In the mid-20th century, the term Anthropophagy – the custom of eating human flesh – was reclaimed as a worldview by Brazilian philosophe Oswald de Andrade. It’s a symbolic devouring and digesting of external influences and information, and their subsequent transformation into something new and entirely Brazilian, where the flesh of one piece becomes the stem cells of another.

de Andrade died in Sao Paulo in 1954, the same place and year that Analivia Cordeiro was born. Cordeiro is the daughter of Waldemar Cordeiro, an Italian-born Brazilian artist who helped pioneer Latin America’s concrete art movement and early forms of computer art. 

During meals, he shared art with his young daughter. By age seven, she was dancing, studying the art form assiduously, touring the globe and working with premier choreographers like Merce Cunningham. In time, her father’s influences crept in.

“I  love mathematics – I am not just a dancer,” she said recently, speaking from her home in Brazil, where big windows revealed trees and the southern hemisphere’s summer sun. “I think ‘cultural people’ have such an interesting mind. They should go into the software.”

Cordeiro has now entered the web3 world with a collaboration with objkt, a community-owned non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace on the Tezos blockchain. Yet as with much of her work, the Brazilian is eschewing the common practice of releasing a large number of NFTs in the hope of making a quick buck. 

M3X3

In 1973, when she was 18, Cordeiro spent a year working at the computer center at the State University in Campinas. Using a PDP-11 with 5 MB of storage and 256 KB of memory, she made “M3X3,” a computer-programmed choreography for video – and Brazil’s first video art piece.

In the early 1980s, she expanded upon “M3X3,” working with the technologist Nilton Lobo to build Nota-Anna, one of the first notation softwares to graphically represent human motion in three dimensions.

The duo has been developing the program ever since, leaning into the tool’s equalizing nature. “ It's not a figure or a personage you show, it’s a stick figure of points,” she said. The software graphically depicts the spatial displacement of 24 joints in the body. “Nobody knows if you are a woman, fat, thin, old, young – no, everybody is the same. It allows a dialogue that is pure movement, from equal to equal. It’s very democratic.”

When Cordeiro was 10, Brazil’s military overthrew its democratic government, beginning a 21-year dictatorship. “They killed people,” she said. “We were all in danger. So I had this censorship in my mind – you have to be careful, you cannot tell people things, there is always someone watching what you're doing. And this fits very well in our world today.”

Here she mentioned Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as modern-day representatives of the censorship regime. They control the world’s data, she said, so they can effectively control the world.

A father’s dance

 ”My work deals with control,” she continued, “controlling movement, controlling language. But I always leave a space for the dancer to create.”

Cordeiro’s latest piece, “MUTATIO – Impossible to Control Just Contribute,” uses the newest version of Nota-Anna. At its exhibitions, a neural network estimates a body’s 24 joints and a video camera captures that body moving. Nota-Anna then renders these points into a three-dimensional space. The piece develops in real-time, as random fragments of the graphics are woven into a geometric tableau.

“I remember once I was in the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, and there was a father whose son was in front of the motion capture,” Cordeiro said. “And the father was telling the boy what to do. The father was kind of a big man. I said to him, ‘Can I ask you a favor? Do what you want your son to do.’ And he said to me, ‘Can I?’ I said, ‘Well, it's for you.’ 

“You have no idea what that man did in front of motion capture,” she continued. “He was a dancer, an artist. He didn't know. He turned into it. This can help open people to movement – to talk through movement.” 

This year, during Art Basel, “MUTATIO” – which means ‘change’ in Latin – was exhibited at the new art fair Digital Art Mile. The fair’s founder, Georg Bak, was the first to introduce Cordeiro to the blockchain. “ He came to us and said, ‘look, I have one of the most important digital artists in the world,’” shared Kika Nicolela, a Brazilian artist and art curator at objkt. “ And then when he said it was Analivia, I said, ‘I know and love her work.’”

Objkt worked with Cordeiro to prepare her Digital Art Mile exhibition. “I explained to her how the market works – that [artists] want to make the biggest drop and sell out as fast as possible,” Nicolela said. “And she was looking at me like ‘why? I prefer to not sell or sell very little – only to the people who really love my work.’”

Cordeiro at the Digital Art Mile discussion

The interactive installation generated over 5,000 output images – one every 26 seconds, and most of them will remain in Cordeiro’s personal collection.

“It's nice to be confronted with somebody who appreciates intentionality – in the way we release the work, in the way the work is collected, in the way the work is experienced,” Nicolela said. “Something that meant something more than ‘let's just sell.’” 

In 2023, at her first career retrospective, Cordeiro unveiled BodyWays, a mobile app that uses software to emulate the “MUTATIO” experience. Just before the call, Cordeiro learned that BodyWays had been accepted to NVIDIA’s 2025 AI Conference in San Jose – what she called “the most important AI meeting in the world.”

Alongside the app, she’ll present a piece called “Human Body Movement Notation as a Tool for Social Communication.” 

“Last year [the conference] was all about robotics,” she said. “This year they chose [my project], which is almost the opposite of robotics – it's a study of human movement. This means something.”

What it means is another opportunity to reclaim technology on behalf of the artists, the movers, the shakers – to echo the words Cordeiro spoke during her lecture at Digital Art Mile: “[When I first started], artists were trying to put the real world inside the computer; now, we have to push people off computers and tech devices.”

Today we need to be reminded of our own flesh. From her home in Brazil, Cordeiro recalled that Digital Art Mile presentation. “When I was talking, I just got up and I began to move,” she said, remembering the audience’s surprise as she broke convention. ”People from the companies that propose software don't know the limitations they are imposing. Technology imposes rules. From the very beginning of my life, I never accepted the impositions and the limitations.

“I know there are limitations – I take sometimes years to get a result because the technology is still not there, but the technology will be there,” she continued. “And if [artists] actually begin to propose software, what happens?” 

Surely the tech that happens would be more embodied. Uncensored. And controlled only to the point to which it can be readily devoured by others, transformed into the flesh of something new – something that we can barely begin to imagine.

lead photograph by Bob Wolfenson