The Suplemento Dominical Jornal do Brazil

About Project

The Suplemento Dominical do Jornal do Brasil (SDJB) is a cultural newspaper supplement that was published from 1956-1961 in Brazil. SDJB was created by Reynaldo Jardim and included among other Neo-concrete artist the poet and art critic Ferreira Gullar with the sculptor and graphic designer Amilcar de Castro. Based on the ongoing research by Simone Osthoff with the help of Candice Ee Ching Ng that focuses on the graphic design evolution of this publication over the 6 years of its existence, the newspaper archive was abstracted from text & images to black boxes and lines. An ‘X’ was assigned to images and black boxes covered the texts. The intention was to be able to see how as time progresses, the graphic design implementation also changed from being rigid to experimental and sparse. Peifeng Yin (Computer Science Eng grad) then wrote a program to try automating this process. What resulted was a whole archive worth of abstracted forms.

Within the context of Playing the Archive, percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky and Joey Baron used music to “read” the graphic design abstractions of this newspaper supplement, assigning different sounds and rhythms to titles, text columns, concrete poems, and photographs of artworks, also taking in consideration in the white space of the pages. Focusing on the Neoconcrete Manifesto which consisted of eight pages of a weekend cultural section of a newspaper published in Rio de Janeiro on 22 March 1959, the archive became a music score for the percussionist. What resulted was an eclectic set of rhythms whose compilation was never before heard.