During a recent public demonstration at the headquarters of Walt Disney Imagineers, the company announced their plans to line the decks of the Dream,  their latest cruise ship -launching early next year – with over 20 pieces of moving artwork, and two interactive floors of youth-oriented play areas.

The “enchanted art” will be displayed on large LCD screens that sit inside a glass case, surrounded by a frame that hides the speakers and motion-detecting camera. In one example of these state-of-the-art works of technological artistry, there is a photograph of Walt Disney lounging on the beach of Rio de Janeiro. When a passenger stands in front of it, it will show “The Three Caballeros” dashing comedically over the landscape. The art will also feature motion-detection capabilities that echo the Nintendo Wii, which will enable children to participate in mini-games as part of a shipboard scavenger hunt. Cruisers will scour the premises in search of the Disney villain responsible for the missing pieces of art, or stolen Dalmatian puppies. Glowing pads placed around the perimeter of two interactive floor mats will also encourage the kids to play games that feature characters from “Bolt,” “Tron,” and “Princess and the Frog.”

Children give the interactive floor a test run

And as far as eating goes, no cruiser will ever forget the “Finding Nemo” restaurant, called the Animator’s Palate, which is expected to flaunt over 700 seats inside a studio-themed eatery that comes to life during dinner.

Technorati Tags: cruise ship, demonstration, dream, interactive floor, moving artwork, walt disney imagineers

President Robert Mugabe

When Owen Maseko decided to explore President Mugabe-related violence, he thought it best to gather the photos of missing people, the pictures of the mine shafts where they are allegedly hidden, and the reports that document the 1980 massacre of thousands of civilians in the western Matabeleland district. But, the police in Zimbabwe weren’t very amused with the exhibit, and they quickly shut it down by cuffing Maseko on incitement charges.

Attorney Kucaca Phulu reported that his client spent the weekend in jail as a result of all of the excitement.  Maseko reportedly sought bail the following Monday, but the courts postponed a ruling until Tuesday. The very next day, Harare Police reportedly pushed a human rights group to abandon another exhibit, which also employed photographs to illustrate the rampant Mugabean political violence. Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, who now works with Mugabe, condemned the police’s repeated attempt to seize the entire 65-photograph display. Tsvangirai believed that such exhibits were a portion of the campaign for national healing.

Owen Maseko hard at work

Today, with the death of Joshua Nkomo – Mugabe’s vice president – the allegiance is with Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change party. As more proponents for free-thought art jump onto Mugabe’s payroll, it grows ever more doubtful that a third violence exhibit will even have a chance to be torn back down.

Technorati Tags: exhibit, owen maseko, pictures, police, president mugabe, zimbabwe

The teen team on the Sherman Oaks set of "Gloria."

Dominic Monaghan, as one of the two celebrities expected to participate in Fresh Films – the program aimed at providing teenagers with a summer-long filmmaking experience – arrived just seconds before the rookie crew of teenagers were even ready to shoot. Shouts of advice – like “work smart – not hard,” filled the background of the bustling set as the 17 winners of Reese’s Puffs‘ nationwide contest put their budding talents to the test of real-world movie making.

Two groups were formed, and issued the task of each creating a short film; In so doing, participants would gain an invaluable hands-on experience in almost every facet of the production process – from scripting to post-edits. Sarah Wendel, the sole Californian to be accepted into the program, said that she appreciated the ability to rotate into different jobs in order to learn the significance of things like continuity, lighting and sound mixing.

Monaghan admitted that his initial attraction to the program was the opportunity that it offered teens. He’s known for his roles in “Lost,” and “Flashfoward,” while Bobbie J. Thompson, the other celebrity to get involved with the project, may be recognized from his work with “30 Rock” and “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. In the short films, Monaghan portrays a rock god in search of his lost guitar, and Thompson plays a teen who won a chance to be a DJ for the day at a favorite radio station, only to discover the format of radio has changed entirely.

The sponsor's cereal box

The films themselves will be available to view online at fresh-films.com from April 12 to 26, where viewers can vote for the winner. Each member of the winning team will receive a $1,000 scholarship and a portable Flip camera.

Technorati Tags: contest, filmmaking, fresh films, movie, reeses puffs, teenagers

Autism Ribbon for Awareness

Stanford researcher David Wilkins is interested in how facial emotions could be employed to help individuals with autism. He studies artists, actors and psychologists to find out how to train people to better recognize subtle emotional expressions. His careful dissections of portrait-drawing techniques, facial mimicry and emotional memory techniques, and the techniques of micro-expression and subtle expression recognition, have led the lecturer toward the fundamentals of human communication.

