Monster Truck and the Power of Social Media

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Monster Truck Fundit from Monster Truck Gallery on Vimeo.

Monster Truck are currently looking for funding for a back projection screen for their gallery in Temple Bar through online fundraiser Fund it, an Irish equivalent to Kickstarter. The screen will project media art, day and night, on a window in the busy tourist/night life area. This is a great idea, it is an effective way to increase art literacy by allowing contemporary art to reach a wider audience. It eliminates the boundaries of the gallery walls.

Something similar has been going on in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary for a few years. SWITCH is a video art exhibition in which shop fronts become cinema screens at night. I would love to see town centres, across the country revived in this way.

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Monster Truck have also produced a viral video to promote the fundraiser, which again, is an excellent idea. That makes three great new media ideas, the screen, the viral and the Fund it campaign. Fund it is a website that allows users to post creative projects that they need funded and advertise it to their networks. Backers pledge money to the project and in return receive rewards. MART used a similar campaign recently for a US tour.

There are 28 days left to give. I plan to pledge when my moneys are a little more plentiful and when I have not just had an ebay spree.

Moving Image Cork; Lord David Puttnam

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Moving Image Cork is an organisation for anyone interested in video or film. They organisied a talk with British producer Lord Davis Puttnam recently which, unfortunately, I could not attend. Amazingly, MIC have released a podcast of the whole thing. It is great, well worth a listen.

I am a huge fan of podcasts and they are increasingly becoming more popular, CIRCA online have been producing a few that I have been downloading lately. They are one of the better applications of the web for alternative media. 

My Plans for the Week

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It is the French Film Festival this week in Cork. Hopefully I will be able to get tickets to the ones I want to see;
The Beaches of Agnès, Agnès Varda,
The Thorn in the Heart, Michel Gondry,
On Tour, Mathieu Amalric,
Enter the Void, Gaspar Noé.

There will also be a few exhibitions of Varda's at the Wandesford Quay Gallery and Alliance Française de Cork Gallery.

If I were to make a movie...

I would shoot it in Detroit, Michigan.

 

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 The city first introduced to me by the musical stylings of Eminem, the socio-economic implications of it's former automobile industry explained to me by Michael Moore in Capitalism: A Love Story and illustrated for me by this informative diagram, seems like a post-post-apocalyptic film set.

A part of me thinks that the end is nigh, not in a 2012 Mayan calender kind of way but in a change of social consciousness. A sort of reversal of the 1950s, 1960s consumerist identity. A quick look at the TV guide shows this redirection of public interest with a increasing number of self sufficiency programming like Grow Your Own Drugs, Kirstie's Homemade Home, Edwardian Farm, Born Survivor and even celebrity chef shows like Escape to River Cottage. Although the other part of me just thinks it is all just a trend what with the recession and that.



Images by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre and found elsewhere here.

Herb and Dorothy, Ultimate Art Collectors

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I read about Herbert and Dorothy Vogel sometime ago but heard, only recently,  about the documentary. Herb and Dorothy are a long time married couple/long time art collectors based in New York. Though well known in the New York art scene for decades, in recent years they gained notoriety for their charming story.

At the beginning of their marriage Herb was taking art classes and, as the good wife, Dorothy took classes in order to take an interest in her husbands interests. Eventually they both decided that they were not talented enough and instead began to collect. The most sensational part of their story is that they managed to accumulate an enormous collection of contemporary art on a modest income. Herb was a postal clerk and Dorothy was a librarian. Apparently they lived on Dorothy's salary and used Herb's to buy the work.

They went to every opening, bought only what they liked provided that they could fit it in their apartment and could carry it home. Seemingly their interpretation of "fitting in the apartment" was quite literal as their one bed was stuffed with most things were stacked under tarps. Their appreciation of minimalism doesn't extend to interior design.

The documentary film was made in 2008. The story has a little magic to it, their interest in art was not motivated by financial gain, the bought unlikable work and they wanted to pay a fair price. It has cleansed my critical pallet.

Undoubtedly these two have a huge cult following. Oh they seem to tick a lot of the boxes; quirky, cat loving, art loving, stylish and elderly(vintage), hoarding and anti-establishment. That's hipster heaven!!












All images were obtained from a google image search, no copyright infringement intended.