Normality - Festival of Regions 2009

In the spaces into which cities extend, the planning potential in politics and society overlap with how people plan their lives. At the point where master plan meets home improvement, in everyday life situated between parking management and the desire for recreational spaces, permeated by hopes of improving one‘s social status and the fear of losing it, historical and topical ideas about communal well-being and society intersect with the daily struggle to live a good life.

The perimeters of cities are no longer oriented primarily toward the city centres. On the contrary, the supposed peripheral position extends the radius of locals´ options to offers made in the commercial zones and far into the rural areas. Urban promises of happiness and freedom have been transformed here into prefabricated packages including options for recreation close to nature combined with transportation links with the urban infrastructure. In fields and […]

In the framework of the Festival of Free Culture No 2, that took place in Belgrade in the organization of slobodnakultura.org, Ronaldo Lemos, chairman of the board of i-Commons, the director of the Center for Technology & Society and project lead for the Creative Commons Brazil presented his research related to the Northern Brazil’s music and cultural phenomenon of “tecnobrega”, known to many people thanks to the movie Good Copy, Bad Copy and through the sounds of sampling and re-sampling of Gnarls Barkley’s song ‘Crazy’.

Tecnobrega, in the translation cheesy-techno or tacky-techno, is an extremely popular music scene on the North of Brazil. In the recent years they use to publish several hundreds of new CDs & DVDs per year. However, they don’t make money by using the traditional schemes of cultural industry, including the mediation of distributors, copyright laws and enforcement, corporate advertising and exclusivity of brands. They simply […]