A watershed moment in Brazilian literary, art, and design histories, concrete poetry burst onto both national and global cultural stages in the 1950s, around the time that Brazil was embarking on its most dizzying period of urbanization, industrialization, and modernization. This presentation, based on the forthcoming book Concrete Encoded, explores Brazil's cybernetic imaginary by bringing together key figures of the Brazilian mid-century avant-garde, as well as some previously marginalized contributors, who grappled with the formation of a data-driven information society. Concrete Encoded examines the concrete movement’s critical intervention into the control society that the Brazilian dictatorship sought to implement through an increasingly networked and data-driven model of governance.

Nathaniel Wolfson is an Assistant Professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California Berkeley, where he teaches modern and contemporary Brazilian literature and critical theory. At UC Berkeley, he is a faculty affiliate of the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. He has published articles in journals and edited volumes on a wide range of topics; among these are two recent catalogue essays for Brazil’s flagship art museum, MASP, for the exhibitions Mário de Andrade: Two Lives (2024) and Alfredo Volpi: Between the Modern and the Popular (2022).

Livestream: https://tinyurl.com/CLAS041125