Brazil

Why do we 'surf' the net? Can anybody give a really good answer? Maybe because the net is said to be from California? But it is also from Boston, Massachusetts. And anyway, not everybody in California is surfing, more are serfing, like in Microserfs. Please, tell us, how comes we do have this expression? Anyway, those guys in the picture don't care.

Lucas Bambozzi, initiator and curator of the artmov festival, during the opening event of the festival.

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Line caught tuna cooked by Ricardo into a Brazilian fishstew and ate by a groupf of 7 including Ricardo, Tati, Ina, myself, and "the boys".

Telecommunications in the Favela Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro. The black cables are electricity, some maybe telephony; the grey ones are cable tv, the blue ones I am not sure but something important I guess. In the Favelas recently the growth of LAN houses has been witnessed, offering IT and internet services in a grey market, tapping into data streams just like the Favelas have always been using water and electricity without paying or paying very little.

This image illustrates the state of telecommunications in Brasil. Somewhere inside those messy cables is the copper wire which carries our ADSL. Because of the rain it stopped working. (I am now in another building where there still is a line). A decent always-on-internet connection costs a fortune here in Rio. If you consider the lower income level this makes it even more expensive. Mobile phone tariffs are punishing, 10 Euros went up in the air just for two or three short calls. So how can you have a knowledge society with such a cost structure?

As soon as I had uploaded the firts two pictures, the connection broke. And then the grand deluge started. So it is not smoke that is coming out of the top of the famous mountain, but a cloud. At least we can see it again. because for 48 hours there was only water on all sides.

In Rio de Janeiro we are staying at Capacete, an artist residency in the old quarter of Santa Teresa. The DSL in the room did not work but we could pick up our hosts wireless connectrion from next door by working outdoors. Obviously Ina didn't mind and me neither.

On arrival in Rio we decided not to sleep out our jet-lag but headed straight to Ipanema beach. The famous Copacabana now completely belongs to the tourists, but the inhabitants of Rio de janeiro, the Cariocas, still visit Ipanema Beach in numbers. But at about 5 pm the sky got very cloudy and we would soon experience our first tropical thunderstorm.