Blogs
Huell Howser
Where's Huell 3/22 - 3/28
By Web Team
March 22, 2010
Huell Howser is not one to dwell on the unremarkable and let's face it, milking a cow is nothing remarkable. Milking camels, however — that is a conversation starter if ever there was one. Join Huell at Oasis Camel Dairy to find out why some have moved beyond the cow. For more information, you can always visit Huell's website.
Where We Are
Uneasy riders
By D.J. Waldie
March 21, 2010
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is a professor of Urban Planning in the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA. One theme of her work is the sidewalk, specifically the experience of women as they negotiate the spaces that connect places of shelter – a car, an office building, a store, a home . . . or a bus.
In a recent interview with Planetizen, Loukaitou-Sideris noted that: Permalink DiscussThink Tank LA
The L.A. Job Of The Week
By Jeremy Rosenberg
March 19, 2010
Think all the good gigs are extinct? The Natural History Museum is hiring dinosaurs.
The following text is copied from the application link on the NHM website:
Permalink Discuss404 City
In a QWERTY World, Love is Hard
By Ophelia Chong
March 19, 2010
Ever try texting this?
"I never knew till that moment, the madness of -- my dearest & most beloved friend -- I cannot express myself -- this is no time for words -- but I shall have a pride, a melancholy pleasure, in suffering what you yourself can hardly conceive -- for you don not know me. -- I am now about to go out with a heavy heart..."- Lord Byron
Blur + Sharpen
Giant Machine
By Holly Willis
March 19, 2010
"We wanted to make a video where we have essentially a giant machine that we dance with," says OK Go band member Damian Kulash, Jr. about the band's latest music video, which was made in collaboration with the LA-based art and engineering collective Synn Labs. Composed in a single shot with a Steadicam following the path of action set in motion by a toy truck colliding with a line of dominoes, the simply spectacular video includes lots of rolling balls, falling umbrellas and splashing paint interwoven perfectly with the song "This Too Shall Pass." A short article in Wired describes the video's production, which included six weeks of strenuous work by a core group of 12 builders in large studio space in Echo Park; the actual shoot involved 60 takes over two days to capture the perfect sequence of events. The resulting video is eminently watchable, and echoes previous Rube Goldberg machine experiments, such as the notorious 1987 video by artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss called The Way Things Go, which was in turn repeated by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet's homage in the award-winning Honda Accord commercial "Cog," featuring a nicely polished nuts-and-bolts machine. Yet another connection could be made with Timo Arnall and BERG's project titled "Nearness," which explores a more high tech sequence, moving from analog to digital, and playing with what's visible and invisible. Each of the videos is seeming non-narrative, but in being totally rooted in cause and effect, they are really all about narrative, and this is part of their allure: storytelling stripped to its core. The OK Go video will be featured at the upcoming Flux quarterly screening Tuesday, March 23 at the Hammer Museum, with a mix of other new music videos and motion graphics pieces.
the detailsFlux Screening Series
Tuesday, March 23, 8:00 - 11:00 p.m.
Hammer Museum
Screening and party, with DJ Tim Nordwind
Free; RSVP suggested
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Blur + Sharpen
Dancing Alphabet
By Holly Willis
March 18, 2010
The letter G zooms across the screen, bounces against the lower edge and tumbles backwards, Pong-style while grunting "gu, gu, gu, gu." Add a B and an R and you get the soft bumping of B sounds and a rolling R as the letters continue to careen up and down and back and forth. Yes, it's been a long day, and I can't stop playing with Jorg Piringer's amazing and beautiful kinetic alphabet application for the iPhone. Titled abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, it's an example of exuberant visual poetry and I like it for its graceful but fun interface, but I'm also thinking about it in the context of literacies for pre-schoolers. What would they think of it?
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Think Tank LA
5 Better Places for a Protest
By Jeremy Rosenberg
March 17, 2010
The New America Foundation has a California outpost. Ex-Los Angeles Times staffer Joe Mathews is among the think tank's in-state fellows.
In an early March blog post, Mathews uses the occasion of college students protesting higher school costs to point out the relative futility of holding these rallies on campuses (where they are preaching to the choir) and outside the State Capitol building ("a waste of time," Mathews says).
Instead, Mathews offers up "5 Better Places to Protest Than a College Campus." They include: gas stations, freeways, and retirement communities.
