocations of her erotic parts: lips, breasts, eyes, and so on. Cordeiro’s visual blason is perhaps better seen as an anti- blason : the image of the lips, transposed onto a grid of movable parts, is wired to elec - tronically open up, and the lips themselves split into pieces. The sensual mouth does not so much open to receive a kiss as it is blasted apart. Contemporaneous with Cordeiro’s readymades, Beijo engages in a dialogue with mass culture both in its subject and its form, which, although not a found object, is reminiscent of such homemade devices as the transformed or muti - lated bicycles and chairs that make up Cordeiro’s other popcretos . In these same years Cordeiro also produced a series in which human figures are represented but distorted, including an image of a crowd (possibly the same people later represented in the digital image Gente ) over which has been positioned, under the pretense of aiding the viewer’s ability to read the faces, a magnifying glass that actually distorts the faces. Is the splintering of Bardot’s lips a hammer taken to mass media’s hawking of images—the “coercive conformism” Cordeiro warned against? Is it a com - ment on the diffusion of mass culture? Is the pop-era artwork merely having fun with Bardot’s inviting lips? Whatever the ultimate goal, a similar kind of frac - turing, now digital, would be repeated four years later in A mulher que não é B.B. In the later piece what one critic calls “an anti-hedonist denunciatory pop image”—that is, an image bearing features of a suffering woman widely distrib - uted among the media, an image not designed to sell sexuality—is muddied with the noise of 25 percent randomness. 63 The result is a slightly scrambled representation of a pixilated woman. The photograph used to make the digitized image shows a young woman, possibly just a girl, turned toward the camera but looking past it, as if she were

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 Left: Waldemar Cordeiro. Indivíduo sobre a massa , 1966. Opposite: Waldemar Cordeiro, Raul Fernando Dada, and J. Soares Sobrinho. Gente grau 6, 1972 –1973.

watching the departure of a loved one. In the magnified, digitized version, the larger context— a group of possibly orphaned children—has been removed and much lightness introduced. The sharpness of the affect otherwise legible on her face as sorrow or great pain has been blunted by the noise. So, how are we to read this face? Gilles Deleuze (and, more recently, others inspired by his work) analyzes “the face” as a signifying surface, something that is read perhaps too easily. 64 In representative painting or film, faces have often been thought to offer unmedi - ated access to the feelings behind them. The pioneering affect theorist Silvan Tomkins goes so far as to argue that affect is facial expression. 65 In “What Can a Face Do?” Richard Rushton, using Deleuze, takes issue with the received idea of the face as a surface on which corresponding inner feelings are expressed . Rushton argues instead for a notion of the face as something that “does” rather than represents—a Fiedlerian argument. 66 Rushton also reminds readers of Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of a sinister “facial machine” that produces essentializing, nearly phrenological reading practices by which a subject is reduced to the face he or she happens to have. Such a “facial machine” bent on homogenization rather than individuality (one is reminded here of Cordeiro’s words on conformism) is also responsible, Rushton writes, for “the proliferation of faces on the covers and pages of popular magazines,” the kind of magazines whose covers Bardot graced in the 1960s. 67 A mulher que não é B.B. should therefore also be read as part of a trend that both reflects on and participates in such a proliferation of faces, anticipating by three years, for instance, the silkscreen of Bardot by Andy Warhol, whose images of global leaders and celebrities are perhaps the most iconic commentary on (via participation in) the “facial machine.” But whereas Warhol’s work seems as interested in being part of the “facial machine” as in commenting upon it, A mulher que não é B.B. is more enigmatic about the status of the “anti-hedonist denunciatory pop image” it reproduces. Was it designed to critique the facial machine? Does this image of a face in pain attempt to grant us access to the