To Wilkins, who is a part of Stanford’s Symbolic Systems Program, distinguishes happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, disgust and contempt as of the greatest significance to human communication. Autistic individuals are fifty percent less likely to distinguish the emotional indications of facial expression, which may adversely interrupt the individuals interpersonal interactions.

Wilkins and his team are designing experiments that they intend to benefit autism. By assessing the efficacy of several different kinds of art, acting and psychological techniques, the scientists hope to discover one that results in a significant improvement in facial emotion recognition. Since people with autism are generally fifty percent less likely to recognize someone’s emotional state through their facial expressions, their successful participation in society depends on increasing their facial-emotional cognitive abilities.

Autism is noticeable in early childhood

A grant from the Stanford Institute for Creativity in the Arts and the Symbolic Systems Program in the School of Humanities and Sciences have made this all possible; with their help, hopefully Wilkins will achieve his noble cause.

Technorati Tags: actor, Artist, autism, david wilkins, emotion, expression, psychologist, stanford

Museum of Modern Art in New York

Today, the prestigious Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in New York announced the addition of the @ symbol to their collection, which they bought for the cheapest price imaginable: absolutely nothing. According to Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in the museums Department of Architecture and Design, this newest item is the only thing in the museum that is quite literally priceless. And, while there is some doubt circulating the artistic validity of this particular addition, the Moma articulated the reasoning behind this unexpectedly controversial decision:

“The appropriation and reuse of a pre-existing, even ancient symbol–a symbol already available on the keyboard yet vastly underutilized, a ligature meant to resolve a functional issue (excessively long and convoluted programming language) brought on by a revolutionary technological innovation (the Internet)–is by all means an act of design of extraordinary elegance and economy.”

Needless to say, web-based discussion on the subject is rampant, with a majority of individuals focusing mostly on the symbol’s significance in e-mail, and it’s convenient prevalence in social-media style communication (i.e. Facebook and Twitter). As such companies battle to become the public’s primary online identity providers, the @ symbol could be much more than just a work of art, it could be the future seed of a mega-dispute.

Technorati Tags: art, modern, Moma, museum, new york

A piece of calligraphy art on display

In lieu of the gloom revolving around Dubai’s upwelling debt concerns, the city’s annual art fair still managed to earn record sales, drawing more than 18,00 visitors – a 28 percent increase from 2009. The four-day contemporary art show featured the works of world-famous artists from 31 different companies, which was also an improvement in the variety of geographical representation in attendance at last year’s festivities.

Art Dubai Advertisement

The success of some galleries, like Saudi Arabia’s Athr Gallery and Berlin’s Galerie Christian Hosp, which reportedly sold 90% of their inventories, stand in stark contrast with the suffering financial statuses of the local crowd. But it makes more sense to consider who attends the fair, said Joan Lee, head of Seoul-based SUN gallery, who admitted that most of the interested attendees are from royal families and collectors. That isn’t to say that they are all foreign interests; after all, Tessa De Caters of Isabelle Van Den Eynde, a Dubai-based gallery, said that the local community of collectors is expanding alongside an increasing international interest in Middle Eastern art. With all this attention, it wasn’t a surprise when Fabio Rossi of London’s Rossi & Rossi, asserted that the four-year fair is undoubtedly finding it’s place on the global art market.

Technorati Tags: art, contemporary, debt, dubai, fair, show

Shepard Fairey and his famed Obama portrait

Today, Shepard Fairey, the once co-founder of BLK/MRKT Inc. (1997-2003) – which worked with high-brow clients like Pepsi, Hasbro, and Netscape – is so popular from his HOPE portrait of Barack Obama that he’s walking door to door at Deitch Projects in New York, searching for building owners that will premiss him to use their exterior wall-space for his exhibition this May.

This is a new relatively new concept to this contemporary artist, who admits to being arrested, getting locked up overnight, and a sentencing of two years probation for his past (illicitly performed) building pastings, which he accomplished long before a retrospective at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Boston

And, while many aren’t too keen on the artist’s vision, he tries his best to offer the building owners a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to contribute to the enhancement of the urban landscape, and to experience art as a part of the current OBEY phenomenon. Even though the over-sized stickers could remain for years to come, several cities have already granted the urban artist permission to paste in Boston, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Now, as May rolls around the corner, millions of Shepard Fairey fans are hoping to see the newest exhibition of modern-day artistic talent.

