ARTECH 2019 - 9th International Conference on Digital and Interactive Arts. 23-25 October 2019 - Braga, Portugal

EMANUEL DIMAS DE MELO PIMENTA. KEYNOTE SPEAKER AT ARTECH 2019

EMANUEL DIMAS DE MELO PIMENTA

Keynote speaker at ARTECH 2019, Braga, Portugal

Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta (born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1957) is a Brazilian-Portuguese (Swiss resident since 2003) musician, architect, photographer and intermedia artist. His works, connecting art and sciences, have been included in art collections and have been recognized by institutions such as the Whitney Museum of New York, the Ars Aevi Contemporary Art Museum, the Venice Biennale, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Bibliothèque nationale de France at Paris, the MART – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Rovereto and Trento, and the Shöyen Collection among others.

Emanuel Pimenta studied with Hans-Joachim Koellreuter, Conrado Silva, Eduardo Kneese de Mello, Decio Pignatari, Lygia Clark, and also with Kenzo Tange, Burle Marx, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Oscar Niemeyer among others.

Pimenta develops music, architecture, and urban projects using virtual reality and cyberspace technologies. His concerts of music integrate visual art and have been performed in various countries in the last twenty years, beginning with his concert at the São Paulo Art Biennial, in 1985, with John Cage, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Pimenta has collaborated with John Cage, as commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham between 1986 and 2009, remaining composer for the Merce Cunningham Legacy Project until now. He has been composer for several companies such as the Appels Company in New York. His concerts have been performed at the Lincoln Center and The Kitchen in New York, the Palais Garnier, Opera Bastille, La Fenice, the Shinjuku Bunka Center in Tokyo, the Festival of Aix en Provence, and the São Paulo Museum of Art among many others. In 2012, Emanuel Pimenta coordinated 38 events, in 11 countries, celebrating the centennial of John Cage.[

In late 1970s, Emanuel Pimenta started developing a new graphic four dimensional musical notation inside Virtual Reality, which he called “virtual notations”, which would characterize good part of his musical production over the years.

In the early 1980s, Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept “virtual architecture”, later largely used as specific discipline in universities all over the world. Since the end of the 1970s he has developed graphical musical notations inside virtual environments.

In 1980, Pimenta starts the first virtual planet in history, called Woiksed, for which he won the Lake Maggiore Prize (AICA, UNESCO, Council of Europe) in 1993, anticipating similar projects for over twenty years.

In 1993 he created, together with René Berger and Rinaldo Bianda, the Eurovideo Festival.

In 2000, Emanuel Pimenta starts researching and creating space architecture design.

Pimenta’s first opera is dated of 1984, titled Frankenstern, with libreto by Decio Pignatari and stage design by the Brazilian visual artist Fernando Zarif, at MASP Modern Art Museum of São Paulo.

In 2008, Pimenta creates DANTE, the first opera on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy of the history of music, which had its world première in that year at the Abstracta Festival, in Rome, Italy.

In 2016, he concluded his third opera, titled Metamorphosis, with libreto by René Berger, with world première at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, in New York City, under direction of the American composer Phill Niblock.

In 2017, Pimenta received the Gold Medal of the Academy of Arts, Sciences and Letters of Paris.

Since the 1970s, Emanuel Pimenta has been a prolific writer, with more than eighty books published in several countries.

Source biography text: Wikipedia