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Brazil's Arte.Mov Festival Explores New Cartographies

We chat with the curators of Brazil’s premier audiovisual art festival focused on mobile media.

Arte.Mov is an art and technology festival that focuses on mobile media and how it changes the way we live. This year, the panels and exhibitions investigated the development of “New Cartographies” based on the critical use of technological products that are designed to help us live and navigate more easily through the world. We talked to the festival’s curators, Lucas Bambozzi and Rodrigo Minelli (who have been in charge of putting debates and exhibits together since before Arte.Mov was what it is) about art, mobile media, the independent audiovisual production in Brazil and their favorite art pieces of this year.

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The Creators Project: How did Arte.Mov come about?
Lucas Bambozzi and Rodrigo Minelli: Back in the late ’90s there was an electronic music festival in Belo Horizonte (MG) called Eletronika. We both had this idea of bringing video and visuals to a music festival, so, in 2002, we created a section of expanded media inside this festival and called it the Expanded Media Forum. It was a very unique festival because we worked under the sponsorship of a local mobile phone company called Telemix. With the privatization of the telecoms in Brazil, these big companies were kicking in, but Telemix was still there as the smallest company operating in the country. So they called us and asked us to come up with a festival exclusively dedicated to mobile media, which was something we were starting to discover and deal with at the time. So it all started with music and then passed to these VJ, live image and audiovisual performance procedures.

It’s interesting that it started in Belo Horizonte, which is outside of the comparatively more technologically robust cities of Rio and São Paulo.
Belo Horizonte always had an audiovisual tradition and never had a festival of new technologies. Back in the ‘80s, when we were in college, video was starting to come up but it was all very scarce and had nothing to do with the way cinema was made. There wasn’t a film school nor even an audiovisual market, so our generation started to work with something that was completely new because we had no references, professors or markets to absorb the production. We started to believe that independent production — with no relationship to marketing, TV or cinema — was a possible way to go.

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Did the arrival of these bigger companies affect your art or the way the festival worked?
Well, it changed it all for the better. They demanded a nation-wide action of us and it made the festival more encompassing. We wanted to take these media, which were originally designed for communications and not for artistic expression, to a more reflexive and critical arena. We wanted to explore the intersections between various media and to create projects that would embody these thoughts about hybridism and new languages that should accompany the massification of mobile media.

Other than the the consolidation of mobile media as a means of artistic expression, what are the particular topics you are interested in?
Our debate with Raquel Rolnik and Daniel Belasco Rogers exemplifies the configuration of our discussions. Raquel is an urban planner who hosts a radio show in which she discusses urban questions and problems, and proposes ideas and solutions. Daniel is an artist and he’s been carrying a GPS attached to his body every day for seven years. His idea of tracing his ways repeatedly over the map is to kind of ‘draw’ a different sense to it, by insisting on it every day. It’s a kind of employment of technology that fosters ideas of responsibility and a consciousness of the social space, of collectivity. We want to emphasize the social aspects, be it positive or negative, of these technologies. Our goal is to bring as many artists as possible to work with these questions, because the more people you have working on it, the bigger are the chances that the common citizen will look at it and develop a critical sense about the presence of these technologies in our lives and the transformations it’s been bringing to the way we live. For example: does everyone know that cell phones and credit cards generate an information flow that can be used for whatever? What would that mean? What we like about these artists is that they show that it’s possible to think about the presence and use of these devices in a critical way. So we focus on mobile media because it makes everything more immediate—carrying a mobile device makes you experiment with other formats and other ways of producing. What we are proud of doing is stimulating the emergence of a culture that wasn’t there before, this culture of searching a possible way of making art with things that were created to be products for consumption so people can be empowered by it.

For the most part, these technologies are still very unstable—they break, they don’t work and their life spams are really short. How do you deal with it in an exhibition?
We assume that these machines are not ready. They are always being developed and almost all we buy is a “beta version,” so we test it and try to find new uses for them. It’s in this indefinite place that unexpected things may happen—it’s not like film or TV, that have reached their “maturity” a while ago. If you think about art as in an exhibition, there’s a certain fetish for the interface. What people normally see in this kind of piece is its appearance, the magic of usability. You touch it, something happens, then you understand the logic of its mechanics and the real content is left behind. So we like it when the spectator has to go a bit beyond the interface to get what the art work is proposing.

Can you list some of your favorite pieces of this year?
There is the Devorondina, a postcard generating machine created by Bruno Viana and by Vanessa, who’s a young musician. Because of our demand, they created this work that makes invisible things visible — radio waves, frequencies, the physical impact of the sound. I like this piece because it was created from our perspective of what the festival should be about, these new cartographies. They created a way to map the world departing from non-visible objects.

I also like Mark Shephard’s work, the Tactical Sound Garden, which works with the concept of the city being sensitive to people via their mobile device signals. He proposes a series of new devices that could deceive this surveillance — underwear that warns you of RFID activity, for example. Because you enter a place and, by your clothes, they’ll be able to know who you are, since what you wear can be linked to a credit card number, for example. So, this way, market agents could conveniently offer you specific products, but you won’t necessarily be aware of that. Neither will you know which kind of power and interests are motivating it. These propositions incite a kind of critical thinking that can help you to decide if you want to be in that environment or not, at least. Because all that is sold as good technologies that will make our lives better but we never know what is behind it, so it’s important to be able to judge and decide if you want to participate in this process or not.

Last, we really like Arcangel Constantini’s work. It has a great sense of humor. In his works, like, for example, the installation Nanodrizas, the interface is on the most ordinary things: pieces of junk, an open suitcase. The Nanodrizas, for example, deal with these ideas of nanotechnology and science fiction. They are spaceships that float in rivers and lakes informing the quality of the water and the environment. It’s nice because it exposes the technology being used in a low-tech way, so it’s not covered by a magical interface or a black box. It goes straight to the point.