Recipes for Brazilian Art: Information Aesthetics in Print and Practice

How collaborative artists in Brazil redefined art with commercial print media via cybernetics and information theory.

Starting in 1951, the Noigandres group of concrete poets proposed a controversial approach to poetry that emphasized the visual nature of text and its role in creating meaning. The theoretical writings of these poets, their collaboration with other artists and poets, and the intermixing of art and poetry in Brazil remain relatively unknown, even though artist books, independently published journals, photocopied works of art, and mail art postcards proliferated in the archives of both artists and museums in Brazil. These works did, however, lead to new forms of exhibition and circulation, and new ways of understanding the work of art, artist, art critic, and exhibition.


In Recipes for Brazilian Art, Erin Aldana explains how cybernetics, information theory, and related topics, such as communication, systems, and noise, contributed to a growing awareness of how changes in Brazil, South America, and Western society required new ways of seeing the world, creating art, and circulating it. There has been a growing awareness that cybernetics and information theory have radically changed the way we understand the world around us. In Brazil, the result was a genre of art in which the artist was not considered a genius, the work of art was not a masterpiece, and the influence of galleries and art museums was diminished.