[spectre] Digitofagia in Brazil, October 2004

[ricardorosas]

"Digitofagia" (Digitophagy)
At MIS - Museum of Image and Sound
Sâo Paulo, Brazil
October 18th to 24th, 2004

Theme
The term "Digitofagia" (Digitophagy) was born out of an idea
that united the concepts of Antropofagia (Antropophagy) and
digital media. "Antropofagia" was a very important artistic
movement in Brazilian culture that arose in the 1920's ,
following the Brazilian modernist movement. It originally
meant the act of eating another human being, a practice of
some Brazilian indians, who made it in order to "catch the
enemy's power and courage", being this enemy another tribe's
indian or the colonist. Such was also a metaphor - if we
follow the idea of the creator of the movement, Brazilian
writer Oswald de Andrade - for the sense of catching foreign
information, in this case, from the European avant-gardes,
and, by "digesting" it and mixing with the local
circumstances, transform the results into something original.
That also meant acknowledging the Brazilian indian and black
heritages, in an avantgardistic reinterpretation.
Antropophagy was of vital importance for the definition of
contemporary Brazilian culture, as one can see by its
rediscovery in the 1960's by the movement of concrete poetry
and by the musicians from Tropicalism, who in their turn
digested the universe of mass communication culture, pop
culture and cinema.

The idea of a "Digitophagia" would be not only to rethink the
antropophagic practice in the age of the computer and new
media, but accomplish an antropophagy of the current tactical
media practices by putting in interaction foreign and local
groups, as well as by investigating the form that Brazilians
deal with technology, whether it is through improvisation or
through the famous Brazilian "jeitinho" (a local way of
creating gizmos) in order to overcome technical and financial
difficulties.

Another fact is that Brazilian cyberculture theoreticians are
very unaware of their own reality, as much as the artistic
universe ignores, in its majority, both the current activist
practices of contemporary artists and militants and all the
theorization that surrounds this practice. The goal of
the "Digitofagia Festival" would be exactly to provide an
interaction of such groups and lectures by theoreticians who
broaden the debate and foment practices.

Format
The event will be structured in the space of Museu da Imagem
e do Som (Museum of Sound and Image) in São Paulo, from
October 18 to 24, allowing the practices of experimentation
of the groups jointly, two by two, which will happen a week
before the exhibition itself. The "exhibition" properly,
whose form of presentation is still being thought, will show
the results of the interaction in the following weekend, with
the museum opening spaces of free expression for the public,
making available a room and equipments for these
presentations, as well as a space for reproduction of
copyleft or liberated press material, CDs or mp3s, very
probably in conjunction with the Creative Commons. The
lectures and debates will take place during the same week,
complementing what will be seen in practical terms. The
biggest interest of Digitofagia is to allow the collaboration
and exchange of ideas and actions not only to open new
horizons of application by everybody involved but also to
provide new cultural configurations to unfold. In that sense,
good efforts will be made in order to disseminate the idea of
the event through the media and a great quantity of public is
awaited to make possible an intense flow of ideas and
information.

- Projects in Collaboration
- Debates
- Burnstation
- Camelódromo, an collective Exchange Fair
- Media Van
- Antiparty

Projects in Collaboration
A week before the exhibition, two groups from media, hacking,
arts and/or activist practices will come together to think of
a project to be displayed/acted during the festival.

check the portuguese page - CoLaboracoes - waiting for
translation . . .

Debates
The main themes are going to be selected from an online list
of national and international editorial guests that will
build up the core areas of debates. So far, we have the
following:
Collaboration
Bio-piracy
Autonomous Knowledge
Copy/Pirate/Plagiarism/Remix
Gambiarra, the Brazilian way
Games in Linux
Paralization of media-art
Intellectual Property

Camelódromo
On September 2003, during the Dutch festival The Next Five
Minutes 4, the Brazilian tactical media lab group presented
the work Camelodrom, a performance about a very typical
informal economy, the street-vendors, selling from useless
objects such as batteries and fake shirts to pirate cds and
jobs. For Digitofagia they will set up a collective Exchange
Fair, a space for reproduction of copyleft or liberated press
material, CDs or mp3s. It is our intention to have part of
the Museum of Image and Sound archives (the material which
have fallen under public domain, if we have support)
digitalized, in order to be accessed by the fair.

Media Van
The Media Van is a vehicle for public media production and
disturbance. It consists of a radio and tv station, driven by
Submidia http://submidia.radiolivre.org . The route will vary
every day, as they will derive around the city of São Paulo.
The dates are also yet to be defined.

Antiparty
Well, the name says it all. Informal talks, sounds and
screenings at the lounge of MIS.