Blur + Sharpen

Electronic billboards are lighting up more of LA than ever, and LA Freewaves founder Anne Bray wants to talk about the implications of this rapid growth. Bray joins a group of artists concerned about the commercial colonization of public space, asking where art fits into the picture. She's also curious about the legality of these billboards - "What do we want to do with our public space?" she asks. "To whom will you sell your eyeballs?... Must our city be covered with ads? Why?" Bray notes that the MAK Center for Art & Architecture is commissioning more than 20 artist billboards to be presented this Spring through a project titled "How Many Billboards? Art in Stead." The billboards will start appearing on February 5, and the project overall will include an overview exhibit and orientation station at the Schindler House, opening February 23, as well as two panel discussions. Before all of that, though, Bray will tackle the subject tomorrow, Friday, January 29, as one of the weekly salons at Farmlab with "Ads or Art," a lively, illustrated presentation.

Iranian art and culture are currently at the forefront of American media. Tyler Green on his Modern Art Notes blog a few days ago posted a piece titled "Dissent, Life in Iran and the Arts," on recent examples of shows dedicated to Iranian art. The post in turn points to Claire Messud's contribution to the New York Review of Books' blog titled "Revealing the Real Iran," in which the critic argues for the value of fiction in helping articulate a culture's true identity. "Fiction and poetry work differently from history or autobiography, opening to us the interior lives, the unrecorded ephemera and minutiae of people and their places," she writes.

The young Iranian artist, writer, producer and occasional curator Bita Shafipour is working to support an understanding of contemporary Iranian culture in Los Angeles with a project titled Society of Cinema and Arts, or SoCiArts, which is an online community for socially conscious artists. A recent graduate of USC's School of Cinematic Arts, Bita also runs a small production company dedicated to producing socially conscious multi-media shows designed to promote the artists on the SoCiArts site. "Our goal is to create a platform for like-minded people to come together as a community and celebrate the arts and think about what matters in our society." Why is this so important to Bita?

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For years, one of my favorite resources was the Submarine Channel's music video compilation titled Pause. (The site title echoes my favorite music video book, too: Pause :59 Minutes of Motion Graphics, by Julie Hirschfield, Stefanie Barth, Peter Hall and Andrea Codrington, from 2000).

The site was recently relaunched as 2Pause: Freezing Music Video Culture, and features a terrific compilation of more than 100 music videos made since 2006 divided into six somewhat enigmatic categories: Netherclips, which are videos made in Holland; Electric Cinema, which includes "cinematographic" music videos; Sonic Animation for animated clips; No/Lo Budget videos; French Wave for videos from France; and Stop Motion, for videos made using that technique. I'm a bit baffled by selection criteria - none are really articulated - and there are stunning omissions if the only criterion is truly to showcase "the most visually exciting music videos." The curators could be far more explicit about the site's choices and limitations, and to me, it seems that the site either needs more curatorial input and contextualization, or a 2.0 interface that lets users create that material... That said, the site is pretty, and remains a terrific location for exploring the music video form.

Some of this year's holiday cards in motion are lovely. The UK-based digital arts organization onedotzero went to Wieden+Kennedy and Karsten Schmidt to create a piece using a design and visualization tool built for their annual festival. Words made from words tumble through space as the camera zooms inward, finally settling on a holiday greeting. Using the same generator, the holiday card's code has been made available so that others can play around and create new messages. And Flux, the LA-based media arts organization, commissioned six holiday animations by the eminently creative Miwa Matreyek to appear on Cooper Design's Space's video wall at 860 S. Los Angeles Street. The video wall, which itself was commissioned by building owner Steve Hirsh and unveiled in June of this year, runs on software designed by artist Perry Hoberman, and Flux serves as the wall's curator. Matreyek's pieces are heartwarming bits of fairytale whimsy, taking the traditional paper card's quick, friendly gesture into motion. The six videos by Matreyek will screen through January 1, but you can see two of them on the Flux site. (Image: Miwa Matreyek.)

"The film's concept intrigued me because the story deals with issues about healthcare, homelessness, class warfare and seems part of the zeitgeist," says Chris Do, director and founder of the LA-based multimedia design firm Blind. He's referring to a 60-second graphics-based sequence that introduces the low budget film Bits and Pieces. Director Allen Martinez went to Blind for assistance in creating and expository intro that would jump-start the story, and within two weeks had a comic book-inspired, black-and-white illustrated opening that efficiently visualizes the ugly economy of the sci-fi film's plotline. Told through stark drawings, lots of zooms in and out, and occasional splotches of bloody red, the piece is at its strongest when it's least literal. Bodies drifting downward through the sky, for example, underscore the notion of expendability while more overt connections to the voice-over are less effective. Blind played with the fluid movement between literal and figurative very nicely with the award-winning music video for the Gnarls Barkley track Crazy a few years ago. The Rorschach-like colors morph in and out of discernibility, creating a sense of intermittent clarity that nicely echoes the song lyrics. "Projects like this are important to us because we are able to beta-test ideas before using the techniques we learn on larger scaled projects," continues Do, whose company's credits also include a recent effective PSA for Partnership for a Drug-free America, a long list of commercials and other music video pieces.

