Dec 13, 2010

WIKIREBELS, THE DOCUMENTARY. OPENLEAKS, THE SEQUEL

You got access to some secret and shocking documents that could change the course of history. You feel ready to leak them, but how? Chasing Wikileaks around the internet has become a very exhausting sport! Don't worry, you should be able to drop your info-bombs on Openleaks starting on Monday. At least that was the plan. The site, mirroring Wikileaks concept, is been built by Wikileaks dissenters, as you can learn, among many other things, in the following documentary, Wikirebels. Go and tell the US government! The nightmare, multiplied!

The Swedish Television has spent the last six months working on this one hour report about Wikileaks. It's the story of this organization from the very beginning until last week. They posted it online yesterday. It's a rough cut but it is quite good, with many in depth interviews with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, his collaborators, his ex collaborators and with investigative journalists from different countries. You will discover, among other things, that he was the brains behind the proposal of creating a sort of offshore safe haven for information in Iceland. What a brilliant idea! Bankers put money in their offshore accounts (shame on you!), and journalists will eventually put their lives when feeling in danger (I wonder what ever happened to the First Amendment...). The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, approved unanimously by the Icelandic parliament last summer, is intended to be the strongest media freedom law. It seems that so far can only protect Icelandic journalists, but it could get improved, and maybe it will. Let's hope.

WIKIREBELS, THE DOCUMENTARY. OPENLEAKS, THE SEQUEL

This time in English.

You got access to some secret and shocking documents that could change the course of history. You feel ready to leak them, but how? Chasing Wikileaks around the internet has become a very exhausting sport! Don't worry, you should be able to drop your info-bombs on Openleaks starting on Monday. At least that was the plan. The site, mirroring Wikileaks concept, is being built by Wikileaks dissenters, as you can learn, among many other things, in the following documentary, Wikirebels. Go and tell the US government! The nightmare, multiplied!




The Swedish Television has spent the last six months working on this one hour report about Wikileaks, the organization that is leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents that are telling the truth about all those things that our governments never openly say or even deny. It's the story from the very beginning in 2006 until last week. They posted it online yesterday. It's a rough cut but it is quite good, with many in depth interviews with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, his collaborators, his ex collaborators and with investigative journalists from different countries. You will discover, among other things, that he was the brains behind the proposal of creating a sort of offshore safe haven for information in Iceland. What a brilliant idea! Bankers put money in their offshore accounts (shame on you!), and journalists will eventually put their lives when feeling in danger (I wonder what ever happened to the First Amendment...). The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, approved unanimously by the Icelandic parliament last summer, is intended to be the strongest media freedom law in the world. It seems that so far can only protect Icelandic journalists, but it could get improved, and maybe it will. Let's have some hope. Otherwise we might have to look for a different job, or being called 'terrorist', and fear prosecution, like Assange.

Dec 6, 2010

BARBARIDADES V

This time in English

In Spanish Barbaridad means 'something very outrageous' , like barbarity in English, but it could playfully mean 'Barbara's world' (on a very wide meaning). Barbaridades is a section I opened in this blog long time ago to talk about two extremes: my favorite creative projects by people not necessarily famous and also the weirdest, flat or outrageous phenomena out there, like Sarah Palin. In Barbaridades the two extremes touch each other, because, as in life, you need a split of a second to go from heaven to hell.

Japanone from bombonia on Vimeo.

That's Japan according to super talented Spanish artist Celina Alvarado. I want to talk about her and her magic way to look at things. She is my friend therefore this post is biased but I am convinced that she deserves media attention because she is giving beautiful gifts to New York like her home gallery, Onebyone or the interactive project Try Me, an electronic t-shirt that tweets the meaning of hugs (she explains that project here in Spanish).

Onebyone breathes in Alphabet City, on Avenue D, inside Celina's apartment. The idea is not new, many New York artists in the eighties used to have galleries in their homes, in the same neighborhood. Today everybody shares pictures of drunken nights on facebook but who is willing to share something really useful and intimate such as their private space?
In this video Celina herself explains the origins of the project, and the first show she organized, appropriately called ONE:


One by One Gallery from Kaleido Works on Vimeo.

