Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Visual art works are always executed on a certain kind of material. By the eighteenth century the art system had been schematized to five “fine” arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music. During some time, just about the middle of the nineteenth century, architecture, painting, and sculpture were the main languages of visual arts in Europe. It was clear, in all of them, that the materiality of each language/type was what was supposed to be preserved. During the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of capitalism, urban cultures, mass media and consumer societies altered the social context where the arts existed. Beginning with the avant-garde of the twentieth century and intensifying in the 1960s, new modes of artistic expression shifted away from objects to explore activities, happenings, performances, video, film, and the media art. This paper asks if art works are actualized in different materials in distinct times, are they the same work? Is it possible to show in an institutional place works that aimed to be out of the system and market of art? This paper will introduce and debate different materialities of Brazilian electronic and media art, specifically how they occupy mass and independent media, weakening the limits between artistic, political, and everyday spaces.