What does solar wind look like? Oddly enough, it looks an awful lot like video art. Semiconductor, made up of UK artists Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt, recently posted a short video titled Black Rain, which is made up of images gathered from a satellite on a solar mission. The satellite tracks solar wind and coronal mass ejections (?!), producing flashing, stuttering flares, spinning dots of light that are actually planets and pulsating digital plaids. The three-minute piece is part of a longer 17-minute loop screened as part of an installation, but even at this length, online, it is absolutely a pleasure to view. Out of the Light, which the artists describe as a "CGI time based sculpture," examines celestial patterns using simple tools - tree branches obscuring a dazzling solar eclipse, for example. Designed to be a 10-minute projection screened onto the floor, the piece is represented with a short clip online that gives you a sense of the visual pleasure of natural phenomena. At work, I'm researching ways that aspects of science can get visualized, helping make the often distant or abstract notions of scientific theory more understandable. Semiconductor's work is a thrilling treat in this regard, framing the world's wonder in magical ways.

"I'm always trying to reveal in my art a little bit about nature that is literally invisible to us," says internationally acclaimed artist and architect Maya Lin in recent a video by The New York Times. In the short visual portrait, Lin eloquently describes a three-part series of landscape pieces titled Wave Field, which involved re-landscaping large fields by sculpting differing wave patterns into the earth. The rolling, grassy hills let visitors experience land and water in a new and powerful way as what is usually fluid and ephemeral becomes eerily fixed and solid.

Lin isn't known as a filmmaker, and yet she recently turned to video as part of a passionate, new memorial project, titled What Is Missing? which includes several components, including a Web site and what will eventually be a series of short videos and a book. For the first video, Lin achieves a disjuncture similar to that of Wave Field in prompting us to experience an idea viscerally. The video presents images of five famous international parks, with a cryptic tagline noting a duration of destruction. Gradually we learn what these phrases mean, and Lin deftly makes visible what to many of us is an invisible - and often therefore negligible - ecological issue. With music by Brian Eno and Brian Loucks and production through @radical media, the piece underscores the power of simplicity.

Scanning the line-up of short films featured at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, I was delighted to see the animated music video N.A.S.A. A Volta in the mix. The project is part of the series of collaborations linking music video directors and visual artists as part of the North America/South America project, itself a collaboration between Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon, who brought a range of artists together to lend voices to create The Spirit of Apollo. The videos for the album adopt the same collaborative spirit, such that A Volta brilliantly pairs the Date Farmers and Logan. The Date Farmers are artists Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, who grew up in Indio and now create paintings and sculptures that merge Mexican art iconography, murals, graffiti and more. Logan is the LA-based studio founded by Ben Conrad and Alex Tylevich and known for some of the most innovative music videos and motion graphics. A Volta, directed by Tylevich, is a dark, violent and frenetic pastiche of imagery and storylines, with references that range from Mickey Mouse to jail tattoos, with hints of gangland thrillers, high-speed chases and, more disturbingly, recent news stories of torture. The video jolts the Date Farmer's typically flat characters into action as the camera careens in and out of maze-like buildings in some lost city, where deals go bad, women are raped and men torture and kill each other. Tylevich describes the feel of the video best in an interview on boingboing when he references Street of Crocodiles, the great animation by the Quay Brothers, and Santo movies in a single sentence. While Tylevich goes on to dismiss direct links to contemporary political events, the mayhem and abuse, with clear cultural reference, bear scrutiny. Like the best videos, this piece is more allegory than pop pleasure.

Wisps of grass wave in gentle sunlight, dragon flies hover in verdant forests and a river of blue glistens cheerfully. Then, unexpectedly, a hulking clay figure appears, eyes widening and mouth grimacing before dissolving into a primordial pool of colored silicone. This is the opening of the music video for Grizzly Bear's track "Able, Ready," by the LA-based artist Allison Shulnik. The CalArts grad captures the song's wistful vibe, and crosses fearlessly back and forth between lyrical images of nature and the almost monstrous clay figures, which are disconcerting in their constant oozing and morphing, and yet strangely human in their facial expressions and movement. The video, which will screen as part of the Flux Screening Series at the Hammer Museum this Thursday night, is jut one of a terrific line-up of projects, which includes the premiere of a new colorful and ever clever Michel Gondry video ("Open Your Heart" by Mia Doi Tood), Keith Schofield's delightfully strange story snippets for "Heaven Can Wait" by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck, and a new, moody animated project that could be from the turn of the last century by Stefan Nadelman, "I Say Fever" by Ramonoa Falls. The mandate for Flux is to highlight new talent in music video, animation and motion graphics, and this month's program will not disappoint; indeed, the Flux team goes beyond LA and even the US this time by including three new videos from France fresh from a scouting trip to Paris. [Image from "Able, Ready."]