Bienal Sao Paulo Asks Brazil to Turn Off the Auto Mode
Turn off the Auto Mode is a 2018 film campaign created by São Paulo agency Tech and Soul for Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, launching in Brazil in September of that year to coincide with the opening of the 33rd Bienal São Paulo, inviting audiences to abandon passive, screen-mediated experience and engage with art through direct human presence at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park.
The 33rd edition of the Bienal São Paulo carried the curatorial title Affective Affinities, running from 7 September through 9 December 2018, according to the official Bienal foundation records at Imgs Fbsp Org Br. The exhibition was free of charge and featured approximately 600 artworks from 103 artists, making it one of the largest and most accessible iterations of the event in its modern history. That scale of programming demanded equally ambitious communication: a single film asset needed to justify a journey to Ibirapuera Park and reframe what leisure and recreation could mean in a city saturated with digital stimulation.
The campaign's central conceit draws directly from photography. Auto mode — the default setting on any camera or smartphone that strips control from the user in favour of algorithmic convenience — becomes a metaphor for how contemporary audiences navigate cultural life in Brazil and beyond. The creative argument is that art demands manual engagement: conscious choice, slowed attention, personal interpretation. In Brazil, where smartphone penetration has steadily transformed how urban audiences consume culture and leisure, the metaphor lands with specific local resonance. By naming the behaviour it wants audiences to abandon, the campaign identifies its enemy not as ignorance but as habit — and positions the 33rd Bienal São Paulo as the antidote.
Tech and Soul grounded the Turn off the Auto Mode campaign in a tension that defines contemporary leisure across Brazil: the gap between being physically present at a cultural event and being meaningfully present within it. Visitors to major institutions increasingly arrive equipped to document rather than to experience, producing a paradox where proximity to great art coexists with genuine disengagement from it.
The 33rd Bienal São Paulo competed for audience attention within a Brazilian leisure and travel landscape that includes institutions such as the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Museu do Amanhã in Rio de Janeiro, both of which have invested in audience development and digital engagement campaigns in recent years. Against competitors capable of generating significant social media footprint, the Bienal's campaign made a counter-intuitive strategic move: it argued against the very digital behaviour that drives visibility, choosing depth of engagement over breadth of reach.
On the advertising investment side, the global travel advertising market was estimated at approximately six billion US dollars in 2018, according to Credence Research, with compound annual growth projected at around eight and a half percent through 2032. While no credible source, including Credence Research and Phocuswright, isolates 2018 Brazilian advertising expenditure specifically for contemporary art exhibitions, the broader context confirms that travel and leisure categories were directing an increasing share of budgets toward digital film in that period. Travel brands globally allocated a substantial majority of marketing budgets to digital advertising in 2018, according to Phocuswright. Tech and Soul's choice of film as the sole medium for Turn off the Auto Mode therefore represents a deliberate concentration of resource into a single, narratively rich format rather than a dispersed multi-channel approach — a structurally sound decision for a cultural institution whose proposition depends on emotional resonance rather than transactional conversion.
Robert Orlich directed Turn off the Auto Mode for production company Zeppelin Filmes, translating a conceptually ambitious brief into a single film asset that had to carry the full weight of the Bienal São Paulo's 2018 campaign without support from additional media formats.
Creative direction came from Flavio Waiteman, with art direction handled by Paulo Ottaviani and Guga Costa. The copywriting team comprised Paulo Maia, Felipe Pacheco, and Fernando Silva — a roster large enough to suggest that the script went through substantive development before reaching production. Audio was produced by Jamute Audio, whose contribution to the film's tonal register would have been critical: in a campaign built around presence and sensory attention, sound design carries argumentative weight that imagery alone cannot.
