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The Brazilian Context

Many are the social, political or economic problems in Brazil. Socially, there's an extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Such a big social unequality is reflected, for example, in the extreme differences between the center and the periphery in the big cities, regional unequalities, criminality, racism. Besides that, we live in an unnoficial police state that acts in defense of the elites, murdering and arresting poorer citzens, because of the color of their skin or social condition.

Politically, the current post-dictatorship Brazilian government defines itself as a democracy, with is current president Lula da Silva, who, in spite of his bond with the Worker's Party (PT), has acted much more in a Tony Blair-like third way, showing a very conservative approach in defense of the great monopolies and business community rather than the population in general. Undertakings like "Fome Zero" (Zero Hunger) reveal themselves much more as politics of favor than real welfare state. Cultural conditions are not better. Public education is in a very bad condition, with high percentage of illiterates, precarious public schools and few public and free universities, whose access is much more easy to rich and well prepared students.

As for the media situation, the majority of Brazilians watch TV, most of them only watching the hegemonic Globo TV. Given that circumstance, a good part of the formation of Brazilians happens rather through television than the school. The control of media is very rigid, favouring the interests of monopolies that are officialized through a state agency like Anatel, whose policy is to repress all initiatives ranging from free radio stations to a vast array of independent media production away from corporate interests, be it communitarian or not. The access to the internet is also tightly controlled by the same Anatel, with most broadband monopolized by few communication enterprises, and, subsequently, very few concessions. In addition to this context, a great conservatism characterizes Brazilian culture nowadays, with most of its production, musical or artistic, directly tied to the market, characterized by a reactionary and disperse post-modernism, with little or none social or political critic, which is normally seen by Brazilian artists as something definitely passé.

Even so, that didn't prevent that, in the last years, a whole series of agents and cultural producers emerged in the artistic, activist or media fields that were actively engaged in an independent and critical production. In that sense, groups like Indymedia Brazil and all a community of websites linked to it and spread through the net, as well as artists involved in video production (or videoactivism), performance and urban intervention, started to work and produce throughout the country, many of them based in São Paulo, but not only. Working spontaneously or by idealism, most of these groups ignored the conceptualization of ?tactical media?.

The city of São Paulo is the richest and most developed in the country, extremely urbanized, with about 18 million inhabitants. Although São Paulo may have lots of differences compared to the rest of Brazil because of its situation as a very industrialized place and financial center, it reflects , in many and diverse scales, the same problems mentioned before. The unequalities between center and periphery and the social exclusion are as big as in the rest of Brazil. Given the fact that the organizers of the festival, as well as many of the groups that took part of it, all lived in this city, it was natural that it was the place chosen to host our first project.

Midiatatica.org

The projects developed by midiatatica.org are aimed to dialogue with this context, and so far have followed different phases, parts of the same gradual logic, starting from the idea of introducing the concept of tactical media in Brazil for the subsequent application of it in both activist and artistic creations; then developing it towards the pratical use of the concept in peripheral, marginalized or poor areas - where it would have bigger and more effective results; and finally instrumentalizing those practices in the artistic community. This last one, although having a relative reduction of the audience targeted, allows a more directed development for cultural producers whose interest in applying, researching and directing actions can have a more accurate effect.

In this case, how to think the application and disclosure of such a practice as tactical media in a country like Brazil? By exactly approaching its charcteristic of being a political, social and aesthetic action, in a context where, even more than in its place of origin, a critical vision of the media practice, i.e., not only its consumption but its production, is needed, both in the field of traditional and new media.

The accomplishment brought by the dissemination of ?tactical media? is important in order to show a renewed sense of militancy that combines new technologies, interactivity, social or political issues, art, and old- and new-media with a hybrid and multidisciplinary approach, in a cultural millieu where such categories are seen as watertight and without contact, isolated. Here in Brazil, such an unprecedented approach allows not only new fusions to arise from that, but also opens fields of action that were up till now unpremeditated by cultural actors and agents, bound as they were to old models and strategies of action. Equally, it brings fresh air to a series of active groups whose perspectives, modus operandi and tools were previously limited by those same points of view. ^

Mídia Tática Brasil, the Brazilian Tactical Media Lab

The project of Mídia Tática Brasil, the Brazilian Tactical Media Lab, had its origins in the basic need of spreading the concept of tactical media in the Brazilian electronic, activist or artistic milieus, given the existence of various groups that already made this kind of practice without knowing it had a name. The intention was to propagate a collective action that had both a cultural impact (an artistic/activist intervention of social and political relevance) and a practical one (creation of devices and tools for the use of groups that intend to act in the public sphere with a sense of social responsibility). With such a task in mind, we subscribed to Next Five Minutes Festival, which in its fourth edition was opening space to initiatives happening in Latin America.

