Call for Thematic Dossier – “Arlindo Machado: Concepts and poetic processes in communications and the arts”

In July 2020, the end of Arlindo Machado's biological life touched the academic community and caused commotion with the most varied configurations. The professor and researcher developed a fruitful path between Communication and Semiotics at PUC/SP, where he graduated and taught, and at the University of São Paulo, where he studied, taught and was an Associate Professor. These institutional bonds gave him a place among the most cited researchers in the communications area.
Revista Significação invites researchers to question the work of Arlindo Machado in a dossier to be released in July 2021, one year after his death. The proposal is to analyze and discuss the critic of video in the press, the researcher, the curator, the researcher in communications and the arts, and the filmmaker of scientific and experimental short films – among them the documentary Apito da panela de pressão and the work Eisenstein multimedia.
His work encompasses historical contexts and unique situations related to “technical images,” a common expression in his books, articles and curriculum. It also includes investigations in diffusion media such as TV, cinema and galleries, covering expressive forms such as photography, TV, the first cinema, cinema, video and experimental art developed from technical research. In these fields of investigation, he explores rare frequencies, inaugurating original readings of genres such as music videos, scientific films, television programs by great filmmakers, TV series and soap operas. As a theoretical support, he usually adopts a linguistic framework. Peirce's Semiotics is presented in a palatable way for any neophyte student, as well as Umberto Eco's Semiotics. Arlindo Machado also dialogues with cinema theories such as the apparatus, the essay film and the montage, notably Sergei Eisenstein, to whom he dedicated a book. Communication theories are the result of contact with Latin American thinkers like Jesus Martin-Barbero and Nestor Canclini. He also dialogues with the Canadian Marshall MacLuhan's approach and his perspective on the materiality of the images, even before this name was consolidated.
With irreverence, the thought of Arlindo Machado questions disciplinary classifications. It crosses the cleavages between theory and practice, which value the former over the latter in one of the greatest examples of prejudice against achievement and the technique that academic structures were able to produce. This thought crosses periodizations and established industrial formats, in short, it faces the successively updated challenge of critically thinking about unconventional media.
The purpose of this dossier is not to domesticate a thought that has opened up in so many ways. The idea is to stimulate the production of texts that develop questions not answered by the work of Arlindo Machado. Thus, we intend to advance the research and audiovisual realization agenda in the various areas sown by the work of a master who leaves us the legacy of transversal investigations and a heterogeneous field of themes.
Also, we are receiving articles for the other Sections of the journal to be published in the same edition.
Sincerely,
Patricia Moran
(editor)
Esther Hamburger
(editor)