[-empyre-] hello world! o/

[Felipe Fonseca]

pois entao

just to confirm that whenever one invites 3 brazilians to a party,
at least another three should be expected to come along. I read Marcus'
announcement of this discussion on nettime and that caught my attention. 
I am Felipe Fonseca, just getting back to living in Brazil, and have 
been involved with some things that I believe are related to the 
subject: metareciclagem [1], bricolabs [2], descentro [3] and some 
others. Looking forward for the discussions here.

[1] recent text in enlish: 	http://mutirao.metareciclagem.org/wiki/CaseStudy
[2] www.bricolabs.net
[3] http://pub.descentro.org/

noix

efe
---
motw: 'o que nos mata é o vamo que vamo'
http://efeefe.no-ip.org
http://metareciclagem.org
http://weblab.tk

Gabriel Menotti wrote:
> Hello ppl!
> 
> I think I should start doing a brief introduction about Cine
> Falcatrua's history, since it explains a lot about the way it works
> and how its experience can contribute to this month's themes: media
> centers, cultural works' distribution and institutionalization.
> 
> In 2003, Cine Falcatrua were but a group of undergrad students from
> different courses, none of us involved directly with cinema besides of
> spectatorship. Just your regular P2P leechers: we downloaded from the
> internet feature and short films we could not find elsewhere, either
> because they were rare, either because they haven't been released in
> Brazil yet.
> 
> Interested in showing each other the movies we got, as well as
> watching them in a real cinematographic struture (as they were meant
> to be seen), we formalized an academic project so that we could borrow
> a DLP projector from the University's communication department. With
> this equipment, we started doing some regular, free screenings. Each
> week, we projected a different movie we got from the internet.
> 
> Since we did not had a DVD-R drive, we projected the movies from the
> same computer we used to download them. We liked to say it was the
> first digital movie theater of Espírito Santo (our state).
> 
> Word spread quite fast, and in less them a month we had a regular
> audience of more or less 300 people. Naturaly, Cine Falcatrua became a
> venue for local moviemakers, and also local "curators" – it was a nice
> place to show everyone an almost unknown movie you liked a lot.
> 
> Hence, almost by chance, unwantedly, we were propelled from mere
> spectators to producers and curators of a film society which gathered
> a weekly audience of hundreds.
> 
> A film society that, using a cheap (almost domestic) digital structure
> and headless (unauthorized) networks, could be quicker than the
> stablished cinematographic venues. We could screen million-dollar
> movies like Kill Bill, in a great (divx) quality, two months before
> they were officialy released in Brazil. And we got first-page
> publicity in some newspapers, as if we were promoting official
> premieres (always for free).
> 
> (Of course, that resulted in a lawsuit from some brazilian film
> distributors, accusing us of "unfair competition".)
> 
> I think the most interesting thing to point out from this story is the
> double process of incomplete institutionalization we went (and are
> always going) through.
> 
> At first, we had to institutionalize ourselves in order to borrow
> equipment from the university. It was this institutionalization that
> made us vulnarable to the lawsuit. This happens everytime: even if we
> do not follow all of a system's ways of proceding, in order to take
> part of it, we must agree to its protocols (I always hear people who
> create art within cellphone networks complaining about this).
> 
> But what was most impressive is that we were institutionalized from a
> side we did not expect: the audience. The audience was expecting us to
> serve them. To work failless. To educate people exhibiting "good
> movies". To take art to less-favoured population. To "democratize
> culture". To be an NGO. To be populistic. To remain static and
> predictable.
> 
> And our goal was to go beyond this. Using our cheap structure, we
> could go were the cinematographic institution couldn't. We were free
> to explore new cinemas, new ways of screening movies, new genres.
> 
> Is it possible to use the structures of diffusion and exhibition as
> creative or critical interfaces? Isn't exerting authority also a way
> of creating meaning and value?
> 
> But that are another points altogether. I'll come back to them in
> another post. ^^
> 
> * * *
> 
> Gabriel Menotti takes part of the Cine Falcatrua group/ project since
> the beginning. Cine Falcatrua ("scam" or "hoax") is a pirate film
> society that has gone wild and invaded other cultural domains: new
> media, videogame, open source software, contemporary art, etc.
> 
> His activities within Cine Falcatrua led him to his MA research, on
> spatial dynamics for audiovisual consumption (namely, the historical
> construction of the movie theater architecture and the effects of
> digitization in movie distribution and screenings).
> 
> At the present time, he is enrolled in PhD courses both in the
> Catholic University of São Paulo and in Goldsmiths College (University
> of London), being a fellow of Goldsmiths' "Spaces, Connections,
> Control" research programme.
> 
> His present academic interests include the relations between curating
> and coding, as well as (cinematographic) circuits as "expanded
> apparatuses".
> 
> In the spare time, he does some old-school 2D animation.
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