Since its beginning , the organization staff was composed of three persons, Giseli Vasconcelos, cultural agitator and web-designer, Tatiana Wells, researcher and information architect specialized in hypermedia, and Ricardo Rosas, writer, net-critic and web-master of Rizoma.net, a Brazilian website dedicated to media activism and tactical media. Making use of their knowledge of groups that worked with independent media production and activist art, the three organizers, once they had the signal of a possible approval by the N5M4 Festival (which included Tatiana and Ricardo in their editorial team), started to articulate their contacts and a network was formed towards the realization of the event.

Starting with no budget available to make the event, we only counted on the good will and enthusiasm of the contacted groups and collectives, which not only accepted to collaborate with the initiative, but also received very well a concept that was so close to their practices of creation and in total accordance with their activist-oriented actions.

The groups themselves were very different as for their actions, creations and field of application, since they ranged from grassroots undertakings of bridging the digital gap by working with computer recycling and using Linux (Metafora Project), to videoactivism and politically oriented VJs (A Revolução Não Será Televisionada, Bijari), collectives of artists/activists who work with urban intervention, direct action and pranks (Batukação, Rejeitados and Bicicletadas), independent media, fanzine producers or media devoted to the empowerment of homeless people (Indymedia Brasil, A Cria and Ocas - sort of a Brazilian Big Issue), a musical collective dedicated to free street raves in the poor suburbs (Interfusion), artists who work with media intervention (Latuff, Formigueiro), a group that works with narratives of anonymous and ordinary people in São Paulo (Museu da Pessoa), and the institutional segment that work with the access of marginalized and poor people to the digital age (the "Telecentros", which run Linux and are afforded by the municipal government of São Paulo, and the endorsement given by the Minister of Culture, who was personally present at the Festival, although no financial support was given by both of them).

Besides those, other groups and individuals took part, summing a totality of 315 people who worked together in a network articulated through a mailing list, which guided all the procedure of creation, mobilization and realization of the festival, all of them united by a desire of exchanging experiences and making an event whose one of the main intentions was to bring social awareness in a country where this type of compromise is despised by the cultural elites and the social problems are painfully evident.

Having started with meetings at the houses of the organizers around December 2002, the collaborations only started to work on January 2003, when the list really began to function at full blast. Our method of work started with contacts with the groups, by phone or e-mail, inviting them to join the list and participate actively, giving suggestions, taking part of the discussions or articulating themselves, The meetings started to follow on from one another during January, in a moment when we had no budget neither a place to set up the TML, and only vague signals from Amsterdam in order to keep on the articulations.

Gradually, the network was formed, with groups that in its majority had never met each other neither known each other's works. Most of it was concentrated in the city of São Paulo, with the exceptions of a group of media activists from Fortaleza (Anomia) and urban interventionists and theoreticians from Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia. We then started to define strategies of action, looking for sponsorships, and, above all, a place to set up the event.
As a basic principle, and having in mind the initial introduction of the concept of tactical media in all its scope of manifestations, our intention was to translate this vast scope with the diversity of the collectives involved, as well as with the reproduction of the original N5M's format, unprecedented in Brazil, of combining exhibition, actions and performances, along with debates and lectures. Taking that format in consideration, we concluded that the best way to use the space for the festival would be a kind of occupation of the place, which was supposed to have not only exhibition spaces but an auditorium or a conference room. Therefore, we started to articulate ourselves to contact spaces and cultural centers that would be willing to be "squatted" by the festival.

Created in a collaborative form by the organizers, a project was elaborated, in a way that informed all the details, the format of the festival, technical questions, possible dates and the likely bond to the N5M4, not confirmed at the time.
With the project in hands, we went to the exhibition spaces that could host the TML. Initially refused by an institutional space funded by a bank, which ironically alleged the politically "subversive" content of tactical media as a reason for their refusal, we contacted an alternative cultural space, the Casa das Rosas, located on Paulista Avenue, a very central location in the city. Casa das Rosas usually showed exhibitions and events that did not fit the traditional formats of the cultural establishment. Anyway, it was almost bankrupt at the time, and the municipal subventions were very little and could only afford the personnel's wages. Unfortunately, in the beginning of 2004, Casa da Rosas was closed by the municipal Secretary of Culture of São Paulo.

