No foley artists used — the squeaking sound (2:09) was provided by the dog!

Srinivas’s movie production house – Pusanga Films has since then produced a few more short films and this feature length movie called Dissolve. The movie explores the relationship between various forms of art. The movie includes the famous dhrupad singers from Bhopal -Gundecha Brothers, Vasumathi Badrinath (carnatic classical singer) and some naughty graffiti artists from France.

Aloha Accolade 2009, Honolulu International Film Festival

Official Selection 2009, FIFA-Montreal International Film Festival

Official Selection 2009, Cor-10 Coruna Tendencies Film Festival of New/Extended Media.

Here is the trailer of Dissolve. If you want to view or buy the full-movie, you can contact me [mithunb AT gmail Dot com] or srinivas [srinivas AT pusangafilms Dot com]

The film includes a recital by Gundecha Brothers. Here is an excerpt from the performance recorded by one of their students(?)

The film wraps-up with a performance by the Mangipudi bothers. Srinivas sings a tune set to a fabulous poem by Kabir and Umesh accompanies him on the dumbek.

Sadho Dekhle

When the last part of Dissolve was being shot, Manoj Kurien coolly spotted a fairy in the sets and captured a photo as evidence.

A block of ice pushed through the streets of a city…that’s it. Obviously the ice melts as it is pushed along, the actor’s posture, his energy levels all these keep changing, a city is the setting. Enough dynamics and room for magic.

Art Hose has done quite well to act as platform for artists and providing a well-rounded view of the art world. I would now like to focus on community building. So lively up yourself, get bold and share your thoughts with fellow art-hose users. How long does it take for you to post a link — less than a minute!

How can you contribute?

1. Post a link on on our Facebook page (zero effort).
2. Mail me a link and I’ll either post it on the Facebook page or try to make a post out of it.
3. Write a post for Art Hose (contact me for the guest login).
4. Showcase your art. Submit your drawings, painting, recording anything.

We don’t care about

1. Your writing style
2. Your aesthetics

What we love

1. Organic and grounded art-work
2. Events in Mumbai
3. Profiles of artists
4. Ideas for events

What we usually avoid?

1. Mainstream and tabloid nonsense
2. Topics that have already received a lot of press

I’ll sign-off this post with a video of Bob. Enjoy!

Ali Farka Touré

It is going to take some time and space to chronicle this really special artist. So here is part 1.

Ali was born in 1939 in the village of Kanau near Gourma Rahous on the banks of the River Niger in the north west of Mali. He was the tenth son of his mother but the only one to survive to infancy. “I lost nine brothers of the same mother and father. The name I was given was Ali Ibrahim, but it’s a custom in Africa to give a child a strange nickname if you have lost the other children.” The nickname they chose for Ali was ‘Farka’ meaning donkey, an animal admired for its strength and tenacity. “But let me make one thing clear” he says, “I’m the donkey that nobody climbs on!” [From  Mali Music]

Ali Farka Touré was an ace vocalist, guitarist and composer. His talent became accessible to the world via Ry Cooder. These two collaborated to release an album — Talking Timbuktu. Ali was a versatile musician and could render songs in different styles and unusual rhythms.

He primarily played on his guitar but is known to play some haunting melodies on the Njarka – small fiddle-like instrument. Here is him jamming with the American musician — Correy Harris.

Ali is not with us anymore but he continues to live through Vieux Farka Toure. Praises!

The tool we will be using is a painting utility called harmony by Mr Doob. It is not a regular tool like Paint Brush or Photoshop but a special one — it is impossible to produce something that doesn’t look pretty. You don’t believe me, do ya? Here is something I created in 2 minutes.

Chilling Elephant

Here is another example by Sougat Garai

In a regular drawing tool, the brushes are basic and it takes time and considerable amount of technical skill to bring depth to paintings. This tool offers brushes that have things like shading techniques built into it. So even if you scribble, it comes out in interesting ways.

So I am going to ask each of you to submit your master piece. Here is how you do it:

1. Go to http://mrdoob.com/projects/harmony/

2. Pick a brush at the top, choose a color and start drawing. Try out all the brushes – I found the sketch, shade and square brushes to be great.

3. Play around with the tool. When you are done, press the ‘Save’ button.

4. Right-Click on the painting and save the painting on your machine.

5. The picture is saved as a file with png extension.

6. Mail me the file and I’ll add it the online gallery.

A scene from Agantuk (Director: Satyajit Ray) set in the dining room.

A well-traveled gentlemen is having a conversation with a young boy and his mother. The gentleman is a relative of the theirs but meeting them for the first time. The conversation moves from the exchange of pleasantries to the food on the table and then on to painting. The kid asks the elderly gentleman if he paints more precisely if he had learnt to paint. The gentleman starts by talking about his visit to the Altamira caves in Spain. He goes on to tell the kid that since a painting of such beauty came about in the absence of any training, he lost interest in learning to paint.

The story above forms the pretext to a discussion of an aspect of art that I find difficult to pin-down with a term. This is the age of effects such as auto-tuning but if you listen to old recordings or some live performances, you sometimes get ‘hit’ by the music. People sometimes use the term raw to describe this effect. It is as though an emotional response was triggered automatically and yet it is at such a primitive level in our head that one cannot reason about it or explain how it came about.  I also think that it is difficult to bring this quality into art consciously and this is the reason that majority of artists use certain symbols to connect with the audience or buyers(for example, Buddha, Ganesha, poverty and so on). The example below is interesting in this light.

A German-American psychologist by the name Wolfgang Köhler showed a picture similar to one below and asked the subjects to choose a name for each shape. They were provided two names — Takete and Baluba.

If you try this experiment, a majority of you will choose the name Takete for the form with sharp edges and Baluba for the rounded form. Wolfgang conducted the experiment on residents of Tenerife. More recently, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran from UC San Diego conducted a similar experiment with undergraduate students in the US and native speakers of Tamil. The shapes were similar but the names were now changed to Kiki and Buba. The results were the same with more than 90% of the subjects choosing the name Kiki for the star and Buba for the rounded form. Ramachandran also points out the strange co-incidence that the shape of the alphabets in the name Kiki and Buba themselves have sharp and rounded characteristics. This is a startling example of how the human brain associates abstract visual forms to sound pattern characteristics.

Edson Dias: +91 9890063469 >> edsonoffline[@]gmail.com

Srinivas Mangipudi +91 9820679662 >> srinivas[@]pusangafilms.com

Spread the word and share this exceptional gallery of entries to the contest.

Satyajit Ray

Wikipedia’s entry on Satyajit Ray says:

“…In 1962, Ray directed Kanchenjungha, which was his first original screenplay and colour film. The film tells the story of an upper-class family spending an afternoon in Darjeeling, a picturesque hill town in West Bengal, where the family tries to engage their youngest daughter to a highly-paid engineer educated in London. The film was first conceived to take place in a large mansion, but Ray later decided to film it in the famous hill town, using the many shades of light and mist to reflect the tension in the drama. An amused Ray noted that while his script allowed shooting to be possible under any lighting conditions, a commercial film contingent present at the same time in Darjeeling failed to shoot a single shot as they only wanted to do so in sunshine..”

I found the entire movie on YouTube. The movie runs for approximately 95 minutes. Becomes a little predictable and slows down in the last 10 minutes but what the heck, it was fun.

Click here to play the first part of the movie. YouTube conveniently shows links to the remaining movie on the right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eVkN4B2W3Y

*one of my friends on Facebook posted this video. I think it was Erik Franden.