During 2013, between June 18 and September 7, the demonstrations in Brazil, (nicknamed June Journeys), comprised successive massive street demonstrations across the country. Their immediate cause is usually taken to be the increased cost of public transportation fares. As the usually harsh repression of street demonstrations by military police spilled over some journalists, the protests of Movimento Passe Livre (Free Pass Movement), originally mobilized through cyber-activist networks gained the massive visibility and sparkled manifestations on a wide range of issues. State’s response to protests was marked by police abuse (Amnesty International, 2014). Notwithstanding this, police repression backfired: at its peak, millions of Brazilians were out in the streets demonstrating dissent on a wide range of issues. The abuses by the security forces spanned from the unnecessary extreme use of force – indiscriminate usage of rubber bullets and tear gas, arbitrary
arrests of peaceful protesters (Amnesty International, 2014) to press releasing of ungrounded allegations of vandalism

Franco, Juliana Rocha

Neves, Bráulio de Britto

Janus anuário

English

Camões - Repositório Institucional da Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa

DURING 2013, between June 18 and September 7, the demonstrations in Brazil, (nicknamed June Journeys), comprised successive massive street demonstrations across the country. Their imme-diate cause is usually taken to be the increased cost of public transportation fares. As the usually harsh repression of street demonstrations by military police spilled over some journalists, the protests of Movimento Passe Livre (Free Pass Movement), originally mobilized through cyber- -activist networks gained the massive visibility and sparkled manifestations on a wide range of issues.State’s response to protests was marked by police abuse (Amnesty International, 2014). Notwith-standing this, police repression backfired: at its peak, millions of Brazilians were out in the streets demonstrating dissent on a wide range of issues. The abuses by the security forces spanned from the unnecessary extreme use of force – indiscrimi-nate usage of rubber bullets and tear gas, arbitrary arrests of peaceful protesters (Amnesty Interna-tional, 2014) to press releasing of ungrounded allegations of vandalism. The novelty in the context of such street manifes-tations was the pervasive usage of mobile com-puting devices by the protesters. Hundreds of ad-hoc media-activists uploaded hundreds of hours of images, taken from the events in an ongoing basis. Even if they weren’t upstreamed through services like Tweetcast, they were mostly posted in social networking sites, commented, tagged, and asso-ciated with hashtags in almost no time. Many then became online memes, viewed by thousands of appreciators who sticked online watching video streaming and posts. Such practices have enabled the emergence of unique public circuit of real-time online counter-information. Police unlawful behavior was relentlessly re-corded, photographed and released online. In these conditions, the sousveillance (Mann, 2004) was widely used to expose, as it happens in many activist videos of urban public expressions of dissent. But now, only to fosterer a retrospec-tive accountability, but an immediate one, preventing police violence. Sousveillance as distributed networkingRepression was countered by a novel political adversary, which, by many reasons, can be said faceless: literally, because many protesters worn masks or hoods, making identities non-individu-alized and interchangeable. But, in a more pro-found sense, as the streets were occupied by a swarm of protesters with no central identifiable leadership, doing without no front nor leader-ship face, so to say (Galloway & Thacker, 2007). A new form of the habermasian “subject-less communication” was accomplished through the gaze of a myriad of handheld cameras, ex-pressing extreme variegated perspectives of the events. The unprecedented plurality of their representation fostered a relay relationship be-tween the actors, as people took up, successive-ly, viewers’, social actors’ and cameramen roles. This relay relation was already present in 1990s’ cyber-activist videos (like This is what democracy looks like, and Brad: one more night in the bar-ricades, cf. Neves, 2010). But now, the artifactual political representations didn’t stemmed from highly ideological media-activist networks, but from the general public. The legitimacy of the representation they provided stems from the unusual form of impartiality emerged by the aggregation of a wild diversity of points of view, published in raw conditions by a faceless multi-tude. Going beyond the countering of the streams of institutional information, the artifactual political representation provided by the usage of mobile computing and imaging devices connected to the civic communication in social networks sites became an update of the prefigurative ethics and stylistics of the cyber-activist documentaries. Demonstrations were profoundly linked to the creation of autonomous communication networks afforded by the spread of mobile Internet access, deemed to be