To our surprise, even having no budget available neither a background of organization of other festivals, our project was approved. Casa das Rosas is an exhibition space composed of various rooms, two floors and a basement, but no conference rooms or auditorium. We then looked for cultural centers in the surroundings that would provide spaces for the debates and lectures for the festival. With the endorsement of Casa das Rosas, it was easier to negotiate those conference rooms, which we got, given the circumstances of schedule, from two neighbouring institutions, Fundação Japão and SESC Paulista.

With the space confirmed, N5M4 staff gave us the definitive approval to set up the Brazilian TML. We then started to direct our attention to technical details, the search for strategic sponsorships, the structural framing of the festival, the theoreticians invited for the debates and lectures, the creation of pamphlets, a magazine and the visual planning. Poster Magazine (Sid Moreira Project), Flyer (BaseV)

As was said before, we had no budget, and Casa das Rosas, with its own problems of funding, could only give us the space, but no financial support. In subsequent meetings with the collectives and other participants, we decided to divide ourselves in groups to look for strategic supports for the different needs of the assembly, as material and equipments; tickets for people invited from other Brazilian states; the creation of a poster-magazine; or the feeding of the participants during the festival. The creation of the logo happened through the mailing-list with a significant number of proposals sent by many participants and, at the end, it remained an open format which could be applied for each specific and thematic section of the event. All the rest of the graphic project of Mídia Tática Brasil was designed by groups that have their work based on graphic experimentation and/or pranksterism, such as Projeto Sid Moreira, Base V and Atomica.lab.

The equipments were lent, as a sponsorship, by communication enterprises. The feeding was got as a support by a vegetarian restaurant in the surroundings of Casa das Rosas. SESC Paulista not only allowed us to use the conference room to present debates and lectures but also paid the pamphlets with information and timetable. Conrad Books, an avant-garde publisher from São Paulo, gave us some money to make the banners that were at Casa das Rosas during the event and the poster-magazine that presented the main concepts tackled at the festival, such as free software, the challenges of the digital gap, videoactivism or culture-jamming.

Also divided in groups, some participants of the list started to contact theoreticians, journalists, professors and cultural critics that were suggested to present lectures or take part in debates according to the issues that were going to be tackled. Besides, given the size that the festival was gaining as time passed, we asked all the participants of the list to register as voluntaries during the four days of the event, according to their availability of time. Those voluntaries would cover a vast extent of activities such as exhibition monitors, guides, sound effects technicians, assembly assistants, amongst others, once that support, as happened to the budget, was not going to be provided by the personnel of Casa das Rosas neither by the institutions involved. Given those circumstances, it's necessary to emphasize that all participants, including the collectives that presented their works, the voluntaries, or all the guests invited for debates and lectures, none of them was paid to take part in the festival, as we counted only on their enthusiasm, curiosity or interest for the cause. In its totality, the budget we got from the strategic supports already mentioned was only US$ 1.500,00. In practical terms, that was the sum that the festival costed!

The "squat" was arranged to start a week before the festival, with each group defining its room and making the assembly of the exhibition, determining and signaling the spaces for circulation and directions, doing technical adjustments and other details. Again, we had to deal with the scarce resources we got for the preparation of the space and all the assembly, dividing expenses for things like nails, paint and other additional needs. As was combined with the people involved, we tried and asked them to do the best they could to present an excellent and clear work.

In meetings, we defined the timetable of the festival, which was divided between group presentations like performances, activist "batukada", a critical mass (Bicicletada), actions that would happen along the festival and around the "squat", lectures, debates, workshops, a free radio assembled and broadcasting directly from Casa das Rosas, musical shows at the Casa's courtyard, video exhibitions, a space for the reproduction and creation of fanzines, and a rave at the end of the festival to be held in the courtyard.

