Words from a Spectaculu Graduate

Pedro Luis Carneiro is a 23-year-old digital media professional in Rio de Janeiro. A few years ago, Carneiro was a Spectaculu student. A friend invited him to tag along to a class back in 2008 and Pedro was hooked. For a year, Pedro took classes at Spectaculu. Years later, Spectaculu's founder, Gringo Cardia, invited Pedro to return to the school and join a workshop and design competition offered as part of the Intel and Levi's "Friends of Vik Muniz for Spectaculu" collaboration. Pedro—like his peer Juliana Xavier Rusino—took Photoshop and art history classes. The way Pedro explains it the benefits were very direct. Straight away, he was able to get a job with a photo-imaging firm because of the training he received in these classes.

When Pedro began taking classes at Spectaculu, he lived with his grandmother in Cachambi in Rio's Zona Norte, a half hour away by bus. Now he lives in the Tijuca neighborhood with two roommates, way closer to the center of the city. Pedro's momentum since starting at Spectaculu appears to be a real-life manifestation of Cardia's goal for the program: "I founded this school 12 years ago, dedicated to providing young people without opportunities to enable them to pursue careers in media."

Pedro is thrilled with the Ultrabooks™ that Intel donated for the "Friends of Vik Muniz for Spectaculu" classes. Whether it was Photoshop or any other program he needed to use, Pedro felt that he was "working on a high level" with the Ultrabook.

This is especially true for the visual arts and technology. The skills and expertise of the visual arts—graphic design, illustration, video game design, fashion, and web design to name a few—have multiple career avenues and trace their point of creation to computers.

To learn more about Spectaculu, visit their web site. And see the limited-edition T-shirts that Vik and his friends, artist Mark Bradford, furniture designers The Campana Brothers, and director Carlos Saldanha, designed in support of Spectaculu.

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