Traveller’s Teacup

check this out….

“We live in public” a documentary by Ondi Timoner

Ten years in the making and culled from 5000 hours of footage, WE LIVE IN PUBLIC reveals the effect the web is having on our society, as seen through the eyes of “the greatest Internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”, artist, futurist and visionary Josh Harris. Award-winning director Ondi Timoner (DIG! — which also won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2004 — making Timoner the only director to win that prestigious award twice) documented his tumultuous life for more than a decade to create a riveting, cautionary tale of what to expect as the virtual world inevitably takes control of our lives.

Harris, often called the “Warhol of the Web”, founded Pseudo.com, the first Internet television network during the infamous dot-com boom of the 1990s. He also curated and funded the ground breaking project “Quiet” in an underground bunker in NYC where over 100 people lived together on camera for 30 days at the turn of the millennium. With Quiet, Harris proved how we willingly trade our privacy for the connection and recognition we all deeply desire, but with every technological advancement such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter, becomes more elusive. Through his experiments, including a six-month stint living with his girlfriend under 24-hour electronic surveillance which led to his mental collapse, Harris demonstrated the price we pay for living in public.

http://www.weliveinpublicthemovie.com/

Here are some recent snaps from my filming mission in the Gobi desert, Mongolia. As mentioned, have been shooting a small UNU story about the disastrous desertification of the Gobi. The story will focus on the efforts of a small Gobi/Japanese research project.

Technical word of advice: if you are taking camera equipment into the desert…. make sure you take aerosol of canned air, a self-pumping air brush in your pocket and an air-proof camera bag (eg pelican case). Even with all this, absolutely everything was caked in dust… every evening!

http://www.youtube.com/homeproject

Artists are always looking for new strategies to communicate their message. On this day in 2003, the grand opening of the “ČESKÝ SEN (Czech Dream)” was staged. Two “student” filmmakers had created a nation-wide advertising campaign selling to the Czech public a hypermarket called “Czech Dream”. The only thing was that it didn’t exist! The grand opening attracted thousands of people… and their documentary crew filmed on.

“… Czech Dream has been called a hoax, a sociological experiment, a “provocumentary,” and a “documockmentary,” among other things. As far as I know, though, it has not yet directly been referenced as a culture jam or an adbust…” – Stephen Harris, Bright Lights film journal

The documentary raises interesting questions about today’s nature of consumerism, advertising and the manipulation power of the media. Here’s are some excerpts from the grand opening:

And here’s the “official trailer”

Recently screened at Hot Docs 2009 – “REPORTER” by Eric Daniel Metzgar