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Thursday, February 11, 2010

NEW MEDIA AT FORTALEZA

Sorry for the long break from blogging but I've been in the Inter-Not-Yet zone of rural Acre, Brazil on the border with Bolivia where there is a small Santo Daime community called Fortaleza and where we have a new media project. It's preparing to quick-launch the children into the 21st Century Age of Information as soon as Internet WIFI spreads across the State of Acre. (We are hearing stories that fast Internet will arrive by the end of the year.)

Here is a slideshow documenting the early stages of this project (during January 2010) which was brought to Fortaleza by Débora, Lorena and Pafy and funded by a grant from FUNARTE (a public agency supporting art and culture projects in Brazil).



The next video documents some of the artistic collaboration that the project is generating. Here, Clementino (our very talented local artist) is quick sketching a portrait of Loro (our talkative and engaging parrot) while Polidoro and Mateus use some to the new media equipment to document the process. As you can see, Loro developed quite a relationship with Pafy and Clementino, and then carefully inspected (with eye and tongue) his new portrait.



When the project finished, Loro returned to his favorite tree where I attempted to interview him. But he was up to his old trick of getting me to call him Jaco and giving a good laugh when I did.



To access more individual photos check out the Fortaleza Media Project set at Flickr.


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