Perhaps Fairey should bring Obama for some assistance; after all, he did get a lot out of the famed portrait.

Technorati Tags: Barack Obama, Deitch Projects, exhibition, HOPE, May, new york, Shepard Fairey

Henry Moore's "Three Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No. 4"

According to two distinguished art experts, many shady art dealers have figured out that Canada is a very easy place to avoid prosecution while unloading stolen merchandise. In a comment he made concerning the recent recovery of a sculpture by Henry Moore, and a Paul Klee painting,  Joshua Knelman – an award-winning arts writer and investigative journalist –  attributed the rampant art robberies to the complete lack of specialist art theft investigators presently employed by the Toronto Police Department.

In Knelman’s book about the international cultural black market, which is titled Hot Art, he explains that the victims of these Canadian thefts don’t have many choices when it comes to finding help in their situations. He mentions the option of reporting it  to the Interpol office in Ottawa, but asserts that the said organization is not composed of active officers, but merely an army of data-bank tellers. He recommends getting everything registered with the ART Loss Register (ALR) and Canada customs, since that route somehow recovered the Moore and the Klee pieces.

Perhaps art is safest in museums, and as parts a private collections

But, detection is very difficult in a world where stolen art naturally changes hands (whether it’s sold or inherited) – over the years; therefore, someone thought it better to rely on the integrity of dealers and brokers, instead of regulating a currently unregulated system, which has been running rampant for the past decades.

Fortunately, now that every sneaky art thief is swimming for the shores of Canada, somebody has noticed that need for some security.

Technorati Tags: art, canada, henry moore, joshua knelman, paul klee, robberies, theft, Toronto Police

Woodstock '69 - Soul Sacrifice

On March 18th, the  human rights advocate – and internationally acclaimed musician – Carlos Santana recieved the 2010 Mayor’s Art Award from San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. Over 300 attended the regal Green Room of the War Memorial Opera House.

The famed musician moved from Los Angeles up to San Francisco in 1961, where his father got involved with a mariachi band. Carlos graduated from Mission High School in 1965, and made his debut with The Santana Band at the Fillmore West theater on June 16, 1968. The following year saw their international success – via the stage of Woodstock ‘69 – and the release of their self-titled debut album, which included the top 10 Billboard hit “Evil Ways.”

“Carlos is one of the greatest artists of our time and any time,” said Mayor Newsome during the two-hour long ceremony, “He is an international superstar who keeps his heart in San Francisco and has humanity of a social worker.” Santana embraced his flowery San Franciscan roots, claiming that he’ll always be a rainbow warrior – or hippie – at heart. He warned against the destructiveness of the ego, and closed his acceptance speech with a frank metaphor:

“Music is the water, people are the flowers and I’m a hose.”

Wise words from a wise guitarist who helped feed the flaming live performance of “Soul Sacrifice,” that fateful day at Woodstock al those years ago.

Technorati Tags: carlos santana, gavin newsom, mayors art award, san francisco

Did you take my father's paintings, Salander?

Lawrence Salander, 60, appeared in the state Supreme Court of New York on Thursday, March 18th, to plead guilty to 28 counts of grand larceny, for which he faces six to 18 years in prison, and $120 million dollars in restitution. The multi-million-dollar scam has gained a great deal of publicity, as it has affected prominent art figures like John McEnroe, famed tennis star, and Robert De Niro, the Academy Award-winning actor, to name a few.

According to authorities, after investing in Arshile Gorky’s “Pirate I and II,” McEnroe soon realized that his share had simultaneously been sold to another collector. Prosecutor’s mentioned that several paintings by De Niro’s father were sold without the actor’s documented consent, and that several other victims reported losses totaling several millions, including:  Earl Davis, son of the American abstract painter Stuart Davis, who lost $6.7 million; Bank of America ,reportedly lost $2 million after Salander used paintings that he did not own to secure a loan; and Hester Diamond, mother of Mike D (Beastie Boys), suffered $6 million in total losses.

Salander appears before the courts looking rather unhappy.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said, “Lawrence Salander’s desire for an extravagant lifestyle turned long-time friends and trusted business colleagues into his personal piggy banks.” Salander is expected back in court on May 20, 2010, in order to proceed with the plea agreement of restitution, which will lighten the 25-year prison sentence he could have faced if he were convicted.

Technorati Tags: John McEnroe, Lawrence Salander, million-dollar scam, Robert De Niro, Supreme Court of New York