Circo Voador is a cultural space in the middle of the Rio da Janeiro neighborhood called Lapa.It started almost 30 years ago under a circus structure, and it was the place where most of the best known brazilian rock bands had their first gigs. At one point it was closed by city mayer. The story goes that he visiting Circo Voador while celebrating for being elected where he was booed by the people there. He exercised his power by simply closing the space down.

Now run by the NGO with great financial help of municipal government, modern Circo Voador is transformed into club for culture with commercial programs, mainly samba, hip-hop and rock concerts, supported by companies like TIM (mobile phone operator popular among young people), Pepsi and such.

At the same time, under project Pontos de cultura, there are construction works happening under the concert stage where new spaces for workshops in open source tools for audio and video production will take place. One of the events that is not part of commercial program, but rather a place for research, knowledge exchange and collaborative work is study group GEMA Carioca that is happening every Thursday.

GEMA Carioca’s current project is creating video mixer with recycled material and using Arduino, an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. DIY videomixer can be used for mixing live inputs such as cameras, but also to control various software such as Pure Data for VJing and so on.

Cinelerra (open source software for video editing) workshops are held too at the production space of the CV area. At the same space there is a video production facilities where materials filmed at the concerts are edited for the archives.