Permalink DiscussBlur + Sharpen
Activated Spaces
By Holly Willis
March 17, 2010
What I like about Kate Mondloch's new book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art is that she dismisses the simple assumption that just because you're moving around when you're viewing installation art you're active, and therefore not a passive receiver of information. She's much more critical in her robust look at a range of key media installation artworks from the early 1960s onward, focusing specifically on the interactions between the viewing subject and the object. These "activated spaces" provide rich opportunities for reflection on the ways in which screens - tv screens, computer screens, and now even billboards - position us. Her descriptions of Bruce Nauman's amazing video corridors, for example, show how he's able to "discipline" us by getting us to bend and contort ourselves in awkward configurations, while other artworks focus on time, asking us to think about how time unspools inside a gallery space populated by moving images of some kind. Do we "window shop," moving from screen to screen? Or do we hang out and watch? What kinds of "architectures" help determine our behavior? Mondloch's chapters are thematic, and she writes about artists as varied as Paul Sharits, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Doug Aitken and Valie Export. While media installation art is not new, it can be hard to find compelling critical analysis. Screens provides a sustained, interesting reflection on that curious in-between space dividing viewers and screens, and Mondloch, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Oregon, acts as a passionate and sophisticated guide. (Image: from Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage))
Permalink DiscussBlur + Sharpen
Precious Images
By Holly Willis
March 16, 2010
Each year the Library of Congress designates 25 special films for the film registry, and by extension, for preservation. The criteria for inclusion? Works that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant. Films selected for 2009 include The Red Book, a lovely, mysterious 11-minute collage animation by LA artist Janie Geiser, which explores Geiser's trademark themes of memory, language and loss. Also selected was Chuck Workman's spectacular eight-minute tour of American cinema made in 1986 and titled Precious Images. Composed of more than 500 clips from classical Hollywood feature films, the short is a testament to the magic of cinema, and to the power of editing as Workman finds ways to craft mini-stories and narrative arcs through juxtaposition. Winsor McCay's contribution to the early history of animation was also selected. Little Nemo borrows from McCay's celebrated and surreal comic strip, and while the film only includes two minutes of actual animation in its total 11 minute run-time, they're wonderful moments, capturing the early excitement of drawings in motion. Filmforum will present eight of the selected films next Sunday night, and Geiser and Workman will be present for a discussion after the screening. (Image: from The Red Book.)
the detailsThe Film Registry Show!
Selections From the 2009 Picks by the Library of Congresss
LA Filmforum
Sunday, March 21, 2010; 7:30 p.m.
Egyptian Theater in Hollywood
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Blur + Sharpen
Coming Up: Transmedia Storytelling
By Holly Willis
March 15, 2010
Worldbuilding, mythmaking, over-design: these are just some of the terms that characterize the emerging world being dubbed "transmedia storytelling," a concept best explained by Henry Jenkins, who in 2006 described transmedia in a book titled Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. The book outlines the cultural shifts that affect media production, highlighting, for example, the increased role of fans, who now form social and creative communities around certain kinds of works (such has the Harry Potter franchise). Jenkins notes that the aesthetic goals of convergence culture projects include serving as "cultural attractors" by bringing people together, and as "cultural activators" by providing opportunities for participation. Works that combine attraction and activation might also offer raw materials for continued fan remix, as well as a means for monitoring and amplifying these activities so that fans gain recognition from peers. Even in this very simple, four-part elaboration, it's clear that the work of "authoring" in convergence culture is vastly different from simply writing a great book or movie script. Jenkins, along with his colleague Denise Mann, will host an all-day symposium tomorrow at USC titled Transmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story to talk about the implications of this new form of creativity, asking, for example, if this is an entirely new way of thinking about storytelling, as well as, simply, how do you imagine, design and create these sprawling story worlds that move from one medium to the next? (Image: from the cover of Convergence Culture
the detailsTransmedia, Hollywood: S/Telling the Story
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
9:00 a.m. - 8:00 p.m.
University of Southern California
School of Cinematic Arts
Free to students; $25 general public
Permalink Discuss
Huell Howser
Where's Huell? 3/15 - 3/21
By Web Team
March 15, 2010
What does a Chicago baseball team and a rocky island off the Californian coast have in common? William Wrigley. This week, Huell uncovers Catalina's surprising role in baseball history.For more information on Huell, visit his website.
Think Tank LA
L.A. Expert: Has America Lost Its Mojo?
By Jeremy Rosenberg
March 15, 2010
That's the question headlining a recent blog post by Nina Hachigian, a Los Angeles-based Senior Fellow of the Center for American Progress.
Hachigian's answer: No, not in the long run.
"It is bleak now," writes Hachigian, "but Americans should step back from the ledge because the future is looking up."
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KCET Local Blogs
404 City- Los Angeles is the ultimate networked metropolis, and in 404 City blogger Ophelia Chong takes a look at our diverse web of communities, all of them interwoven by freeways, shared history, media, automobiles, and the ever present digital penumbra of cell-phones and computers.
Blur + Sharpen- Blur + Sharpen is an insider’s look at Los Angeles’ vibrant and globe-trotting community of new media artists. It is curated by Holly Willis.
Cakewalk- Cakewalk is journalist and op-ed columnist Erin Aubry Kaplan's first-person account of politics and identity in Los Angeles, with an eye towards the city's African American community.
City of Angles- From City Hall to the City Council, from the County Board of Supervisors to the L.A. Unified School District, from elections to ballot measures to budgets to scandals, Brian Doherty's "City of Angles" will help you understand and appreciate all the angles of L.A.'s always lively and often perplexing political scene.
The Guest Room- Every now and then we'll be asking one of your neighbors - famous, anonymous, maybe infamous - to share a few blog posts about their corner of Southern California. Past guest bloggers have included NPR host Madeleine Brand and journalist Ki-Min Sung.
Movie Miento- Movie Miento is a poetic exploration of Los Angeles history, Latino culture and overall sense of place, darting across LA’s physical and psychic borders. It is written by poet and journalist Adolfo Guzman-Lopez.
Pixeltown- KCET Local's editorial team crawls the SoCal web and brings you the best of local blogs, video, film, television and other pixellated curiosities.
Think Tank LA- Think Tank L.A. is a slow-boil chronicling of the goings-on at policy centers, research institutions, and the like in and around the Southland – and beyond. The blog covers the tanks themselves, the people who work at them, and the big ideas so often born at tanks. It is written by Jeremy Rosenberg.
Where We Are- Where We Are is an ongoing examination of LA's twinned identities as urban and suburban written by one of the area's great chroniclers, D. J. Waldie.