Title and abstract: Fortcoming
About the speaker: Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, PT/CH
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta creates music, architecture and urban projects using various technologies. Born in Sao Paulo, Brazil he originally began his artistic life as a photographer but also moved into the fields of music, architecture and intermedia. Considered a pioneering artist in his field, he became know for his unique audio-visual style and since the 1970s has been developing graphical musical notations inside virtual environments. His style has became known as a form of ‘virtual architecture’ and he often draws on environmental data collected from various sources, such as government data banks, internet and the media. This is then combined with photography, virtual and graphical effects to create multi-layered compositions, which are aimed at stimulating and waking the our sensory perceptions. A regular collaborator of John Cage’s, since the early 1960s he has worked with Merce Cunningham, Dove Bradshaw , Phill Niblock, William Anastasi, as well as many of the leading contemporary and experimental artists of this period.
Recent works include Dr. Jekyll and Mr. X (2004); music compositions such as Zyklus (2005) a virtual, audio-visual music composition, which was played continuously for one month and used environmental sounds from around the world; Deep Ocean (2005) a composition created from sounds recorded in deep ocean waters by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the sound-visual composition Rawwar (2005) which was composed using sound and images collected from the worldwide media on war and human conflict, and the opera Dante (2007) based on Alighieri’s Divine Comedy.
Over the years his works have been shown internationally and collected by: Whitney Museum of New York, the ARS AEVI Contemporary Art Museum, the Biennial of Venice, the Computer Art Museum of Seattle, the Kunsthaus of Zurich, the Durini Contemporary Art Collection, the Bibliotèque Nationale of Paris and the MART – Modern Art Museum of Rovereto and Trento among others. Pimenta is founder and director of the Arts, Sciences and Tecnology Foundation – Observatory, in in Trancoso, Portugal. He sits of various arts and cultural boards in both Europe and the U.S., and has lectured internationally about his work. A prolific creator his artistic and cultural output include musical composers, CDs, books, films, video and papers. In 2008 he co-founded the Holotopia Academy an institution oriented to arts, sciences and philosophy located at the Amalfi Coast, in Italy, where he is also director. He currently lives near Locarno, in Switzerland but also has a base in New York and Lisbon.
Emanuel Pimenta+Carsten Stabenow. Conversation 1: From this Position: The construction of landscape and the interrelations between sound, image, architecture and space, 12 Nov, 18-19.30hrs, FBAUL, Auditorium, Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, Largo da Academia Nacional de Belas-Artes. €3
