October 2008 Archives

A few months ago, some wonky mishaps with my Mac required opening up the computer, and I personally witnessed the unscrewing of tiny screws, the removal of the computer's protective silver cover, and the naked wires and vulnerable circuit boards exposed to light, dust and even the prying point of a screwdriver. The result? Lightheadedness. A cold sweat. The need to sit down.

It all ended well, but the experience was revealing. You're supposed to keep these things warm, dry, clean and together, and to do otherwise is very, very unsettling. Right?

LA-based artist Phil Stearns disagrees. Indeed, for a workshop this weekend at the terrific gallery Machine Project in Echo Park, Phil will give a group of attendees a bunch of old Texas Instruments computers with the following instructions: first, crack them open and rummage around in the wiring; 2) rewire the circuits; 3) mount hardware and then "solder like crazy and seal the deal."

More

Jeremy Bernstein can't remember which lie set him off. "It was one of those bald faced, no-bearing-on-reality lies and I just got so pissed off," he recalls. "I spent the whole night fuming, wondering, 'What I should do?' I woke up in the morning and said, 'I'm a game designer; I should make a game.'"

And that's what he did. The result is the game Truth Invaders, which uses the campaign lies currently careening through the mediasphere as the presidential candidates battle toward November 4 as its foundation.

More

The Institute of Network Cultures, founded by Amsterdam-based media theorist Geert Lovink in 2004, released its fourth reader last Friday. Titled Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube and edited by Lovink and his colleague Sabine Niederer, the book features 34 essays by an international group of writers tackling YouTube video. Rather than simply adopt the usual positions - the celebratory enthusiasm around social media and amateur video production or the highly critical lament about the rampant stupidity of most YouTube fare and the incredible waste of time spent watching clever cats flush toilets - the book instead really looks at YouTube videos as political, cultural and social practices across a spectrum of users.

More

"For thirty years, I've been striving to get the public and edgy art to interface," says LA Freewaves founder and curator Anne Bray (who is also my colleague at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy). This year, that interface for the collision of the public and edgy art will be Hollywood Boulevard between Wilcox Avenue and Orange Drive, October 9 - 13, when the LA Freewaves festival will illuminate the street and its shops, bowling alleys, restaurants and erotic supply stores with over 150 experimental media projects.

More

Video artist Ghosh is fascinated by perceptual confusion, and he'll soon have a chance to alter ordinary perception along Hollywood Boulevard.

That's because Ghosh, a recent graduate of the Design | Media Arts program at UCLA, is one of dozens of artists who will have work on view at the upcoming LA Freewaves Festival of Experimental Media Arts, slated to start October 9, where media art will be showcased inside shops, projected onto walls and displayed on mobile devices carried up and down Hollywood Boulevard.

More

The remake: what's it good for?

Often the bane of audiences at the megaplex, the remake is oddly one of the most popular forms gracing gallery and museum screens around the world. Rather than diligently recreating the original, however, artists making - or remaking - old films tend to dissect, elaborate, scrutinize, question and even mutilate their sources, using the original material as fodder for new ideas and concerns.

LA><ART is currently home to a prime example of the form, namely Silvia Kolbowski's video After Hiroshima Mon Amour, which revisits Alain Resnais' enigmatic 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour, starring Emmanuelle Riva as a French actress who has an affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). Their passionate encounter takes place in Hiroshima, and the city triggers memories of pain and suffering, which disrupt the story's timeline with a series of flashbacks, creating an intriguing story puzzle.

More

Named for a tool in Photoshop, this blog's paired verbs conjure the essence of contemporary Los Angeles media, where once hard and fast boundaries are dissolving, and conversations about media are finding sharper definition and focus, especially as more of us move from being consumers of media to its energetic producers.

I hope this space will highlight both the blurring and sharpening tendencies, celebrating the rich and varied moving images that illuminate LA and hosting conversations that question their shifting significance as cinematic expression expands beyond the theater into galleries and onto outdoor screens, across computer desktops and through mobile devices.

More