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With the migration of Brazilian television to the digital platform, launched in 2006, the channels of public interest created after the Cable Television Law (Law 8.977/1995) are discussed again and organize themselves into networks. The main objective is to ensure space in the scenario of digital communications that begins to configure itself. In this paper, we examine the case of TV Câmara, a station of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. From this experience, we discuss the characteristics and importance of the legislative channels in the field of noncommercial television, including the questions about the state systems and public broadcasting. The objective is to evaluate what kind of role is played by these stations: in which extent these channels are governmental and institutional, without autonomy and directed primarily to protect the image of the organs that keep them? Could be they counted, as they intended, as vehicle of public communication, which help to broaden the democratic debate and make the institutions more subject to the control of citizens and more open to popular participation? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the relational dynamics involving art practice and activism in urban space in the context of art groups in Brazil. It discusses how what seems to be the renewal of forms of engagement and of political action and of the role of art in the context of the blur the boundaries between art and life today. It particularly focuses on the actions of Contra File, one of the so-called "collective of artists", groups which operate in public spaces producing performative interventions that mix art and activism in a quite different fashion comparing to those of the 1960's and the 1970's. Based on the connectionist logics of the networks (Granjon, 2001; Antoun 2004), these actions can be considered a social practice with interesting communicative aspects since they connect in a unusual ways urban spaces, media technology, social actors and artistic forms. These actions are often categorized as "urban interventions" or "site specific art" (Pallamin, 1998). However they use to escape all definitions as they problematize the very concepts of art and activism in order to discuss participation, social rules and control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]