non-hierarchical and dynamic (Castells, 2015). In such conditions, any mobile device user could transmit online information and images, countless real-time transmission channels have been used (through Tweetcast, YouTube, among others), encouraging cyberaudiovisual utterances to be shared, edited, tagged, and commented by thousands of Internet online users. Some channels, at the height of the pro-tests, achieving audiences of many thousand users live. The flow of the street demonstrations and live broadcasts was incorporated into the very flow of the crowd in the streets virtualized networks. The superimposed distributed networks of urban grids and of telematics public spaces became fused. The sousveillance effects of this fused cyber-urban web were brought into being by a coalescence of agents who came together in the construction of a cognitive distributed system, or a civic “extended mind” (this term supposes the human mind is not entirely contained within biological bodies).The usage of mobile technologies in 2013 Brazilian demonstrations promoted a decentralized sousveil-lance that occurred as a process of distributed cognition, actualizing the crucial role of mobile media in organizing collective action stressed by Rheingold (2008). The sousveillance afforded by interactive and multimedia ubiquity has been incorporated into many devices. It is exercised in a decentralized fashion, yielding non-hierarchical, self-aware col-lective public expression practices. The evidence of the decisive role of this mobile distributed network here we can seen in the fre-quency we can find takes of policemen grabbing and breaking smartphones of protesters with no avail, as the network is kept working, as these images very existence proves. Besides it doesn’t depends on any of the isolated individual in the crowd, a huge distributed network keeps linking a multitude of non-electoral would be represent-atives – often with disparate political agendas – allowing an ongoingly live participation on the events and its public expression.Performing the distributed sousveillanceSobchack (1992) suggests that the distinctive re-versibility of expression and perception provide by audiovisual media is historically understood by film theory by successive metaphors: as pic-tures, as windows and as mirrors. As it is obvious that the theories usually reflects and is very influ-ential in the audiovisual production, we better take these metaphors as correspondent to the distinct rhetoric networks of cinematic commu-nications, emerged through history (as does Nichols, 1992, 1994). We propose a fourth metaphor, corresponding to the emergence of performative and political-pre-figurative usages of documentary audiovisual communication arrangements. The mask meta-phor, afford us to understand the cyberaudivisual political representation provided, firstly, by new social movements and cyber-activist practices, ex-tended to the widespread video production through mobile media. Taken, in the present case, as sousveillance gear to public urban demonstra-tion events like clashes with police or repression by other physical devices and corporations. As this kind of sousveillance occurs anonymously and in ephemeral and risky conditions, the rela-tions created between the participants matters a lot more than their intentions or proficiency as cinegraphists. The novelty in the context  of such street manifestations was the pervasive usage  of mobile computing devices  by the protesters.JANUS 2017120The distributed performance of artefactual  representation by mobile video in BrazilJuliana Rocha FrancoBráulio de Britto Neves2.3.13 • A comunicação mundializada • Utilizações e manipulações da informação e da comunicaçãoThe video-activist’s mask-camera fully exhibits the reversibility of positions of cinematic commu-nication. Masks and cameras are both rhetorical devices that work in pre-reflexive level. As uni-forms or costumes, they depersonalize individuals. Such depersonalization is critical to establish a distributive rhetoric, nonlinear, audiovisual nar-rative and argumentative communication that constitutes the network that performs the coun-ter-surveillance. The mask metaphor allows recognize not only the disguising purposes but also as the grounding of collective identifications provided by the swarming action of urban demonstrations not institutionally organized. The camera, as the mask, is the artifact that immerses the appreciators as vicarious par-ticipants of the events. Unfolding in the extra-field the post-production, real time editing, the organization’s publishing platform and exhibition space-time can do with-out institutionally places of cinema consumption. The camera-mask prefigures the overriding of the individual authorship in favor of collective pseu-donymity. By creating alternative roles to the implicitly engaging subjects of documentary communication (social actors, cinematic appara-tuses operators, and appreciators), new intersub-jective and interobjective relations can be practi-cally tested in a cyberaudiovisual utterance.In the case of Brazilian demonstrations, the hori-zontalized and reversible relations aimed by cyber-activist documentaries approached to attain a new quality, that of a multitudinal urban political artifactual representation. The sousveillance was already turned into a kind of swarm’s gaze. Notwithstanding this, the conditions of reflexivity of this gaze were – and still are – quite poor, as the demonstrations participants and demonstra-tion documentarists have to opt between two different devices to make their way in the ocean of video images (Neves, 2010). In the one hand, the raw material have to be bun-dled in a linear, static, determinate, transient, asynchronous, and arbitrarily controlled textuali-ty to be exhibited in documentary festivals or in artistic installations. In this case, its collective appreciation settings afford the dialogical inter-pretation, at cost to be shaped by single curato-rial perspectives (Aarseth, 1994: 61 ss.). In the other hand, the very same archives are still kept as a non-linear, indeterminate, intransient, and random access topological textuality. But appre-ciators are kept in isolation, interacting in online environments with little affordances to the build-ing of arguments. As we can see in the comments sections of online video sharing platforms, the dialogue is utterly shallow, fragmented and filled with personal attacks between viewers with very little room for emerging of new consensual arguments. In both appreciation arrangements, the public is prevented of building dialogically interpretations robust enough to foster collective action beyond a mere (narcotic) spectatorship. nSouSveillance practiceSThis essay seeks to examine the sousveillance practices of the ad-hoc media activists in 2013 protests in Brazil, stressing its political prefigurative dimension. The political prefigurative dimension (Neves, 2010) refers to political relay relationships between the participants of the audiovisual utterances who could equally engage the enunciation roles of actors, cinegraphists and appreciators. We are interested in un-derstanding the specificity of sousveillance processes fostered by the use of pervasive computing devices and mobile telecommunications networks by a “media activists swarm” in these protests. Our hypothesis is that the videographies in mobile media in question built public visibility prefigurating experimental that happen in a heterogeneous network of relationships that involve humans, cell phones, cloud storage in real time, mass media and so on. We want to show that this network performs the counter-surveillance effects (Mann, 1998). These images impact the broad public opinion in a pre-reflexive level, able to pivot collective activation of emotionally intense experiences, such as resumption of urban space as a public space, the occupation of abandoned buildings because of speculation real estate for housing or production knowledge, and so on. The solidarity experiences in protests disseminated through prefigurative sousveil-lance ability to catalyze autonomous public visibility spaces is, however, dependent on the topology of the appreciation networks. At the present stage of development of appreciation settings, the interpretation of the multitude of documentary images is severely maimed, both by the curatorial models of festivals, and by the interaction design of video-sharing platforms, determined by the particularistic interests of the semantic Internet corporations.ReferencesAarseth, E. J. (1994), Nonlinearity and literary theory. In Wardrip-Fruin, N & Montfort, N. (eds.), The new media reader, vol. 1, Cambridge, MIT Press, pp. 51-86.Amnesty International (2014), Brazil: they use a strategy of fear: protecting the right to protest in Brazil (AMR 19/005/2014), available at www.amnestv.ore/en/librarv/info/AMR19/005/2014/en.Castells, M. (2015), Networks of outrage and hope: social movements in the internet age. John Wiley & Sons.Clark, A. (2001), Natural-born cyborgs? Minds,  technologies, and the future of human intelligence,  Oxford, University Press.Galloway, A. R., & Thacker, E. (2007), The exploit: a theory  of networks, University of Minnesota Press, available at http://dss-edit.com/plu/Galloway-Thacker_The_Exploit_2007.pdf. Hutchins, E. (1995), Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MIT press.Mann, S. (2004), Sousveillance: inverse surveillance in multimedia imaging. In Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, ACM, pp. 620-627.Neves, B. B. (2010), Prefiguração de contrapúblicos em Brad: uma noite mais nas barricadas, Revista Galáxia, vol. 10, n. 20, São Paulo, pp. 134-145, available at http://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/galaxia/article/view/4718.Rheingold, H. (2008), Mobile media and political collective action. In Katz, J. E, (ed.) Handbook of mobile communication studies, pp. 225-239, Available at http://www.rheingold.com/texts/PoliticalSmartMobs.pdf. Sobchack, V. C. (1992), The address of the eye: a phenomenology of film experience. Princeton University Press.121

The distributed performance of artefactual representation by mobile video in Brazil

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The distributed performance of artefactual representation by mobile video in Brazil

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