Bronac Ferran and Felipe Fonseca worked on a mapping of e-culture in Brazil. The document can be downloaded as PDF.

Brazil’s importance is increasing continuously as one of the emerging economic world powers. Alongside grows the interest for Brazilian culture. Following a request by the Ministry of Education, Culture & Science, SICA (the Dutch Foundation for Internatinoal Affairs), has mapped the cultural landscape of Brazil.
The mapping was done by Brazilian experts and is intended to be a handbook for the Dutch cultural field interested in collaboration with Brazil.

A print version of the mapping can be requested at SICA (www.sica.nl), and the e-culture part of it can be downloaded here.

The mapping Cultural Mapping was presented to Brazilian culture and government representatives last week (June 15-22) by a Dutch Cultural Mission that further investigated possibilities for intensification of cultural collaboration.

From the introduction: Locating any art form withing a geographical or national border is a challenging task. In the case of digital culture/new media art it is particularly paradoxical to define or confine artists or arts organisations who may be working in virtual and networked ways by physical location. However, paradoxes are often healthy things and certainly, in the case of Brazil, location and context (as well as recent political history) have played an enormous part in determining the specifics of what we will call digital culture.

How might therefore we characterize this practice within Brazil in order to begin to map it? What are the key characteristics we will find that may help to differentiate this work from other forms of expression both in Brazil or elsewhere? Download the PDF document to read the full text by Bronac Ferran and Felipe Fonseca.

Visit the Brazilian E-culture mapping weblog (Portuguese) or read the translation via Google Translate.

A report of the SICA trip to Brazil is available at http://sicabrazil2009.wordpress.com/