“When Electronic Art was just Art: The Early Days of New Media in Brazil” presented by Nunez

This paper introduces an ongoing research into the study of early Brazilian electronic art at a time when the very distinction between this and other artistic forms was almost inexistent. By reviewing the demands of contemporary practitioners and contrasting it to the situation found by artists during the Brazilian dictatorship, we find that the reception of those early artworks was very much positive: not only did these find space within traditional artistic institutions but were also displayed alongside other emergent genres at the time, such as mail or video art. We
conclude this paper pointing to the necessity of a historiographical revision regarding new media art in peripheral countries that did not possess the well-developed infrastructure seen in more developed economies. It is this precarity that, we believe, marked those early years and its close relationship with the larger art world.