Concrete Encoded

Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil

Nathaniel Wolfson

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English

University of Texas Press
04 November 2025

Literary studies: poetry & poets; Popular culture; Media studies; Digital lifestyle

A study of concrete art and poetry, its implications, and influence in Brazil.

Concrete art and poetry burst onto Brazil’s cultural stage in the 1950s, while the country was embarking on a dizzying period of modernization. Bringing together key poets and visual artists alongside less recognized figures, Nathaniel Wolfson shows that concretism was hardly socially inert, as pundits have suggested. Rather, it presciently grappled with an emerging information age that would soon reorganize human relations globally.

Concrete Encoded describes a nascent cybernetic imaginary. While concretism has long been considered Brazil’s most global aesthetic movement, Wolfson traces new circles of international theorists and practitioners involved in critical technological thought. Wolfson argues that concrete poetry is the quintessential literary genre of the early information age. He shows that Brazilian poets, artists, and designers contested the military dictatorship’s technological authoritarianism and information-gathering operations. Vigorous experimentalists, their attention to form and semantics unveiled both the creative and nefarious possibilities of algorithmic writing. A highly original and daring work, Concrete Encoded reckons with aesthetic responses from Brazil to an advancing capitalist and digital era.

By: Nathaniel Wolfson
Imprint: University of Texas Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9781477332535
ISBN 10: 1477332537
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 04 November 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Nathaniel Wolfson is associate professor in the department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty in the Program in Critical Theory and the Berkeley Center for New Media at University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews for Concrete Encoded: Poetry, Design, and the Cybernetic Imaginary in Brazil

What is the cybernetic imaginary, and what are its defining features? What distinguishes knowing (imagination, memory, cognition and so forth) in the age of cybernetics from knowing in the age of print? Concrete Encoded is a daring study of the ways in which artists, designers, and writers in Brazil responded to the emergence of cybernetics as a new sphere of knowledge. It is among the first to explore how modern Brazilian culture responded to the rise of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and other fields that have radically transformed the fabric of contemporary societies.--Sergio Delgado Moya, University of Chicago, author of Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil