a big flying machine brought me back to LA last night. my room looks exactly the same as I left it, what's different is my hard drives, which are choke full of more than 50 hours of footage and countless pictures, created over the last three weeks in Sicily.
can't deny I'm extremely excited to sit down and fold my sleeves and start the slow process of editing and creating all the additional visual content for the film.
I have also created a Twitter account for the film, so if you use it feel free to start following it for updates and to hear me complaining about misbehaving keyframes and interviewees not repeating my question in the answer.
below is a pic from our last day of shooting, which was about creating a 24 hours time lapse. the thing about the stray dogs is not a joke.

back. i'd love to get a coffee with Salvador Dali and tell him how it went, I am sure he would be proud.
I would like to spend a few lines to infinitely thank you the whole crew, which was awesome and patient and professional (well, we need to work a little more on waking up timing guys - yes, me too, I know).
I will go back to Sicily (yes, that's where we're shooting) next week to shoot more interviews and research archive material I need for the film and to test my belly to see how much food it can store before exploding. below are a few pictures from the first shooting and traveling session.

Salvador Dali enters the stage.
He looks at everyone, without speaking. we, as audience, are hundreds. he examines everyone, and after a minute, he choses me. i walk on stage. everyone is looking at me. you can cut expectations in the air with a knife. i start to freak out. Dali starts to make a weird quick dance with his feet. i think he's telling me to emulate him and i try even if i know that i will make a fool of myself. the audience laughs vigorously. it clearly wasn't what was requested of me. Salvador Dali looks at me scornfully, doesn't say a word. he then proceeds to light three lines of fire, and welcomes me and other two people to walk on them. all eyes on me. the two other persons start walking, and i don't. audience is disappointed and boos. Salvador Dali is about to give up on me when i gather courage and walk the fire. cut to the after-show backstage, my grandmother is having a drink with me and tells me she didn't care much about the walking on fire, she thought it was redundant, but she tells me she loved when i talked about art and life.

normally it would be kinda hard for me to try interpret this dream i had last night. but seeing the context of things, it's not that difficult, as tomorrow i will be leaving with a crew of 9 from the north of Italy headed south, to go shoot the first batch of my new documentary film, The Archaeology of the future.
is my subconscious telling me i'm freaking out? well, thank you subconscious, i could have figure that out myself, you can do better you lazy ass.
one thing that doesn't freak me out though is that the crew i'll be traveling with is composed of mostly best friends and my brother Davide is producing. i love when you can keep things in the family, at least for passion projects like this one (well, let's not forget my production company Paydirt Pictures which is financing). we will be gone for two weeks, but unlike with my previous film Megunica, i won't be keeping an online diary. that doesn't mean the shoot will be less of an adventure than Megunica was, trust me.
come back in a few weeks and i'll have a few more infos and hopefully some nicely lit pictures from the shoot.
now let me go buy 13 pairs of underwear at the chinese store for 5 euros, there won't probably be a laundry machine where we're going.

I am back from the Living Walls conference in Atlanta and as expected I had a damn blast. there's very few things i enjoy more than being around other fellow artists and make art and do things. night-trespassing a swimming pool and a cemetery and sleeping on a wooden rooftop floor brought me back to my teenage years, but going to the Quarry was probably my favorite.

apart from screening my film Megunica, i also gave a small "pecha-kucha" style presentation, in which i introduced my new documentary project, The archaeology of the future. the whole thing consists in showing 20 images with a 20 seconds fixed time to talk about each. when 20 secs pass, the person controlling the slideshow will cruelly move on to the next, and you have to keep up with the flow of the presentation. trust me, it's hard.

goodbye, comfort zone. see you in a year or so.
i am embarking on a new documentary project which will take me who knows where, mentally and physically. i still haven't decided when to start sharing informations about it, but will soon set up a website for the project.
wish me luck, it's going to be a long journey.

finally! the documentary narrating the making of the album N.A.S.A. will premiere on August 2 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. it was directed by my friends and collaborators Sam Spiegel and Syd Garon, and i helped doing some animation segments for it (aided by the magic help of Markus Wagner and Ranefritte). make sure you come and support this 4 years long effort!
congrats Sam and Syd, you fucking rule.

i love it when the excuse to leave LA for a while comes in the form of a festival. I will be in Atlanta from 11 to 15 of August, where my film Megunica will be screened at the Living Walls Conference, an event about public art. in their own words: "The idea behind Living Walls is to put the work of a very small subset of the population (street artists, graffiti writers, etc), people who actually interact with space, and people who spend their time in discourse about public space all under the same roof. Our intentions are simply to broadcast to the attendees a wide spectrum of ideas about public space, hoping that everyone leaves the event looking at the city, its walls, and how we interact with space differently." Very much my cup of tea.
The film will be screened at the Java Lords venue on the 12th. More infos on the website. Please come and say hello!

yesterday i was at The Family, the best art bookstore in LA where a lot of my favorite artists pass by all the time, where they hosted a presentation of the new epic book by one of those favorite artists of mine, Anders Nilsen . The magnum opus, which has just been released, is called Big Questions, and it's the collection of all the chapter that he released over the years in smaller fanzine forms. i would find them over the years with great pleasure at random comic bookstores, and soon i realized they were part of a bigger plan/story. nothing out of the ordinary, i agree, if only it didn't take him 12 years to complete the story. TWELVE years. i won't even begin to think about how much dedication, passion and commitment you need to keep going at something for all that time. infact, i was complaining all the time that my film Megunica took me two years to make.. pff, beginner.
you can buy Anders book directly from Drawn & Quarterly website here, you won't regret it, trust me.

the short film I shot for the Levi's Workshop Food event, "The sound of heat", is up online. yes, we ate that food after camera stopped rolling.