Abstract
In this article, I explore a short history of exchange between cybernetics and aesthetics in Brazil, beginning with the reception of Max Bense’s “new aesthetic” by concrete and neo-concrete poets and artists. I focus on his intellectual exchange with the poet and literary critic Haroldo de Campos, who promoted Bense’s information aesthetics in Brazil throughout the 1960s to tell a little-known history of cybernetic theory wedded to aesthetic practice, demonstrating the role that Brazilian critics, writers and artists played in mediating and deviating from some of the major tenants of first-order cybernetics. Rather than embracing the total “entropy” of meaning that characterized Bense’s “generative aesthetics”, Brazilian poets and artists drew upon cybernetics and information theory to produce artistic works that engaged figuration, bodies, politics, spectatorship and participation.
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Notes
For a discussion of collaborations between Cordeiro and Moscati, with special attention given to the Derivadas de uma imagem series, see Price (2012).
For a historical discussion of Cordeiro’s theories of aesthetic form in connection with his Marxist orientation see Nelson (2020).
See Franklin (2021).
De Campos's (1981) article refers specifically to Swiss concrete art. However, the movement of concrete aesthetics to which it refers was intertwined with the Hochschule für Gestaltung, the Ulm school of design. The Swiss connection is to the founder of the design school, Max Bill, who was trained at the Bauhaus and spent his adult life mainly in Germany.
In an article, entitled “Hegel Poeta” (1997), which addressed Bense’s literary experiments that rewrote a section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit under strict quantitative limitations regarding word-length, de Campos referred to the German philosopher as “bereft of pertinence” (destituído de pertinência) (de Campos, 1997, p. 69).
On his notion of “generative aesthetics,” Bense wrote: “Generative aesthetics therefore implies a combination of all operations, rules and theorems which can be used deliberately to produce aesthetic states (both distributions and configurations) when applied to a set of material elements. Hence generative aesthetics is analogous to generative grammar, in so far as it helps to formulate the principles of a grammatical schema–realizations of an aesthetic structure” (Reichardt 1971 57). The theory of “generative aesthetics” had a practical application to the first algorithmically generated artworks.
See Pamela Lee’s lucid discussion of Norbert Wiener’s own “discomforted” treatment of art as a cybernetic system (2004, p. 247).
Plaza, who immigrated to São Paulo in 1973 became an important presence in the local art circuit as an artist, professor, and curator, as well as an early theorist of the concept of “network”, which he developed in his exhibitions on new media, communication and the circulation of art in partnership with curator Walter Zanini. His collaborations with Augusto de Campos include the earlier Poemóbiles (1968–1974).
See João Cabral de Melo Neto’s poem “Acompanhando Max Bense em sua visita a Brasília, 1961 (Cabral 1995, p. 371).
Before ESDI, there were two design courses in Brazil. The first was established by architects Lina Bo Bardi and Pietro Maria Bardi at the Instituto de Arte Contemporânea (IAC) of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) between 1951 and 1953, and the second at the Escola de Artes Plásticas, Universidade Mineira de Arte (UMA) in 1955. For a discussion of the relation between the IAC and ESDI, see Anastassakis (2014).
For an account of Max Bill’s presence in Brazil, and his activities with the Fundação Biennial de São Paulo, see Nelson (2012).
For a detailed historical account of ESDI’s formation see Souza.
Upon returning to São Paulo from Ulm, Alexandre Wollner joined Karlheinz Bergmiller, Max Bill’s the former assistant, and graphic artist Rubem Martins, to launch the design studio Forminform.
When Décio Pignatari met Eugen Gomringer in 1956, Gomringer was Max Bill’s assistant and was editor of the magazine Spiral, dedicated to European avant-garde art, principally concrete art.
After teaching at Ulm from 1954 to 1958, Max Bense moved to the Technical University of Stuttgart, where he was a professor of philosophy and headed what became known as the “Stuttgart School,” an artistic group dedicated to Concrete aesthetics and later, in the 1960s, to the incorporation of computer programming in art. Bense and his assistant Elizabeth Walther-Bense, a semiotician and literary critic, also promoted German avant-garde literature and visual art through their Stuttgart-based magazines Augenblick and rot.
Thanks are owed to Jose-Carlos Mariategui for noting that by the time the Studiengalerie des Studium Generale closed in 1978, Bense had presented ninety-one exhibitions.
Bense’s book Brasilanische Intelligenz: eine cartesianische Reflexion was published Brazil as Inteligência Brasileira: una reflexao cartesiana by the publisher Cosac Naify in 2009.
In correspondence with Bense, de Campos says that his article is probably “the first critical piece in the Americas on Bense’s work.” However, Roch Duval notes that an earlier review of a Spanish translation of the first volume of Bense’s Aesthetica (under the title Estética: consideraciones metafisicas sobre lo bello) was published by the Brazilian author Heitor Martins in The Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (17 November 1957) (Duval 2015, p.140).
Translations from Portuguese and German to English, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
This shift recalled de Campos’s description of a shift in concrete poetry, as argued in his 1958 “Da fenomenologia da composição à matemática da composição” [“From the Phenomenology of Composition to the Mathematics of Composition”] from “phenomenological” to “mathematical” stages.
In his Einführung in die informationstheoretische Ästhetik (1969), which de Campos translated as Pequena estética (1971), Bense defined the chaogenous state, or the entropy state, as a “regular distribution of signs” corresponding to the following series: S1, S2, S3, … S; n 1/n, 1/n, 1/n, … 1/n. (De Campos 2003, p. 127).
In de Campos’s article “Poesia concreta-linguagem-comunicação” (1957) (De Campos et al. 2006) he laid out a discussion of syntax that recalled the “general semantics” of the philosopher Alfred Korzybski, the thrust of which described the limitations of human knowledge as a direct function of the structure of language.
This fictional program prefigures later “real” computer applications that sort and combine letters, such as Waldemar Cordeiro and Giorgio Moscoti’s Beabá (1968). See Price (2012).
Bernhard Siegert describes Bense’s algorithmically-generated radio-play, “vielleicht zunächst wirklich nur: der monolog der terry jo im mercy hospital” as follows: “a technological muse’s mouth that gives birth to language… employing random selections from a repertory of events with differing frequencies. It, the radio, speaks” (2007, p. 31). For a detailed account of these and other works produced by the Stuttgart School, see Beals (2018).
See Cordeiro’s catalogue essay “Arte concreta semântica” (1964) for his exhibition of the same name, in which he discusses “new figuration” as a corrective to concrete art’s earlier “pragmatic” and “utopian” concern with “infrastructure”.
For a discussion of this change in Bense’s valuation of information see Beals (2020).
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Acknowledgements
Some ideas discussed here were first presented in an earlier book chapter included in Roteiros de palavras, sons, imagens: os diálogos transcriativos de Haroldo de Campos ed. Jasmin Wrobel (2018) and in the conference “Poetry, Criticism, Translation: Haroldo de Campos, an International Conference,” Yale University, 2020, organized by David K Jackson and Eduardo Jorge.
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Wolfson, N. After the “new aesthetic”: a short history of the cybernetic turn in Brazil. AI & Soc 37, 1059–1069 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01340-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-021-01340-8