"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. The five-day showcase is organized around a series of themes, including Friday night's Visual Music emphasis, the Streetwise Mobile Media day on Saturday, and Sunday's Remapping Hollywood, featuring self-portraits that offer diverging visions of Hollywood.
Bray's goal in part is to make sure that conversations about the future of urban space include art. "As cities grow," she says, "market forces, particularly franchises, often determine the direction of the development." Artists, both those based in LA and those sending communiqués from faraway cities, have a lot to say about the role of art in the future of urban life, and the festival, with its exuberance and eclecticism, is helping showcase those points of view.
The festival is also a testament to the growing interconnectedness between networked spaces and lived spaces. The festival's Web site offers one home to information and media, and the street offers yet another. However, the two intersect in interesting ways. Indeed, Bray notes that she's very interested in how "the street converges with the Web site" and how "the virtual interacts with the real," and these are pressing issues in a world in which the street is not only home to many more large-scale projections, often advertising products, but also a site for politicized responses as mediamakers fight back with digital graffiti or their own projections. Add mobile media devices and the growing role of pervasive computing, and the sense of a networked public inhabiting the city's spaces becomes very exciting.
the detailsFreewaves 11th Festival of New Media Arts
"Hollywould"
October 9 - 13, 2008
http://www.freewaves.org
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