The "squat" happened on the planned time, with panels and videos in some rooms, a space for Indymedia Brasil with computers and the pirate radio assembled together with Radio Muda Collective from Campinas, a city near São Paulo, a "telecentro" assembled in one of the rooms, a room with recycled computers from Metafora, and other rooms closer to the exhibition format, such as Revolução's , Bijari's, Formigueiro's, Anomia's and Nomads', a group of architects involved with technology and social issues, and others closer to an "anti-exhibition" format, as Rejeitados' one, whose work, comprising an innumerable combo of artists and collectives from all Brazil, is much more related to the streets and open/public spaces than a "white cube", and presented "ironically" only a coffee machine for people to drink and an "open trash" in a corner of the room where everybody dropped the glasses, sort of a critical statement towards the Brazilian institutions dedicated to the arts. Other rooms showed an exhibition of diverse numbers of Ocas magazine, some graphic agit-props by the internationally famous artist Latuff, the bathroom was filled with displays from ordinary characters interviewed by Museu da Pessoa, a video by the collective of artists/actvists Atrocidades Maravilhosas in another bathroom, and, finally, the basement was dividided between a room for the video exhibition and A Cria, an underground fanzine producer, which opened its space for anybody who wanted to learn how to make a fanzine or create graffiti, and had at their disposal djs playing all along the event.

At the same time, divided between the conference rooms of Fundação Japão and SESC, the lectures and debates took place tackling a variety of themes such as "art as resistance", "independent media", "introduction to tactical media", "videoactivism", amongst others. The workshops, in their turn, were given outside the space of the festival, in a decentralized manner, as was combined with SESC. Those happened in many of the SESC units spread through all the city of São Paulo, and taught webradio and online publishing.

It's important to mention that a very remarkable trait of this festival was the low-tech character of the works presented. Although it may not sum up the totality of the collectives involved - about 20, among artists, activists and cultural workers- and in spite of the fact that groups as Bijari, A Revolução Não Será Televisionada and Formigueiro work with high technology in a very sophisticated manner, the "low-tech touch" would more than anything else be a point in common in the Brazilian production, given the context that in Brazil there is not a significant production of net.art or high tech tactical media, as it happens in Europe or in the USA. The use of Linux and Open Source, fully adopted during the festival, and the assembly of the free radio also broadcasted via web, were other technological achievements privileged during the TML.

The TML's underlying theme was "Digital Inclusion (a Brazilian expression for the strategies to bridge the digital gap) and Networked Communities", hence the participation of the "telecentros", which were institutional initiatives that, although very active, were not well known or divulged in the cultural milieu before the festival. The theme was the main subject for the opening debate of the festival, held a week before the event itself , having the presence of Richard Barbrook, John Perry Barlow and our Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, who kindly decided to take part after the invitation by one of the participants of our mailing list.

The festival itself happened like a continuous happening during four days, a kind of TAZ, a mix of a hype fair and an anarchic exhibition, attracting, with its unprecedented format, a great legion of youngsters, activists, artists, curious or "trendy" people. The festival was all for free. Something never seen at Casa das Rosas, we had queues formed to enter the already crowded place. In its totality, the event attracted about six thousand visitors, a record for Casa das Rosas, something uncommon in a cultural venue like that one. The media attention to the festival was also very significant, generating many reports, and, much to our happiness, it brought up a series of issues that we intended to discuss in a public level, such as the question of the digital gap, of media activism, of the sum technology + politics + art that characterizes tactical media, of the collectives that work with activism in Brazil, of social awareness. In that sense, given the public response and the cultural impact we had, we can say that the festival ended like a big success. ^

Back to Basics : The revenge of the low-tech

In Johnny Mnemonic, William Gibson writes about an obscure group of people, the Lo-Teks. Lo-Teks are people who live at the margins of a high tech society in the near future. Those people, as one can tell by reading the story, have their own peculiar weapons, even if they're made of discarded tech-residua of the overdeveloped society of their time.

But why talk about low technology nowadays? Tactical media practitioners mostly like to think about action when it's mediated by a very high tech device through which they can learn or teach others how to use it. That's how it works, as you can understand when reading Nettime or tactical media theories all over the web. But that only works if you are talking about a very rich country, that has a high rate of people who have access to the Internet or high tech gadgets. And what if the focus is an underdeveloped country like Brazil? As far as we know, the Next Five Minutes is a kind of overview of DIY, activist media producers. If the point is Brazilian DIY media and arts, then it is, as you'll see, basically low tech.

