We founded the aarea curatorial project at the beginning of February 2017, when we set out to explore the Brazilian art scene, commissioning works from artists whose output doesn’t necessarily have characteristics or interests related to technology or the internet. In most cases, these artists are dealing with digital media for the first time. 

The works are exhibited for a certain period of time (some projects lasted 24 hours, others three months, depending on the proposal) after which they ‘go offline’, i.e. they are no longer available to the public, but remain stored on a server accessible only to the aarea team, constituting an archive that today contains over fifty works that are representative of a contemporary experimental and investigative approach to Brazilian digital art. This approach defined aarea’s format and activity, setting it apart from other national or international initiatives focused on presenting digital works. The project’s concept is reflected in its own name: aarea, a-area, with the negative prefix ‘a’, which suggests the negation of a fixed, stable, definitive area. 

It is evident that the digital medium was already proving to be a promising field for the visual arts long before the recent Covid-19 pandemic that erupted in 2020. However, the pandemic heightened the interest of artists, institutions, curators and, in parallel, the public, in works that could be created and exhibited on the internet. In Brazil alone, at the end of the 20th century and in the first decade of the 21st century, artists such as Augusto de Campos, Regina Silveira, André Vallias, Lucas Bambozzi, Analivia Cordeiro, Eduardo Kac and Giselle Beiguelman were already using the technological resources made available by computers at the time, exploring digital tools in innovative ways.

The period beginning in the 1980s marks the discovery of the computer and its potential for plastic, conceptual and poetic exploration. Since then, the way a digital work is produced has not changed much: the development and implementation of a work often requires collaboration with specialized technicians, since artists often don’t fully master the programming language. Even today, production remains collaborative, facilitated by new software and the growing interest of programmers and technology professionals in the artistic and even economic possibilities available, as in the case of NFTs. However, the biggest change in this panorama has been in the reception of these works: while they used to circulate mainly in specialized niches, in recent years we have seen a popularization of digital art, largely caused by the unbridled way in which we have come to inhabit the internet, and also driven by the transformations brought about by social networks and their algorithms.

As aarea was born out of an unprecedented and experimental model, the challenges inherent to the format arose throughout the process, especially with regard to our archive. In constant dialogue with other Brazilian and international actors and institutions, we searched for possible solutions and ideas relating to the project’s collection, such as archiving, recording, conservation and restoration. The inaugural format of the temporary presentation of the works proved to be correct, as we discovered that keeping an ever-growing archive of works running simultaneously is not a viable operation (even in the case of international institutions with robust budgets), given the rapid obsolescence of software and other systems. In this sense, even though a fundamental aspect of the internet is the wide constitution of and access to archives, we can make an analogy between aarea and a physical art space, such as a museum or gallery, in which exhibitions take place over a certain period of time and are then dismantled, giving way to subsequent ones, and surviving only in records.

Another striking aspect of the internet is the ease of live broadcasting and its ability to reach a wide range of territories, which has interested many of the artists commissioned by aarea. In these cases, in relation to the archive, we realized early on that a work carried out live, for example, would result in an archive dissociated from its performative nature, which involved the presence of the public in front of screens.

Let’s now consider the provocations and impasses posed to aarea by its own commissioned works. Made in the project’s first year, Arquivos anexos [Attached Files] (2017), by Fabio Morais, involved the broadcasting of a text written in real time, allowing the public free access to the artist’s text editor, being, in other words, a performed writing, accessible to visitors who entered the site at the time of its execution. After the period of the real-time writing performance, what remains of Arquivos anexos is just its text published on a website. The work Andar em círculos [Walking in Circles] (2018), by Marcius Galan, graphically represented, live for the aarea visitor, the course of five walks (each lasting around five hours) through the city of São Paulo, in which Galan tried to trace a perfect circle through the city streets. The record of the work is the superimposition of these digital drawings. 

We remember these two works in particular because their archiving, when viewed in isolation, is not capable of fully preserving the core of the work, leaving only records of its performative event. Another correlation with the physical field of art would be appropriate here: the recording and survival of digital artworks is similar to the solutions already applied to documenting performances. Videos, photographs, scores, instructions, reports, etc., can be used to translate these works into the best possible archival format. 

Curiously, in parallel to the documentation carried out by the aarea collection, Morais and Galan created derivative works from these pieces afterward, both engraved in metal, a durable medium. These are works which, although autonomous, are inseparable from their original performative moment and which, in a way, are allied in the effort towards their preservation and their essentially elusive character. 

About the authors

Livia Benedetti is an art curator, researcher and co-founder of the aarea platform. She took a Master’s degree in art mediation at the Université Paris VIII and visual arts at the Universidade de São Paulo. Since 2007, she has been working on curatorial and educational projects at cultural institutions such as Sesc, Pivô and Centro Cultural São Paulo. In 2016, she was Associate Curator of the FotoBiennale at the Brandts Museum in Denmark and, in 2019, was part of the Emerging Professionals program at Para Site, in Hong Kong. As a writer, she has been published in magazines, books and art catalogs.

Marcela Vieira is co-founder and curator of the aarea art website. In her career in the visual arts, in addition to curating, she has worked in educational teams and in writing, translating and editing for cultural institutions and art galleries. With multidisciplinary interests, she is also the editor of Revista Rosa and a literary translator (French-Portuguese). She holds a doctorate in semiotics from the University of Paris 8, co-supervised with the Universidade de São Paulo. She has been living in Los Angeles since the beginning of 2022.