The narrative approach that defines Turn off the Auto Mode belongs to a strand of cultural advertising that favours introspection over spectacle. Rather than showcasing the artworks of Affective Affinities directly — a conventional approach that risks reducing complex contemporary art to a highlight reel — the creative team chose to frame the act of looking itself as the subject. This is a structurally sophisticated choice. It decouples the campaign from the specific contents of the 33rd Bienal São Paulo and positions the institution as a guardian of a particular mode of attention, one that transcends any single edition. The metaphor of auto mode versus manual control gives the film a conceptual spine legible to any Brazilian urban audience familiar with smartphone photography, requiring no specialist knowledge of contemporary art to understand the invitation being extended. The result is a piece of cultural communication that earns its category — recreation and leisure — by making the act of recreation feel worth defending.
No verified performance data for Turn off the Auto Mode is publicly available. Attendance figures specific to the 33rd Bienal São Paulo's 2018 edition attributable to the campaign have not been documented in sources accessible for this analysis, and no credible market-share data for the Bienal São Paulo relative to competing Brazilian cultural institutions in 2018 has been identified, as confirmed by the absence of such figures in sources including Credence Research and Phocuswright.
Structural analysis, however, supports a measured assessment of the campaign's effectiveness as a piece of cultural communication. The decision to commit entirely to a single film format concentrates creative and production resources in a way that suits the Bienal São Paulo's positioning as a serious artistic institution. A fragmented multi-format campaign would have undermined the very argument the film makes. The creative team's choice to use the auto mode metaphor rather than showcase specific artworks gives the campaign longevity beyond the exhibition's closing date of 9 December 2018, and the sustained relationship between Tech and Soul and Fundação Bienal de São Paulo — documented through at least November 2021, according to records at imgs.fbsp.org.br — suggests the client found the creative partnership productive.
The Clapboard Score for Turn off the Auto Mode is 60 out of 100. The campaign demonstrates conceptual clarity, an appropriate medium choice, and a creative team with documentary depth, but the absence of measurable outcomes and the constraint of a single media asset limit the score's ceiling. In the Brazilian travel and leisure advertising landscape of 2018, it represents a considered institutional communication rather than a breakthrough creative intervention.
Turn off the Auto Mode is a 2018 film campaign created by Tech and Soul for Bienal São Paulo. It launched in Brazil in September 2018 to promote the 33rd Bienal São Paulo, titled Affective Affinities, using the metaphor of camera auto mode to encourage genuine, attentive engagement with art over passive, screen-mediated presence.
Tech and Soul, a São Paulo-based agency, created Turn off the Auto Mode for Fundação Bienal de São Paulo. The agency maintained a documented creative relationship with the Bienal through at least November 2021, according to records at imgs.fbsp.org.br, suggesting the 2018 campaign was part of a broader, ongoing institutional partnership.
Robert Orlich directed the Turn off the Auto Mode film, produced by Zeppelin Filmes. Creative direction was led by Flavio Waiteman, with art directors Paulo Ottaviani and Guga Costa, copywriters Paulo Maia, Felipe Pacheco, and Fernando Silva, and audio produced by Jamute Audio for the 2018 Bienal São Paulo campaign.
The 33rd Bienal São Paulo carried the title Affective Affinities and ran from 7 September to 9 December 2018 at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in Ibirapuera Park, Brazil, according to imgs.fbsp.org.br. The exhibition was free of charge and featured approximately 600 artworks from 103 artists across the duration of the event.
Auto mode refers to the default setting on cameras and smartphones that removes deliberate control from the user. Tech and Soul used this metaphor in the Turn off the Auto Mode campaign to argue that habitual, screen-mediated leisure prevents genuine engagement with art, positioning the 33rd Bienal São Paulo as a space demanding conscious, manual human attention.
Turn off the Auto Mode receives a Clapboard Score of 60 out of 100. The campaign earns marks for conceptual clarity, an appropriate single-film format, and a well-documented creative team led by Flavio Waiteman, but is constrained by the absence of publicly verified performance data and its reliance on a single media asset throughout Brazil in 2018.
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