So let's begin with a cliché: Brazil is a land of contrasts. That's what everybody says, be it a foreigner, which comes here for the first time, be it a Brazilian theoretician in his comfortable seat at a university. Even in the richest city of the country, Sao Paulo, you can see beggars guiding their cars made of wood in order to carry garbage to be recycled, as they walk through the gigantic Paulista Avenue, with its impressive skyscrapers of glass and steel. That is a country where you can find very rich boys with lots of high tech gizmos, the latest ones made in Japan, living very near to a homeless family, which has nothing to eat. Yes, there is lots of net stuff here, lots of web designers, programmers, software experts, web writers, bloggers, and so. Our cyberspace is full of beautiful home pages, e-commerce, hackers, but, back to reality, if you keep your eyes wide open, if you walk a little bit (or a little more!), you can see violence, hunger, ugliness, all these things supposedly found in a third world country.

How could a Brazilian TML dialogue with such different cultures, the virtual and the real, and at a common space? One thing we had in mind while translating the Tactical Media Lab and its concept to a Brazilian reality was, throughout the entire process, never to close our eyes to such a context. And that would be even more difficult, if we had to talk about net art and net activism.

There is a "web-art" in Brazil. A very much alienated, self-referential kind of art, mostly related to technology for technology's sake. Here, the so-called "web-artists", as most artists in general, are much more worried about their own egos, and very distant from their everyday reality. Most of them don't even know about net art (in Nettime's terms), net activism, or tactical media. Activism and political issues are something totally ignored in their works. The situation gets a little worse when you discover that the ones who know about such things don't care too much about letting others know. It seems it's just not interesting for their status quo. As people say, information is power. Why not be a privileged one?

On the other hand, Brazil is also notorious by the number of it hackers. Piracy also is a very hot issue nowadays, as pirated programs and music CDs are the easiest thing to find in the black markets on the streets, sold at the popular tents of "camelos". Besides, cyberactivism is something which has consistently grown since the appearance of the Brazilian Indymedia, in late 2001. Before then, there were very few sites producing independent news and information, one being Rizoma (www.rizoma.net), which tried to establish a sort of digital counterculture in Brazil, much in the guise of Disinfo.com at its good phase. So, after our Indymedia started, its incisive media activism was responsible for the spread of a great network of leftist and activist web sites as never seen before on Brazilian cyberspace. There are also some hacktivist groups working on, for instance, Microphobia, which are very difficult to find or contact.

A few advances have been made in cities such as Porto Alegre and Sao Paulo (both cities governed by PT The Workers Party), in order to implant computer centers in the suburbs, all Linux-based. Those places are called Telecentros, and have surely been the first step in what could be a utopian virtual democracy in this country.

That said, what could be done for a TML here and now? The first thing we thought was not to call mainstream Brazilian "web-artists", which, by no means, were anything near to the very definition of tactical media. Instead, we tried to look out for groups whose logics of action were, yes, web-based, but, for all the circumstances explained above, were not exactly "high tech". Such groups, whose way of working deals with activism, arts and social or political issues, are spread all over the country. Their production is not only prolific, or underground, but they're so different among themselves to the point that they seem antithetical, if only apparently.

As it was the first one of its kind in our country, we idealized this TML by firstly introducing the concepts on and around tactical media, and trying to be a little didactical to the Brazilian audience. Of course, it was free and open to all kinds of public, not a minority or elitist class of "connoisseurs". In a way, we tried to give a very "pop" approach to the festival - for it was really like a festival - in order to make it become sort of a "trendy" thing, a "hype" among youngsters. Call it "tactical marketing".

That's one of the reasons for which we chose so different groups in the same event. In a way, we tried to follow Lovink and Garcia's varieties of tactical media as mentioned in The ABC of Tactical Media, and for that reason we created something which included from art/activist groups and collectives to djs and street theater performances.

