Critical Mass in SM was last night, which was really fun. I’m happy to have fixed my bike up this week, so that I could begin riding it extensively. Me and Taka had our first adventure, riding with the pack from the SM Pier all the way to Marina Del Ray, via Venice.
It was slightly less organized that some critical masses i’ve been in, but no less fun. The group got broken up and reformed several times and we lost one or two to the police along the way… Highlights included: reaching a roundabout and having the mass encircle the roundabout for several minutes. Bike racing in a Ralphs parking lot. The ride back along the beach bike path by night.
Link.
Week one of graduate school is officially complete. I wouldn’t say that I’ve been working my fingers to the bone yet, but It has certainly been a mentally engaging week, full of group and individual meetings, small presentations and introductions. And while I do feel much more comfortable around the facilities, I am still not settled in to a work-conducive environment yet. That will hopefully be remedied this weekend when I move all my crap into the studio.
So I thought, for whoever is reading this blog anyway, I would give a brief rundown of the presentation I gave to my Dynamic Media class (which is basically my studio course). Christian Moeller, our professor asked us to chose a theme and give a brief presentation on it. Then we had a day to come up with 12 ideas for a project that could be done relatively quickly. We met with him individually so that he could rifle through them speedily and subject us to his curt, German sense of judgment: 
NO.. NO… YES… CRAP…. BEAUTIFUL… BORING…. YES……. WHAT ELSE? It felt a bit like having a blood exam, but in the end I was surprised to hear him refer to my ideas as “entertaining”.
My presentation hovered around several ideas that are of interest to me at the moment: the spectacle of technological breakdown and dysfunction, purposeful/clever misuse of technology, instances where beauty is revealed through error… I’m interested in the exposure of the mechanism and the exploitation of it’s shortcomings. This relates to some of my earlier research on the work of the structural filmmakers and the artists they influenced.
My ideas were all over the place, but the most interesting and feasible ones, and also the one’s Christian gravitated towards, were a series of lo-fi mechanical sculptures that would mimic or reflect on neurotic human behavior. The titles were things like, “machine that tries to draw a perfect circle”, etc. I’m attracted to this idea of building imperfect machines because A) I’m bad at building machines and B) I’m interested in the process of discovering the most natural/imperfect way to make a machine do something. I also think it could be more challenging, say in the example above, to figure out how to make it not draw a perfect circle (making a robot draw perfect shapes is probably very simple.
These ideas aren’t revolutionary, but I think they’re interesting and also, they’ll put me on the path to working on something here and potentially lead to different/more unique projects. Being creative is a process and it has to begin somewhere, even if if that somewhere is heavily influenced by existing work/ideas.
