Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta has been considered an important musician, architect, photographer and intermedia artist in the beginning of the third millennium - according to statements written by personalities like John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Merce Cunningham, René Berger, Daniel Charles, Dove Bradshaw , Phill Niblock or William Anastasi among others.
His works are included in some of the most expressive art collections and world-wide recognised institutions like the Whitney Museum of New York, the ARS AEVI Contemporary Art Museum, the Biennial of Venice, the Computer Art Museum of Seattle, the Kunsthaus of Zurich, the Durini Contemporary Art Collection, the Bibliotèque Nationale of Paris and the MART - Modern Art Museum of Rovereto and Trento among others. The international department of art exhibitions at MART - the largest museum of modern and contemporary art in Italy, architectural project by Mario Botta - was inaugurated with an individual exhibition of Emanuel Pimenta's works.
He develops music, architecture and urban projects using Virtual Reality and cyberspace technologies.
His concerts of music integrating visual art have been performed in various countries in the last thirty years. An important moment was his great concert at the Biennial of Sao Paulo, for four large orchestras, in 1985, side by side with John Cage, Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and Robert Raushemberg among others. Among his many celebrated projects around the world there are ZYKLUS, dated of 2005, which had an audience estimated in more than three hundred thousand people along fifteen days of continuous performance at the city of Locarno, in Switzerland; DEEP OCEAN, in 2005, also in Switzerland, in Lausanne, near Geneva, at the EPFL Technology Institute, with the support of NOAA - the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, of the United States; DR. JEKYLL AND MR. X, in 2004, based on the film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in its 1932 version, in Naples, Italy; ABELL2218, at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York City in 2004; KIRKOS - A Dialogue Between Marcel Duchamp and Josqin des Près, in Naples, in 2004; RAWWAR in Portugal, in 2005; Leonardo - on Leonardo da Vinci's works in Switzerland, in 2007; the opera DANTE, based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and many more.
His works are included in the Universalis Encyclopaedia (Britannica) since 1991, in the Sloninsky Baker's Music Dictionary (Berkeley), the Charles Hall's Chronology of the Western Classical Music, as well as in the All Music Guide - The Expert's Guide to the Best Cds.
Legendary musicians like John Cage, David Tudor, Takehisa Kosugi, John Tilbury, Christian Wolff, Martha Mooke, John DS Adams, Maurizio Barbetti, Michael Pugliese, Umberto Petrin, Susie Georgetis, Audrey Riley and the Manhattan Quartet among others have performed his compositions.
He collaborated with John Cage, as commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham, from 1985 until his disappearance in 1992. He remains commissioned composer for Merce Cunningham in New York City. Not only, he has been composer for several companies like the Appels Company in New York among others. His concerts have been performed in some of the most prestigious theatres all over the world, like the Lincoln Center and The Kitchen in New York; the Opera Garnier or the Theatre de La Ville in Paris; the Shinjuku Bunka Center in Tokyo, the Montpellier Municipal Theatre, the Festival of Aix en Provence, la Fenice in Venice, the Modern Art Museum in Sao Paulo, and the Biennial of Sao Paulo among others.
Articles on his works have appeared in different newspapers and magazines, like the New York Times, Le Monde, Le Parisien, O Estado de Sao Paulo, O Expresso, and O Globo, Il Sole 24 Ore, la Reppublica, among others.
With more than four hundred musical compositions already recorded, twenty published compact discs, four cd-roms, he has wrote and published about thirty books, several of them individually, and several papers. His works have been regularly published in England, the United States, France, Japan, the Netherlands, Portugal, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, Italy and Spain. He has also been curator for various institutions, like the Biennial of Sao Paulo, in Brazil; the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Portugal; the Triennial of Milan, in Italy; and the Belem Cultural Centre, in Lisbon, among others.
In the early 1980s Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept virtual architecture, later largely used in universities all over the world. Since the end of the 1970s he has developed graphical musical notations inside virtual environments. He is also responsible for concepts like sensorial design and nanodecision among others.
He won the National Marketing Prize in 1977 by the Brazilian Association of Marketing; the APCA Prize in 1986 by the Art Critics Association of Sao Paulo; and the Lac Maggiore Prize in 1994 by the Lombardia Regional Government, the International Association of Art Critics, the Unesco and the Council of Europe, in Locarno, Switzerland. In 1993 his works were selected by the Unesco, in Paris, as one of the most representative intermedia researchers of the world.
He is member of the SACD - Societè des Autheurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques in Paris since 1991. He also is an active member of the European Environmental Tribunal, in the United Kingdom, where he has been member of the board since 1995. He is an active member of the New York Academy of Sciences, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC and of the ASMP - American Society of Media Photographers. He is member and advisor of the AIVAC - Association Internationale pour la Video dans les Arts et la Culture, in Locarno, Switzerland. He was a founding member of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry - ISIS Symmetry, in Budapest. He is member of the jury of the BES Fellowship (Experimental Intermedia Foundation of New York, the Luso American Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation) since 1995.
He was Editorial Director of the art and culture magazine RISK Arte Oggi, in Milan, from 1995 to 2005. He was also member of the Editorial Council of the science magazine Forma, in Tokyo, Japan. He is member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the art, science and philosophy magazine Technoetic Arts, in Bristol, England; as well as of the online centre of architecture Vitruvius, in Brazil.
He studied with Hans Joachim Koellreutter (Paul Hindemith, Hermann Scherchen, Marcel Moyse), Demetrio Lima (Jean Pierre Rampal), Eduardo Corona, Eduardo Kneese de Mello (Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius), Decio Pignatari, Holger Czukai (Karlheinz Stockhausen), Conrado Silva (Olivier Messiaen) and Roti Nielba Turin (Haroldo de Campos) among others. He took part in various workshops and master classes with Kenzo Tange, Oscar Niemeyer, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Charles Moore among others.
Mr. Pimenta has been frequently invited, as professor and lecturer, by several institutions, among then the universities of New York, Lisbon, Florence, Georgetown, Lausanne, Tsukuba, Sao Paulo, Palermo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Monte Verita Foundation in Switzerland and the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel.
He is founder and director of the Arts, Sciences and Technology Foundation - Observatory, in Trancoso, Portugal. In 2008 he co-founded the HOLOTOPIA Academy, an institution oriented to arts, sciences and philosophy located at the Amalfi Coast, in Italy, where he is also director.
Emanuel Pimenta lives near Locarno, in Switzerland - but he is also based in New York and Lisbon.