Groups like Bijari/Antipop and A Revoluçao Nao Sera Televisionada (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised) work mainly with video-art and videoactivism, much in the guise of Candida TV, from Italy, and theirs is sort of an MTV collage aesthetics full of political and edgy art's issue. Rejeitados ("The Rejected") is a national "combo" of alternative artists which work with urban intervention and art outside the institutions. Formigueiro (Ant's nest) works with plagiarism and parody, and their exhibition played with fake biotech art. Museu da Pessoa (Museum of the Person) collects individual stories and photograhs/videos of ordinary and anonymous people. A nomia (Anomy) works with culture-jamming, comics, zines and video, a lot based on psychogeography and sonic shock. A Cria (The Baby) is a "factory" of fanzines. The Nomads' collective work with architecture and popular solutions for living. Projeto Sid Moreira - whose name makes a parody of an anchor reporter from Globo TV News Program - works with posters and culture-jamming. Metafora.org (Metaphor) recycles old computers for poor communities and has wiki-based projects concerning open publishing and group-based actions, like Recicle-1-Politico (Recycle-1-Politician), which re-used ad material from political campaigns that polluted the cities. Rizoma.net works basically in the Internet with a content which makes a recombination based on the variety of texts with different points of view talking about specif themes like activism, afrofuturism, neuropolitics and such, a sort of open-source-like treatment of ideas combined with a conceptual engineering in order to provoke ch anges in the subjectivity. Manufatura Suspeita (Suspect Manufacture) with its street theater using situationist techniques as psychogeograhy and detournements of classic authors. Latuff, a graphic artist, famous worldwide for his political agit-props and culture-jamming mainly about the Israel/Palestine conflict and anti-war bravados, who draw, live throughout the festival, a huge anti-war cartoon at the house. There were also rooms from CMI (Brazilian Indymedia, as explained before) , the "Telecentros" and Ocas, the Brazilian version of Big Issue, the street journal. Banda Paralela, a collective of designers and programmers, created a "media monster" all made of tech-detritus. Batukaçao, as a group of street protest which plays with drums, presented sort of a martial and activist "batucada". Radio Muda, a free radio station collective, also broadcasted its activist voices. LSD discos, a home-made music label that produces experimental eletronic music with some political flavor, was responsible for the musical section of the TML.

All these people "settled" at Casa das Rosas (House of Roses), which is a space for non-mainstream art exhibitions on Paulista Avenue, something like a "castle" on Peter Lamborn Wilson's terms (see A Network of Castles, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00118.html). We had the house for four days, during which we had not only the exhibition - that looked more like a weird fair or TAZ - but music pocket shows, performances, (unexpected) parties and a temporary pirate radio station broadcasted by Indymedia, one that defied on the web and live, that the Brazilian authorities should come to the festival to close them down - a protest against the repressive politics of free radios in this nation. This was a very symbolic act, once we were at Brazil's financial heart and that was impossible to hear, given the impressive proliferation of (legal) radio station antennas and multiple frequencies on the avenue. We also tried to make a free rave in the neighbo rhoods, but we were not allowed to do so by the police. That one was going to be held by a brazilian free party group, Interfusion, which promotes raves for free in the poor suburbs of Sao Paulo. The music pocket shows explored Brazilian IDM and experimental/funky electronica bands, ones which have a very small and mostly non-commercial audience, and their reception was good.

At the same time, lots of brazilian theoreticians, activists and artists made lectures, debates, conferences and workshops during the four days, all held in buildings next to Casa das Rosas. Among other things, they debated on independent media, art as tactic and resistance, the politics of multitudes, cyberactivism, copyleft, open-source logics, post-media sounds, free radios and independent music production. We had a debate with Richard Barbrook and John Perry Barlow in our opening night (a week before the TML itself), dicussing digital inclusion and such. We also had the presence of Derek Holzer, who gave a lecture on tactical media, net art/activism and the Next Five Minutes. In retrospective, many issues discussed there generated some polemics, others not. Anyway, they produced a significant, if small, earthquake in the agitated cultural scene here, which had the merit to bring socio-political agendas to discussion.

The best thing about all this four-day fuzz was its good reception (even by the corporate media!) and great audience both in the house and the locations of the debates and lectures. If something, we made some noise. We brought critical theory and activism to the pop arena here in Brazil. And that was one of our intentions. Anyway, we sort of created a "network" of artists, designers, webmasters, activists and theoreticians which never had contact to or heard of each other before. And that was our logistics: the Internet was the means by which we made all this TML possible. It was an "open-source"movement, as thought by Felix Stalder and Jesse Hirsh (see Open Source Intelligence, http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0206/msg00030.html), where everybody gave their own contribuition working in a logic of network-based groups. And, as we didn't really have the affordance to realize it, everyone worked as fellows for a major project, so we did it counting on the participants' and volunteers' own efforts and good will. And it worked.

Back to the point, most of its participants produce low tech works and actions, even if, paradoxically, most of them contact and link themselves, as we made, by using the Internet. In a way, most the groups were marginalized in relation to the arts or political mainstream. And, in a way, it was a revenge. A revenge against the Brazilian self-indulgent high tech web-artists and techno-fetishistic elite which only have looks to their own ego. A revenge of Low Tech.

Source:
http://mtb.midiatatica.info/mtb_ingles.htm