Helio Oiticica and Neville DAlmeida Afterall

the long version

"Hélio Oiticica is one of the key figures of Brazil's tropicalia movement. During his stay in new York, and together with film-maker Neville D'Almeida, Oiticia [sic] conceived Block experiments in cosmococa, program in progress (1973-74), a series of nine 'supra-sensorial' environments, each incorporating slide projections, soundtracks, cocaine powder drawings and instructions for visitors. The work is the epitome of what Oiticica called his 'quasi-cinemas', and of his desire to merge individual 'life-experience' with art. In this book, Sabeth Buchmann and Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz consider the effect the New York underground scene and Brazilian avant-garde cinema had on the Cosmococas. They draw together the influence of concrete poetry and the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Henri Bergson, and others, to present a rich analysis of the work and its experimentation with duration, its blurring of formats and languages, and its modes of spectatorship"--Back cover.