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In this curatorship we selected 44 videos of 19 countries: Brazil, South Africa, Lebanon, Israel, Canada, the United States, France, Turkey, Servia, Norway, Japan, Romania, Russia, Germany, Mexico, Argentina, Swiss, England and Italy.

The 44 artists are presented in a panorama of the international and national production of video art. We have divided the videos into 4 blocks.

We called the first block subjectivities, where we noticed the realities created by each artist, with his/her unique interpretation of the presented universes. We could mention Camila Sposati's work, in which while presenting the aerial view of São Paulo at a beautiful dusk, she maintains a dialogue on the telephone with a friend disclosing a banal and supposedly intimate speech of the daily life. The whole video is then made of a simple conversation, being that same circumstance of a simple talk the one in Florência Guillen's Mexican video, where a professional hairdresser talks to a friend and praises herself for contests she has participated and gotten the title of "champion of the champions", as the best hair colorist. The work explores the irony of that naïve speech on medals and titles, besides the representation of the excess typically Latin.

In Leonardo's video "The thing in itself", he presents the dilution of the image in layers, where he emphasizes the essence of the image as something non-existent. In Kazumi Kanemaki's video "Green Rays", the camera is exposed in the image, occupying a physical space, questioning the stereotypical imagery representation of women, camera and nature, demystifying the production and contemplation in video art. In Ido Fluk's video the image is badly focused at almost all times and the speeches are disconnected, being small reflections on banalities using a fragile voice and finishing the video focusing on an image of a polar bear. The artist Mihai builds a fantastic narrative of science fiction, but one reflecting mystery, exposing bodies that reveal the mysterious formation of new organisms representing a digital interference in the city. A distant universe, cold and scientific. Sagi is an artist who works on internal impressions and external events as parallel universes in the video "Blue".

In the politics block, Giordani Maia's work on the Brazilian context explores the extreme difficulty, on the public's part, of understanding the operation of meanings created by the artist in his relationship with the street salespeople. Therefore, he has a relationship with the works of the informal economy, inviting them to be the salesperson of his artwork (object - canned goods), displaying in this way the barriers regarding the different areas of knowledge. In Stuart Pound's video "Equivocation", he brings in an interview with Tony Blair trying to explain a political mistake that came to public. The artist talks about the use of ambiguity in the politicians' speech to hide the truth, about misunderstandings and about truths used to cover lies. In Akiko Nakamura's work, she develops a symbolic speech that refers to codes regarding the Japanese society and criticizes the submission before the power of the State and the euphoria before the development of the society. The also Japanese artist Kawai, in the work "The theology of the society of spectacle", talks about the tactics of the society of consumption and about the artificiality created by the marketing that always brings new needs and a false self-image for the individual, as well as an assumed well-being, as a permanent search for ecstasy. Man would then be more and more sterile in their actions, in other words, paralyzed.

In the block of the formal discussion we have the work of the Russians Galina and Serguei which make reference to the Soviet formalism, in the constructivism, using that model to represent and to present the objects, as in a formal second reading. Kentaro Taki shows different language codes (different languages and mathematical codes, as well as other mentioned codes) in an overlapping of the sense, expiating the complexity of the codes meanings which would be mere language tools. He also shows the technologies (use of objects and media) as mere work tools as to what concerns man's survival, being those tools important in the formatting of communication. This work would be a reflection on the use of technology and its interference in our perception of the world. Marcello Mercado creates a geometric abstraction to represent biochemical synapses regarding a simple event (e.g. a cat that has cut your finger) He represents that through a formality referring to the microcosms of the human organism. Myriam Thyes in her video explores a course of filming made upright to exhibit the internal architecture of a building, creating the sensation of a supposedly religious ascension.

In the block parody we run across the satirical, the farce that ridicules speeches and alludes to language patterns criticizing them, as for example do the artists Richard Nicolas and Ed Young, who create simulations of false rebellious characters as if it were a manufactured rage, simulating a pop universe, where Nicolas criticizes the image produced by the music industry and Ed simulates a hate to plush bugs as an artistic action.

Robert Tyler creates a speech paraphrasing TV publicity and in doing so referring to the fetish of the brands and packages, such as those ads that create the products valorization, the inexhaustible and tedious universe of nutrition and cleaning as facilitators of money circulation. Finally, the Spanish Andrés Senra reproduces an interview with the star Michael Jackson and overlaps it with his own image in the scene, providing a disturbing show.

The installations

In the four presented installations we noticed political aspects related to the critics over certain language systems, as well as the use of technology as a means of control and safety. In Paul Rowley's and David Phillips' work, "Security fugue", a film from the 1970's with situations of rescue that alludes to a promise of total safety offered by great health insurance plans and other insurance companies. Infallible teams that guarantee life at a high cost. Finally, the companies grow because they bet on the protection against the unexpected of a violent society that needs to profit with the promise of safety and, because of that, it invests and speculates high amounts on fear. In that same line of thought we are able to find a relationship among all the four presented installations.

The German Niklas Goldbach in his video "Looping my barrio" portrays Berlin in the summer of 2004 with an urban architecture which, according to the artist, doesn't present fragments of human life for they are extremely clean, safe areas, with surveillance cameras everywhere, what Niklas called non humanist conceptual architecture, a cold Berlin that represents great economical interests in its urban culture.

The French artist Pascal Liévre presents three videos that bring the universe of one massive cultural industry, something easy to be watched, presenting great elderly stars from TV and faces that could only be away from the audience screen, as well as musicals vulgarizing political speeches and also films related to a universe produced to be consumed with all voracity and audience of an MTV so as to say, which makes homogenous the whole musical production. Pascal reveals an immediate speech ready for consumption.

The collective "M&M is not a confetti" presents a work that will have a dialogue with the idea of urban paranoia, control and safety, in a third world society with high unemployment indexes and many social problems (health, education). They show a "sandwich-man" or a "poster-man" (a man who holds a poster advertising a product), a representative of the informal economy workers, without work papers signed by a firm, who try to survive by exposing their bodies on the street. That represented body captures images of downtown Sao Paulo and broadcasts those images inside the institution. M&M's work accuses the systems of power and brings irony to the sentence 'Smile, you're being videotaped' as an icon of the persecution and distrust towards all beings filmed in public spaces showing a false happiness.

All of the presented works are embedded with social critics contents and a reflection upon the relationship of technology and our daily lives not as social improvement but as distrust, fear and a guarantee of profit and entertainment.