"Brazil is currently one of the largest social media markets in the world and in "Life of the Sign" Nathaniel Wolfson seeks to tie Brazil's current fascination with digital communications to a longer history and interest in the promise that technological advances in communication could bring. As Brazil continued a project of modernizing in postwar Latin America that was met by the military dictatorship that would overtake the country from the mid 1960s and would last decades, it was also entering a period that Wolfson describes as "when imagination and rationality merged." Aesthetic practices in the form of concrete poetry and graphic design that were so central to Brazilian culture during this time merged with new automated technologies to develop a "cybernetic imaginary." Writers and artists tinkered with early forms of computers, artificial intelligence, and digital and manual forms of technologies, like printmaking and typesetting, to form a way of understanding new networks of communication. These aesthetics were also shaped by artistic and philosophical networks between Brazilian artists, writers, and technologists, and their counterparts in postwar West Germany as well as by refugees from Nazi Germany who settled in São Paulo during the war; these experiences deeply informed Brazilian writers and artists as they soon faced repression with the onset of the military dictatorship beginning in 1964. Concrete aesthetics via poetry and art has long been acknowledged as a deeply important facet of Brazilian culture in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Wolfson applies cybernetic concepts to examine these artworks and writings in a new way by contextualizing the transnational networks between countries touched deeply by fascist repression. And while he finds collaborations between artists and technologists, they were also frequently skeptical of the belief the military government had in uses of technology to develop a modern nation"--