Here’s a great documentary about the Irish music industry made by Manina Films. Made in late 2005, early 2006 about the Music Board Of Ireland which was set up by the government in partnership with the music industry through IBEC to promote and support contemporary Irish music in 2001. It was disbanded (pun intended) in 2004 having accomplished little if anything. The idea was good but it was not a priority for the government.

This was in a sense banished to the web as it could not be shown in it’s entirety because of it’s critical angle of government policy in the area of support for young Irish bands. Comparisons are made to funding giving for others areas in the Arts and in Sport (which is handled by the same government department – I never quite got that one!).

There is a point made by Jim Carroll that the government is more interested in entertaining the National Concert Hall punters (can you call them that?) than the regular young gig goers and young musicians, as the former are more likely to vote. This is a fair point, but a worrying one. There are a lot of young people apathetic to politics in this country and this is a shame. Ultimately then, when complaints are made about the “state of the nation” the apathetic are the ones to blame. Vote not just for the Battle of the Bands, vote for (or against) bigger things.

Thanks to Nialler9 for bringing this to my attention on his blog.

Here are some words from Lindsey, the director of the film, to lead you in :

After failing to get this documentary seen by the general public I’ve finally put it up on the Internet. It’s amazing how much control someone in power has. I was warned that by showing a certain individual in a bad light then I would be shooting myself in the foot because my film would not be accepted into film festivals or shown on TV. The Last Broadcast on RTE showed part of my film but refused to air the entirety, omitting the scene with this particular individual.
I felt that the film would not prove the point I was trying to make if I left the scene out so I made the decision to keep it. Unfortunately I underestimated how much fear people have for this man. The power that he holds over funding for arts makes sure that he can maintain a good image.
The only place my film was actually seen in its whole was in Wales where it was a runner up in the Screen Academy Wales student awards.
Anyway… here it is!

Roll it there Roisin!

A new high resolution image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Last Supper” has been posted online on a new site which specialises in macro images of artworks for closer inspection. The resolution is 16 billion pixels and that equals about 1,600 times your average 10 megapixel digital camera image.

This impressive study was done by none other than HAL9000! Well no, not that one, but rather an Italy-based firm specializing in the digital restoration and preservation of works of art through high-resolution art photography. The image size is 16.118.035.591 pixels, (172181 pixels wide and 93611 pixels high) and takes up a whopping 96 Gigabytes on disk. The panoramic photography technique used allows the stitching into one image of different photos shot using rigorous criteria.

Go have a look for yourself. It looks like more will artworks are to be added. Just click on the image of the work of art and you go to a page where you can explore it’s detail. There’s lots of great info about the technique used on the site also. See it here.