It was up for a few months and then, last September, she decided to take it down inviting two performers to do an action, Down with one, and so she created another great and intimate event:




*you can look at a video of this whole performance on onebyonegallery.com

She was born in Madrid and moved to New York about a decade ago, after working in Canal + Spain doing those amazing promotional clips that made that channel shine like no other at the time. When I met her she used to travel around Brooklyn with a plastic alien on her bag and a Super 8 camera. It was a weird and beautiful image, looking at this smiling woman with green hair taking out this small alien in the middle of the street and start filming it. She also took lots of pictures of him, a series that yet has to be shown in New York. The Super 8 material became my favorite short film about New York, the awarded I live in Brooklyn:


I Live in Brooklyn from bombonia on Vimeo.

A couple of years ago she decided to learn more about the digital world through the Interactive Telecommunications Program at FIT and now she gives us presents like the Try Me t-shirt or a program that allows you to throw a book against the wall and see the letters falling down like in a visual poetry.

You should check out her whole production at www.celinaalvarado.com
Then you will understand why I am in love with her work. She is one of those awe-inspiring people that make New York still unique.

Dec 1, 2010

WHEN LEONARDO BECAME A FILMMAKER

This time in English



It will blow up your mind. Leonardo's Last Supper: a Vision by Peter Greenaway will open on Friday at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan and you shouldn't miss it. Imagine that Leonardo da Vinci could have had the tools of a XXI century filmmaker: cameras, projectors, 2000 lights and gigantic screens... He only had his genius and his brushes, and just with that he gave us one of the most delicate and impressive paintings in history, The Last Supper, a fresco housed in the Refectory of Santa María delle Grazie in Milan, which changed and revolutionized the idea of painting, perspective and art in the XV century. Then, six centuries later, a man in love with painting such as artist-filmmaker Peter Greenaway has done magic. "Painting is the cutting edge of all art notions. Painting will be the last activity men will do when the civilization collapses" he said during the presentation. He has taken that masterpiece and has played with it using the tools of a filmmaker and the admiration and respect of a real art lover (before jumping into filmmaking he was trained as a painter).


The results are difficult to describe: you need to experience this massive installation that will involve all your senses with lights, images, multimedia and sound in a celebration of the Italian masterpiece. First you will find yourself surrounded by massive screens that will immerse you in the history of Renaissance painting and architecture (the music and sound help to travel in time), and then you will enter The Supper Room: in front of you an almost perfect reproduction of the painting (high end technology by the Spanish company Factum Arte has allowed Greenaway's team to do this superb clonation) that looks at you as if you were for real in the original church.


A massive reproduction of the table on the floor allows you to give a closer look at the setting in which Jesus told the apostles that one of them was going to betray him. Then, 2000 lights start playing with shadows, perspectives, colors, projections... giving you dozens of possibilities around a painting that transforms itself into a live creature. "We use the language of our age to farther enrich with contemporary tools one thousand years of culture" Greenaway says.








He wanted to mix "8000 years of western culture with 115 years of cinema". On his mind a big worry: "The laptop generation believe there is no painting before Pollock and no cinema before Tarantino. This is my way of showing Da Vinci to this new generation".


The whole experience doesn't end here. The epilogue of the show is a third multimedia exploration based on Paolo Veronese's The Wedding at Cana. In this case Greenaway has chosen to play with more than hundred guests that populate the painting and imagine the sound of the party, the gossipy comments around Jesus and even the barking of the dogs. The filmmaker's voice takes over at one point to explain, as in a guided tour, the different mysteries that surround a painting that was plundered by Napoleon from the monastery San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice (the painting was part of the Refectory built by Palladio, the most perfect marriage between architecture and painting of that time), cut in three pieces, and placed at the Louvre in Paris.

I saw it this morning and I am still in awe. I can't help it. I love Greenaway. He reminds me of my father, a painter himself fascinated by art and filmmaking, (not as famous, though).
He showed me some of Greenaway's first movies, The belly of an architect and The cook, the thief, his wife and his lover...
Greenway wants to continue the Nine Classical Paintings Revisited series (that's the name of the whole project) with Guernica by Picasso and Las Meninas by Velazquez. I won't miss it.

Pd: a quick pick at the highlight scene of The cook, the thief, his wife and his lover... just for film lovers and Helen Mirren fans: