Fig. 2: Carlos Fadon Vicente, Still Life/Alive, SSTV frame sent from Pittsburgh to Sao Paulo.
(Photo: Paulo Laurentiz)

A final improvisational period was also foreseen. We thought that an extended concluding time would permit a spontaneous flow of ideas and emotions resulting from the immediate experience of the event.

THE EVENT IN SAO PAULO

The Teleconferences
On Monday, 25January 1988, the city of Sao Paulo was celebrating its 434th anniversary under a thunderstorm. Nevertheless, that night an attentive audience was waiting for the transmissions from Pittsburgh after having crossed the flooded streets of the city.
A few minutes after the Sao Paulo/ Pittsburgh connection was established (Fig. 1), Breland's speech from Pittsburgh, "Floating in a Telematic Culture", was received in the auditorium at the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo. The audience could feel his enthusiasm in communicating with the city and its inhabitants [4]. We could also see his face, for the first time, in the slow-scanned video images.
Composite images resulting from the electronic mixing of Sao Paulo and Pittsburgh landscapes and transmitted by Jim Kocher, DAX operational director for the event, alternated on the screen with frames of Breland's face. The synthesized city was a metaphor for the telematic culture as defined by Breland: "By combining the two cities in slow scan technology we appear in electronic space as an extension of each other where we become one" [5].
Breland identified possibilities for an ecological renaissance in the human conquest of outer space and in the recently extended telematic culture. From his perspective, artists have a creative role to play in the encompassing telematic culture: "If the Earth is a living organism, are we a part of the process?" he asked. His own answer could be detected in the final words of his lecture:

I want to extend and amplify the possibilities of life. I want to discover
the power of my imagination. [ want to exercise my fullest potential as
a thinking human being. It is possible to do, but will we do it? Can we
do it? Do we have a choice? [6].

Breland reaffirmed his faith in the artist's power to renew the life forces essential for planetary survival.
Coincidentally, the two talks sent from Sao Paulo dealt with similar questions and demonstrated the same enthusiastic belief in the healing effects of widespread telecommunications upon the earth's surface [7].
'The Time of the Planet", Laurentiz's speech, advanced a semiotic view of contemporary cultural change under the impact of electronic technology. Defining reality as "the reference of the real according to certain sensors", Laurentiz invited us to consider that the newly disseminated electronic sensors were redefining reality itself [8].
The process of change, according to the Brazilian lecturer, has affected regionally defined values: "Electronic sensors display the species to universal knowledge ... These sensors make regional cultures shock, hybridizing them ... [they] despise idiosyncratic value highlighting the commonly known universal cultural profile" [9].
Laurentiz believes that wide-range simultaneous communication and human expansion into outer space have been eliciting new planetary values. Therefore regionalized time, epitomized by the Greenwich Meridian, no longer has meaning.
"Electronic sensors synchronize space, reinterpreting time", he asserted [10], also suggesting that electronic sensors could connect human consciousness all over the planet's surface.
In "Cyclotopia", my own lecture, the planet was also portrayed as a living being: "The planetary organism sensitizes itself through the impulses of an electronervous system. While we are in contact, we make it and we perceive it - the pulsing of the planet" [11].
The lecture emphasized the transformation of language under the impact of communication technology. It stressed the importance of language as a tool for thought, pointing out the need for linguistic rupture so that new configurations, and consequently new concepts, might arise.

Fig. 3: The Videocreature, performed by Otavio Donasci, experiences a face just received from Pittsburgh during the show. (Photo: Paulo Laurentiz)