Cem anos de Waldemar Cordeiro

Overcoded Sign: Notes on Waldemar Cordeiro

Pierre J. Pernuit

The corpus of algorithmic images produced by Waldemar Cordeiro (1925–1973) in the late 1960s and early 1970s constitutes one of the most significant bodies of work in computer art, created in a close dialogue with the theoretical approach that emerged alongside early expressions of digital technology: informational aesthetics. Yet these hermeneutically rich visual texts also evoke political themes and a form of critical engagement with mass media that distinguish them from other works guided by the principles of informational aesthetics, particularly the more abstract, generative experiments that dominated the contemporary scenes in Europe and North America. Created with an IBM 360 computer, Cordeiro’s algorithmic images are photographs treated through a process of quantification, subsequently enabling alterations in size, contrast, and contour. The labor-intensive and semi-automated procedures of early computing are thus mobilized to treat images imbued with anthropic, social, political, and emotional overtones. Together, this repertoire echoed postwar conflicts, episodes in Brazil’s history, affects, and critical reflections on the social landscape. Traditionally portrayed as a threat to art—an activity commonly defined as a refuge of authenticity and human values—the cold logic of the computer here becomes a vehicle for expressing human emotions in response to distinctly human concerns. 

A Mulher que Não É B.B. (1971) is arguably the most striking and enigmatic work of the corpus. As its title suggests, this is precisely not an image of Brigitte Bardot, but rather a digital rendering of a cropped press photograph taken during the Vietnam War, depicting the face of a young Vietnamese woman who, in the original shot, is holding a child in her arms. This choice becomes even more surprising given Cordeiro’s opposition to both naturalism and subjectivism in art. As Rachel Price writes, “Just when computer algorithms promised to remove subjectivity from representation, the human reentered Cordeiro’s oeuvre.” To make sense of this underlying tension, one might be tempted to suggest at least two possible interpretations of A Mulher que Não É B.B.:

1//Cordeiro offset the computer’s coldness and the depoliticization of computer sciences, at a time when most machine-generated art in the U.S. and Europe, under the banner of informational aesthetics, amounted to little more than permutation games, far removed from political issues. Such an interpretation conforms with what physicist Giorgio Moscati, Cordeiro’s partner in his technological explorations, noted and could also be seen as emblematic of the various contemporary efforts to forge an alternative, distinctly South American path in contemporary art. By choosing not to depict B.B., Cordeiro sought to introduce political content into a blossoming art form (computer art) that, through its theoretical framework (informational aesthetics), had been devoid of it.

 2//Cordeiro criticized the mass media’s manipulation of affect. Here, computer art becomes a vehicle for challenging the culture industry and a media economy built on endless repetition, trading on easy emotions and glossy images like that of Brigitte Bardot, only present through her “initials B.B.” A variant of this explanation would read A Mulher que Não É B.B. as a commentary on the constructed nature of collective feeling—and, by extension, on how digital media are about to become the primary architects of reality itself. Through this lens, the image might be saying: “I know the Vietnam War only through press photographs and media narratives,” or more abstractly, “I perceive the world only through layers of mediated representation.” Such an interpretation invites us to question whether true empathy for the woman depicted is even possible, and to interrogate the political value of images in the nascent age of digital reproduction.

Both interpretations highlight two distinct dimensions of the work’s critical significance. The first is informational, engaging primarily with the context of computer art and the formal possibilities of computational and algorithmic imagery. It addresses a central tenet of informational aesthetics: its refusal to engage with an artwork’s content, its signification. The second reading is semiotic, shifting the focus from the formal nature of digital images to the ways images generate meaning and either reinforce or subvert ideology. It recalls the method of image analysis forged by the great names of semiotics: Roland Barthes’s essays on mythology (isn’t Bardot a quintessential myth?), his dissection of pop art, and Michel Foucault’s reflections on the gap between text and image in Magritte.

Neither the informational nor the semiotic explanations alone exhaust the possibilities of A Mulher que Não É B.B. The two readings are fundamentally inseparable. I’m convinced that this very fusion was Cordeiro’s intention, and that the work should be read against the backdrop of two theoretical discourses—those on new technologies and those on image—that were, at the time, rarely brought together. This was no coincidence: Cordeiro knew personally some of the actors in these theoretical discussions, engaged closely with the critical thought of his time, and contributed to the debates in his own right, both through his art and his writings.

A Mulher que Não É B.B. only becomes fully legible when the image is viewed in relation to another, absent one: that of Brigitte Bardot. Not just any portrait of Bardot, however, but one that circulated at the time and that Cordeiro knew well. In the writings of Abraham Moles, the authoritative theorist of informational aesthetics, we learn that Bardot’s digitized portrait was a standard image in early computing: “the charms of the heroine of femininity [circulated] from center to center as a stack of punch cards.’ I am convinced that Cordeiro was implicitly referencing that benchmark image. Once again, this could invite a reading of the work as a critique of the depoliticization of computing culture: unlike many of his contemporaries who reproduced Bardot’s glamorous image, Cordeiro instead chose to show the grim face of a Vietnamese woman, pointing to early computer culture’s blindness to the political upheavals of its time.

