Art and technology are strongly intertwined in the theorisation and creative practice of film and media in Brazil today. No doubt such hybridisation can be traced in the continuing curiosity and openness to modernity described by Vilém Flusser in his observations as a long-term resident and cultural chronicler of the country (Medeiros 2015). In turn, in her attempt to define the specificity of the Latin American context, Vivian Schelling (2001: 2) talks of the layering of old and new traditions that combined with elements of European and North American modernities to create ‘an experience sui generis, with its own dynamic and possibilities’. In Brazil, the legacy of the first modernity has been continuously revisited, notably through the prism of the key European thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s (Marques et al. 2013), and, in the following decades, with reference to emergent media archaeology and intermedial approaches (see Nagib and Solomon 2019). In the resulting bent towards reflexivity in evidence in the conceptualisations and practice of Brazilian scholars and artists, cinema plays a key role – not only as the emblematic modern artform internationally, but as one that was implanted early in the country. To consider the medium from the vantage point of the long history of apparatuses and lens-based images, as the artists discussed in this chapter do, is not to deny its specificity, but to recast it within a continu-ing web of exchanges between art and science, and between film and other arts. Envisaged in this way, intermediality becomes a historiographic method, a means to explore the traces of the long-lasting heritage of Brazil's cultural modernity, as they surface in the experiments of contemporary filmmakers and artists.

More specifically, in what follows I propose to explore the persistent fusion of art and the machine heralded by protocinematic devices and effected by photography and cinema. When envisioned from an intermedial standpoint, I suggest, this fusion helps to shift the classic discourses (Krauss 2000; Aumont 2010; Bolter and Grusin 1999) opposing medium specificity to remediation and self-differentiation back to the images themselves – the question of their production, actualisation and reception.