affect of the woman represented? Or does it sug - gest we are barred from the feelings “behind” the face? Does the image’s title, by naming the woman in negative terms—this is not Brigitte Bardot , not part of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 that commercial facial machine—paradoxically attempt to preserve the woman’s singularity, even as the apophatic title ensures an anony - mous opacity? Perhaps we must move beyond “the face.” In psychoanalysis, both the face and the voice have been analyzed as partial objects, charged with affect. The mouth, curiously, has been largely exempt from such theoretical musings. Yet in both Beijo and A mulher que não é B.B. the mouth is the primary means of access, the opening to something beyond sheer surface. In Beijo an electronic mechanism forces open the closed lips—the impenetrable surface of the facial machine that is B.B.—not to allow us in but to disperse before our desire to penetrate them. In this sense Beijo interrupts the facial machine. In another way Beabá is similarly a program not to reduce human language to the machinic but to produce a machine’s own aleatory language, the voice of a machine materialized. In A mulher que não é B.B., the mouth that is slightly open is releasing a silent cry. The open lips seem to grant the viewer entry to the figure’s pain. But, again, what access does the viewer actually have? Does the não not negate the original photograph’s attempt to unproblematically convey tears, suffering, affect? Is Cordeiro performing an “autopsy” of the Vietnamese woman’s pain, or is he negating this tradition by introducing noise and randomness, defeating the will to expression to which the original photograph aspires? The Vietnamese woman and B.B. are each stripped of their singularity through wide reproduction of their images in the media, even as the contrast between Bardot’s liberated sexuality and the Vietnamese woman’s injury suggests a tedious prostitute/ martyr dichotomy. For Kac, A mulher que não é B.B. “has clear political overtones, as it contrasts the glamour of cinematic spectacle with the horrors of another form of contemporary spectacle, the war.” 68 Moscati concurs with this interpre - tation, suggesting A mulher que não é B.B. contrasts an image of a young war victim with the name of a sexual symbol. But how or to what ends Cordeiro is marshaling the unavoidably political image of a pained Vietnamese woman during the Vietnam War, a war that in some aspects resonated with the coeval struggle for Algerian independence from France, home of B.B., remains unclear. 69 In the implicit analogy suggested by Cordeiro’s allusion to Andrade’s essay, the digital image of the Vietnamese woman is sheer expression, “facial contraction,”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 true creation, while the “slave” to mere imitation—Isaura was an eroticized white slave in Guimarães’s novel—is Brigitte Bardot. But perhaps the woman represented is “not B.B.” in the same way that a representation of Bardot is also not equal to the historical person. I believe Cordeiro, committed since his early days in Italy to social justice, intends not only a critique of the Vietnam War but also a critique of the media machine that placed images of Bardot on the same level as suffering war victims. But I also believe Cordeiro was interested in the resistance of images to realism and representation altogether. Perhaps in the image’s title Cordeiro combines his allusion to Andrade with an allusion to another modernist poet who published a poem in the same year Andrade read the first portions of “A escrava que não é Isaura. ” In 1922, Bertolt Brecht published the poem “ Vom armen B.B.” (Of Poor B.B.), a play on “poor baby.” 70 This dark poem about life in industrializing cities was by a “B.B.” who elsewhere reportedly claimed, “whomever you seek—I am not he!” a skepticism about identity and rep - resentation that Cordeiro seems to conserve in his iconic work of computer art. 71

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 Notes Thanks to Giorgio Moscati for generous and extensive exchanges with me about his work with Cordeiro. Thanks also to Myriam Correa, Bettina Funcke, Jennifer Rhee, and Seth Price for their contributions to this article. Finally, thanks to Princeton’s Program in Latin American Studies for supporting research toward this article.