We also learn from Abraham Moles that the digitized Bardot image was used in early computing experiments to illustrate “the complete independence between the elementary unit of perception (in this case, typographic characters) and the general form that may result from them.” Rendering Bardot in computer characters served as a demonstration of how computer images are composed of what Moles calls “atomical” parts (bits, pixels, characters); that these parts do not in themselves convey the aesthetic nature (eroticism) of the model depicted; and yet, that their combination can construct an image of beauty. Here we find a variant of one of the core beliefs of informational aesthetics: computer characters are structures from which an aesthetic message—a natural or artifactual beauty—is constructed; art, understood as the realm of beauty, can be programmed and rendered through the language of the computer.

Understanding this aspect of A Mulher que Não É B.B. involves reconstructing the sense of novelty that the discovery of the image’s “atomical” structure held for Cordeiro and Moles. This new method opened the possibility of an infrastructural understanding of the signifier. Marks, characters, and letters were no longer seen as empty shells but as composed of multiple levels and organized according to an “informational architecture” that could be analyzed in detail. For Cordeiro, an artist trained in concrete art and profoundly informed by a theory of form (Gestalt) which posits that perception is the recognition of a unified and objective structure, this shift towards infrastructure was nothing short of revolutionary. This not only explains his turn to computer art but also suggests that his algorithmic image functions as a visual text that, like many thinkers of the time, questioned the validity of Gestalt theory in the digital era. If such a thing as pure and objective form exists, why, then, is a digitized image of B.B. not the same as a photograph of B.B. herself? While Gestalt theory remains important in understanding perceptual coherence, informational aesthetics introduced a new stratification. In this sense, the image of B.B. is precisely what Moles described as a “supersign”: a composite of numerical characters that, when combined, constitute her lips, eyes, and hair—elements that together construct the figure of B.B.

I’ve so far deliberately set aside the fact that A Mulher que Não É B.B. is, quite explicitly, not an image of B.B. Bardot is conspicuously absent, and it is from this absence that the abrasive political irony of the work emerges. The crying Vietnamese woman functions as a “supersign” in its own right: a superimposition of elementary symbols, randomly distributed, that alters the woman’s facial appearance. This alteration is Cordeiro’s most visible artistic intervention. It can be read as signifying the destruction of war, which in the early 1970s was inseparable from computing—the computer itself was born of wartime research, and the collusion between computer science and the military-industrial complex was frequently denounced during Vietnam War protests. An informational analysis of the supersign’s multilayered architecture reinforces this reading; not only because alphanumeric characters collectively construct the gestalt of a Vietnamese war victim, but also because, among them, the “X” s contribute a metaphorical negation evoking war’s devastation, the dehumanizing erasure of its victims, and the tragic fact that this woman could never be Brigitte Bardot—and was therefore fated to endure atrocities rather than achieve glamorous fame.

In creating politically charged algorithmic images, Cordeiro was not abandoning information aesthetics in favor of a turn toward semiotics. Informational aesthetics acknowledged its status as an approach “from below” and did not claim to account for meaning, which, as Moles noted, “rests on a set of conventions that are a priori to both receptor and transmitter.” What informational aesthetics did not (and did not claim to) address were what Cordeiro called “cultural variables,” or what Umberto Eco—whose informational theory of the “open work” Cordeiro explicitly referenced in the title of a 1963 painting—referred to as the “psychological point of view.” These include the cultural elements and contextual factors that precede the reception of an artwork conceived as a communicative act: the political, social, and ideological dimensions. Informational aesthetics concentrated on the infrastructural dimensions of the sign—elements that, unlike meaning, lend themselves to formalization and control. This pragmatic stance in no way makes informational aesthetics apolitical. Its advocates acknowledged a basic fact that the best semioticians tend to ignore in their reading of images: you can’t predict an artwork’s ideological effect, nor ascribe a single, definite political meaning to an image. The complex architecture of the sign prevents any one-dimensional reading. Even if an artist embeds a clear anti-war message in a work, ardent supporters of the Vietnam conflict would still defend it—much like today’s voters fed on fake news cling to their beliefs.

The mythological status of Brigitte Bardot, the atrocities of the Vietnam War, the everlasting suffering it caused: these are all meanings that emerge from the semiotic operations triggered by the obscene conflation of the image of war we are confronted with and the absent image of a sex symbol we are invited to imagine. Yet these are not the only meanings Cordeiro intended to convey in A Mulher que Não É B.B. The work is also a commentary on the missing image of Bardot’s digitized portrait, a foundational algorithmic image that reduced the “charms of the heroine of femininity” to a stack of punch cards. It also seeks to demonstrate how the supersign’s layered infrastructure underpins the complex meanings of images, and, more broadly, how sophisticated the act of interpreting an image truly is. A Mulher que Não É B.B. is thus neither only a semiotic demonstration nor only the praxis of informational aesthetics. It is an overcoded sign that both reveals the complexity of images at the dawn of the digital era and participates in the rich debates on how images produce meaning, thus arousing through experimentation questions at the intersection of aesthetics, image theory, mass media, and technology that would only crystallize in the twentieth century.