As a member of the Brazilian Tropicália movement, Lygia Clark, along with Hélio Oiticica, helped produce a distinctively South American form of artistic modernism and response to the possibilities of cybernetics for art.

Her Dialogue: goggles is a brilliantly witty and even comic work that prefigures and engages with the idea of interactivity without using any complex technological means. It was one of a number of works Clark produced at the time that explored questions of interaction and sensory experience.

In Dialogue: goggles two sets of diving goggles are attached to each other in such a way that participants are constrained to make eye contact with each other, to the exclusion of other senses, and are forced to engage. The focus of Dialogue: goggles is the experience that is made possible rather than the object itself.

Lygia Clark began her artistic practice in the late 1940s, making drawings of stairs and her children. She joined the neoconcrete movement (1959-1961), where she attempted to escape both the notion of the artist as ‘genius’, and the supremacy granted to the object that implicitly forces the viewer into a role of passive contemplation.

In the 1960s, Clark created her Bichos with thin metal plates connected at hinges, built to be modified by the audience through handling. Based on the exploration of the senses and on the interpretation of the emotions awakened by these senses, Lygia Clark created collective experiences during her time in Paris (1964-1976).

Her thought was that by handling a sensorial or relational object—such as, plastic bag or stones—viewers, now transformed into participants, could heighten their sensory perceptions and ability to sense connections between themselves and the collective world.