Within the last decade there has been a vigorous response to the challenges to established orders of knowledge posed by the ‘digital revolution’ from Brazilian artists, theorists, and practitioners, who have gained great influence within what the US social theorist Gregory Coyne has termed the new cultural axis emerging in the Americas, extending from Florida to Brazil (Hinchberger 2004). Brazilian artists’ engagement with and contribution to the international cross-fertilisation of ideas within the numerous discourses of modernity is not, of course, a new phenomenon. Practitioners of the new media in Brazil are working within a tradition that was already highly receptive to, and, indeed, foreshadowed in many ways, the possibilities of engagement, interactivity and radical embodiments, and transformations of society and self promised by the new digital media. Yet the new and unprecedented opportunities for communication, dissemination and access afforded by international network systems have enabled Brazilian practitioners working with computer networks and animation, telecommunications, digital video, hypermedia and multimedia to overcome logistic, cultural and national barriers, and become key players in the international digital community.

This chapter, then, will focus on the theory and practice of one example of new media art in Brazil: corpos.org, constructed by a long-established and publicly funded group of researchers, web practitioners, and performance artists, Corpos Informáticos [Virtual Bodies]. First established in 1992 at the University of Brasilia, the group have in their fifteen-year trajectory developed a theoretically sophisticated corpus of ideas within a body of work that encompasses live art, installations, video, and performance art within broadcasting media, and have, with the creation of a website of some nine years’ standing, effected a further synthesis and development of one of the central questions informing the discipline: the ontological nature and status of the human subject and its embodiment and reconfiguration in communication, information, and electronic media. Corpos Informáticos develop this principal informing question from several perspectives. Firstly, the alterity of the body, and the manner in which modified and distorted reflections of the body in print and broadcast media alter and inform our own perceptions of ourselves, our will, and our desires. Secondly, the interaction between the body and the technological artefacts and prostheses which enable humans to move, function, and create.