Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta (born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1957) is a Brazilian-Portuguese (Swiss resident since 2003) musician, architect, photographer and intermedia artist.
Emanuel Pimenta studied with Hans-Joachim Koellreuter, Conrado Silva,[3] Eduardo Kneese de Mello,[4] Decio Pignatari, Lygia Clark, and also with Kenzo Tange, Burle Marx, Yona Friedman, Peter Cook (Archigram) and Oscar Niemeyer among others.
In the early 1980s, Emanuel Pimenta coined the concept "virtual architecture[8]", later largely used as specific discipline in universities all over the world.
In 1980, Pimenta starts the first virtual planet in history, called Woiksed,[11] for which he won the Lake Maggiore Prize (AICA, UNESCO, Council of Europe) in 1993, anticipating similar projects for over twenty years.
Pimenta's first opera is dated of 1984, titled Frankenstern, with libretto by Decio Pignatari and stage design by the Brazilian visual artist Fernando Zarif [pt], at MASP Modern Art Museum of São Paulo.
In 2016, he concluded his third opera, titled Metamorphosis,[16] with libretto by René Berger, with world première at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation,[17] in New York City, under direction of the American composer Phill Niblock.
He has served as a curator for the Biennale of São Paulo, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the Triennial of Milan, and the Belém Cultural Center among others.
In 1975 he co-directed and co-edited a documentary movie with the French photographer and filmmaker Jean Manzon [pt], who was assistant to Orson Welles in Brazil, in the 1940s.