1. Francisco Morais, “ Cordeiro: O não afirmativo ” (1973), in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Analivia Cordeiro (São Paulo: Caboverde Design Digital, Galeria Brito Cimino, 2001), CD-ROM. 2. Mario de Andrade, “ A escrava que não é Isaura ,” in Obra imatura (São Paulo: Livraria Martins editora, 1960); and Bernardo Guimarães, A escrava Isaura (Rio de Janeiro: Briguiet , 1941). 3. Thanks to Jennifer Rhee for her comments on this topic. 4. Ana Maria Belluzo raises the question of the turn to figuration briefly in an interview with Giorgio Moscati. See Giorgio Moscati, “Waldemar Cordeiro: Art and Computing,” interview by Aracy A. Amaral and Ana Maria Belluzzo , Leonardo On-line, http://www.leonardo.info/isast/ spec.projects/moscati.html. 5. Eduardo Kac, “Waldemar Cordeiro’s Oeuvre and Its Context: A Biographical Note,” Leonardo 30, no. 1 (1997): 25. 6. Valdemar [ sic ] Cordeiro, “ Arte moderna e naturalismo—Os preconceitos artísticos da imi - tação e do sentido—Fundamento e superação da teoria da duplicidade do fato artístico,” Folha da Manhã , Caderno At. e Com., December 1951, p. 7, in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. Unless otherwise noted, this and all other translations are mine. 7. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Problemática da arte contemporânea,” in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 8. Waldemar Cordeiro, “ Concretismo como arte de criação contraposta à arte de expressão, ” in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 9. For instance, according to Cordeiro, Mondrian’s art does not eliminate the individual but is a kind of “political conscious,” to adapt Fredric Jameson’s term. In Cordeiro’s words, “Mondrian’s rationalism . . . does not constitute . . . a leveling and elimination of the individual, but rather his or her realization in the field of expression. Art exteriorizes the unconscious, consciously .” Waldemar Cordeiro, “O Suprematismo, o Néo-Plasticismo e o Construtivismo, do ponto-de-vista de pura visualidade,” in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro, 6. 10. A notable study of Cordeiro’s landscape work is Givaldo Medeiros, Artepaisagem: A partir de Waldemar Cordeiro (São Paulo: FAAUSP, 2004). 11. Medeiros, 162. 12. Décio Pignatari, “A arte de um revolucionário,” in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 13. See Medeiros. 14. See Medeiros’s citation of a 17 June 1956 interview published in the São Paulo newspaper Folha da Manhã , in which Cordeiro tells Yvone Jean, “I am attempting to express certain prob - lems of avant-garde art in landscape’s language .” Medeiros, 163. 15. Helouise Costa, Waldemar Cordeiro (São Paulo: Cosac and Naify, 2002), 72. 16. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Paisagismo e cultura,” AD-Arquitetura e decoração (São Paulo) , January–February 1957, 21, quoted in Medeiros, 166. 17. See Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (Paris: Flammarion, 1958). 18. In this Cordeiro was a true contemporary of other pioneers of “artificial reality,” as Myron Krueger terms it. Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 19. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Conceituação do paisagismo enquanto comunicação e arte” (1964), in Waldemar Cordeiro, ed. Cordeiro ; the talk was later published in Revista de Cultura Brasileña , no. 14 (September 1965): 307–311. 20. Cordeiro , “Conceituação do paisagismo enquanto comunicação e arte .” 21. Waldemar Cordeiro , “ A arte e a cidade ,” in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 22. Cordeiro , “ A arte e a cidade .” 23. Waldemar Cordeiro , “ Expressionismo Fordista ” (1953), in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 24. Waldemar Cordeiro, Arteônica (São Paulo: Editora Universidade de São Paulo, 1971). 25. Annateresa Fabris, “Waldemar Cordeiro, Computer Art Pioneer,” trans. Izabel Murat Burbridge, Leonardo 30, no. 1 (February 1997): 31 n. 19. 26. Waldemar Cordeiro, Arteônica . 27. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Letter to Božo Bek, August 5, 1968,” in Margit Rosen, ed., A Little- Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 241. My thanks to Giorgio Moscati for bringing this volume to my attention. 