(In-person) TrAIN Open Lecture: Gabriel Menotti and German Alfonso Nunez

Slop and Opera: Imaginaries of Brazilian Modernity, 1980s–2020s

Developing from the intellectual concerns of their recent book, Barbarian Currents, this joint presentation asks how successive information and communication technologies - from videotext and early computer networks to television, the internet, and generative AI - have shaped broader imaginaries of Brazilian modernity. What continuities and ruptures connect the technological promises of the 1980s and 1990s to the contemporary proliferation of AI-generated cultural forms and “slop”? Bringing together their current research on early digital culture, television and recent generative AI systems, they consider how technological change has repeatedly been imagined as a break with the past, while remaining entangled with older structures of dependency, inequality and cultural authority.

Gabriel Menotti is a Brazilian independent curator and filmmaker working across various media. He works as an Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Studies at Queen’s University, Ontario. He has published extensively on the subject of images, institutions, and technology, and his works have been shown at various institutions worldwide, such as the São Paulo Biennial, Centre Pompidou, and the transmediale festival. His latest publications are the monograph O filme em circuito (Editora Machado, 2016) and the anthology Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts (co-edited with German Nunez). Menotti is also one of the coordinators of the Besides the Screen research network and festival.

German Alfonso Nunez is a social art historian whose research focuses on the intersections of contemporary art, technology, visual culture and social history, particularly in Brazil. He received his PhD from the University of the Arts London and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of São Paulo, Stanford University and the University of Campinas. His recent editorial work includes Barbarian Currents: Half a Century of Brazilian Media Arts (co-edited with Gabriel Menotti; Open Humanities Press, 2025) and a publication marking the 75th anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. In May 2026, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP).

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Filming and photography notice

Please note: filming and photography may be taking place at this event. All images and footage may be published on the College websites, social media channels and in print. The lecture will be broadcast at a later date via TrAIN's YouTube channel.

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