Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum

Sérgio Roclaw Basbaum, PhD. is a jazz musician (player, composer and arranger) who has made his graduate studies in Cinema (Universidade de São Paulo - USP) and concluded his post-graduate studies at in the Comunication and Semiothics Program in Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). His master dissertation (1999) has focused on the quest for synesthesia in arts; his doctorate thesis discusses perception in digital environments in a broader sense, starting from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception, expanded by a dialogue with the contemporary anthropology of senses from Constance Classen and David Howes, put in a dialogue with approaches Vilém Flusser, Martin Heidegger, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Benjamin and others have offered on the problems of technology and its relation to meaning and perception.

From this matrix, his current work investigates topics around the intercrossings of perception, art and technology, targeting a comprehensive view of questions of aesthesis in digital culture. In this landscape, perception and its relations with production of meaning, perception and language, perception and power, perception and technology etc. emerge in very a particular view.

Presently, Basbaum teaches at Pontificia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP) and Universidade Anhembi-Morumbi (UAM) and prepares a presentation for the II Congresso Inrternacional de Sinestesia, Ciência e Arte -- in Granada, Spain, next May (http://www.sinestesia2007.info/). He has published a book on synesthesia (Sinestesia, arte e tecnologia. São Paulo: Editora Annablume/FAPESP, 2002) as well as published and/or presented several papers dealing with such topics he's been working with.