Artur Matuck

Artur Matuck

 

Multimedia artist, videomaker, performer and writer. He has a degree in art from ECA/USP and a postgraduate degree in visual arts from the University of California, San Diego, where he was awarded a Fullbright Foundation scholarship to do research on copyright at the University of Iowa. In 1991, Matuck developed the Reflux project at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh and another on computer-altered writing at the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was one of the pioneers in art communication in Brazil. He presented the video installation Alpha Centauri Stelo Binara at the 17th São Paulo International Biennial (1983).

Importance of his work

A significant part of Matuck's work is ecologically inspired, such as his video Emanatio-Profanatio (1977), which deals with the politically motivated sacrifice of calves by a farmer in Wisconsin; and Brahminicide (1977), which shows the technological process of slaughtering pigs in Iowa City. From a more politicized perspective, Matuck also made Mauricio Prisoner (1981), a fictional reconstruction of the slow process of a Tupamaro militant going mad in a Uruguayan prison. For this work, Matuck used only one actor, a small room with a ladder and the common objects found there. The images of the outside world are slowly transfigured into inner projections of the prisoner's hallucinated fantasy. Also in 1981, Matuck made Ataris Vort in the Planet Megga (the first version; there was to be a second, prepared for the São Paulo International Biennial in 1983), an experimental science fiction storyline in which the author made extensive use of the electronic effects he had access to at the University of San Diego. This video would start a series of experiments that would unfold throughout the 80s and early 90s, involving a strange kind of videographic science fiction, with the exploitation of hitherto unseen electronic resources.