28. See, for instance, Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); and N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 29. Giorgio Moscati, “Investigations in ‘Digital Image Processing’ at USP and UNICAMP: A Personal Experience from the Early Beginnings of This Art (1969/70)” (PowerPoint lecture deliv - ered at São Paulo Advanced School of Computing, Image Processing, and Visualization, IBL-USP, 12–17 July 2010), http://www.vision.ime.usp.br/~mh/SP-ASC/moscati.pdf. 30. Giorgio Moscati, “ Waldemar Cordeiro e o uso do computador nas arte um depoimento sobre uma experiência pioneira,” Revista USP (São Paulo) 24 (December 1994/February 1995): 124–135. 31. Giorgio Moscati, “ Arte e computação: Um depoimento,” Cadernos MAC-2 (São Paulo), July 1986, 3–17. 32. Moscati, “Investigations in ‘Digital Image Processing.’” 33. Giorgio Moscati, personal communication. 34. Moscati, “ Arte e computação ,” 129. 35. Moscati, “Waldemar Cordeiro: Art and Computing.” 36. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Novas tendências” (1963), in Waldemar Cordeiro: Uma aventura da razão , 123. 37. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Arte e tecnologia ” (1973), in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 38. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Uma nova variável para o modelo de organizacão territorial: A evolução dos meios eletrônicos de comunicação ” (1970), in Waldemar Cordeiro: Uma aventura da razão, 161–162. 39. Cordeiro, “Uma nova variável, ” 162. 40. Here Cordeiro is working in the longer tradition of the first constructivists, citing Mondrian on exteriorization: “‘And as to the means of production of sound it is preferable to use electricity, magnetism, mechanics, for they best exclude the individual’s interference. The new artwork should be, with respect to content, a clear plastic exteriorization, balanced with the aesthetic of sonorous relations, and nothing more.’” Cordeiro, “Suprematismo,” 7. 41. Gilles Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Éditions Montaigne,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00070 by guest on 24 September 2021 1958). 42. Moscati, “Investigations in ‘Digital Image Processing.’” 43. Moscati, “ Waldemar Cordeiro e o uso do computador ,” 130. 44. Giorgio Moscati to author, 11 September 2011. 45. Thanks to Jennifer Rhee for this observation. 46. Waldemar Cordeiro, “ A física da arte,” in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 47. Cordeiro, “ A física da arte.” 48. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Realismo, ‘Musa da vingança e da tristeza’” (1965), in Waldemar Cordeiro: Uma aventura da razão , 46. 49. Cordeiro, “Realismo,” 46. 50. See Moscati, “Investigations in ‘Digital Image Processing.’” 51. Moscati, “Waldemar Cordeiro e o uso do computador,” 132. 52. Moscati, “Waldemar Cordeiro e o uso do computador,” 132. 53. Jonathan Benthall, “Technology and Art 15: Computer Graphics at Brunel,” Studio International 17, no. 6 (June 1970): 247. 54. Benthall, “Technology and Art 15,” 248. 55. Benthall, “Technology and Art 15,” 247. 56. Moscati, “Waldemar Cordeiro: Art and Computing.” 57. Waldemar Cordeiro, “ Realismo ao nível da cultura de massa” (1965), in Waldemar Cordeiro uma aventura da razão , 143. 58. Waldemar Cordeiro, “Planejamento e design paisagísticos” (1966), in Waldemar Cordeiro , ed. Cordeiro. 59. Giorgio Moscati to author, 17 August 2011. 60. Moscati to author, 17 August 2011. 61. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media , 9. 62. Andrade, 203 (emphasis in original). 63. Medeiros, 149. 64. See, for instance, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image , trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Richard Rushton, “What Can a Face Do? On Deleuze and Faces,” Cultural Critique 51 (Spring 2002): 219–237; and Mark Hansen, “Affect as Medium, or the ‘Digital-Facial-Image,’” Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 2 (August 2003): 205–228. 65. Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, vol. 1, The Positive Affects (New York: Springer Publishing Company, 1962), 205–206, quoted in Jennifer Rhee, “Anthropomorphic Attachments in U.S. Literature, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 2010). 66. Rushton, 223. 67. Rushton, 221. 68. Eduardo Kac, editor’s note, in Fabris, 31 n. 19. 69. Thanks to Giorgio Moscati for his comments on this parallel. 70. See translator’s note, “Poor B.B.,” Poetry 188, no. 1 (April 2006): 40–42. 71. Bertolt Brecht quoted in Michael Merschmeir, “The Ballad of the Rich BB and the Poor BB,” American Theater 15, no. 5 (June 1998): 15; 58–59. Thanks to Henning Teschke for alerting me to this possible allusion.

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