072

Authors:

 Fraga, Tania.

Title:

 Virtual Utopias

Keywords:

 Virtual Reality, Interactivity, Computer Art, Computer simulation, Interactive Art.

Abstract:

 This essay is about convergence, fusion and inventions. Brazil is the country where hybridisation is a law of nature. It was colonised by the children of either Native or African women with European men - mamelucos 1 and mulatos were the designation given to them by the Jesuit monks who usually educated them. This new kind of people was neither Native, nor African, nor European. These first colonisers discovered and unveiled the heart of Brazil, stretching the Tordesilhas Treaty frontiers and defining the boundaries of the country.

Who were they? Were they conscious of their singularity, their difference? These two new kinds of person have begun to give us the features we have today. It was a long time after they discovered that they have an identity and the independence movements begun in the states of Bahia, Pernambuco, Maranhão and Minas Gerais. Finally, around the end of the century XXVIII, in the last mentioned state, these people tried to set up a republic project: The Republic of Brazil. This project failed at first but the seed grew. Time has passed and new immigrants arrived mainly from Europe and Japan. These new foreigners also tried to keep their cultures but were swallowed by these people who have learned to transform things, fusing and mixing everything to create new meanings and build new Utopias.

This summarised history is the context to the development of virtual worlds based upon old European roots mixed with the Brazilian Contemporary culture. The former gives us old ways to organise non-linear materials: the magic squares from Pythagorean studies and the ciphered way of writing from the medieval poet Rabanus Maurus2. The latter authorises the poetic licence to relate and mix things apparently disconnected to build new meanings and new Virtual Utopias with them.

1 The anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro used to say that they were the guys who, keeping the features, the culture, the native language of their people went back to them with another soul.
2 Rabanus Maurus. De Laudibus Sanctae Crucis. Faithful copies from Carolingian times (1503). Ex Libris, José Mindlin Library, São Paulo.
Fraga, Tania tfraga@ unb.br UNB http://www.lsi.usp.br/~tania/ http://www.unb.br/vis/lvpa/xmantic/ Tania Fraga is a Brazilian architect and artist and has a Ph.D. from the Communication and Semiotics program at the Catholic University of São Paulo. She is Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Brasília and Associated Researcher at the Polytechnic School of Engineering at the University of São Paulo. She was Artist-in-Residence at The Bemis Foundation, USA, 1986, with a grant from the Fulbrigth Commission and Visiting Scholar at the Computer Science Department at The George Washington University, Washington DC,1991/2. Recently she received a grant from CAPES/Brazil to devellop Post PhD research and is a Research Fellow at the CAiiA-STAR program at the University of Plymouth, since December, 1998. Her work has been presented internationally in the CAiiA, Interstices and IV FISEA, Minneapolis, and in several lectures and exhibitions in Brazil, U.S.A, Paris, and Italy, and it is in the collection of the Bemis Foundation, the Brasília Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the University of Hong Kong. She has been working with computer art since 1987 and her major interest today is the development of interactive VRML environments which may be seen at the following electronic addresses: http://www.lsi.usp.br/~tania/ http://www.unb.br/vis/lvpa/xmantic/