I hope everybody had a safe and happy New Year celebration, and is enjoying the first week of 2008!
I’ve spent the past week here at Tammy’s apartment in the Mission. The experience has been different from the usual visit, because much of the beginning of it involved moving/cleaning. But overall it’s been really enjoyable. Seeing some of my other friends has also been an added bonus.
Out of the many things we’ve done, a couple have stood out. Haight/Ashberry was interesting and certainly charming, but damn, did I ever feel totally un-hip after attempting to shop there. It’s my own damn fault for refusing to spend $100 on some allover print hoodie and neon pink sunglasses. Which way is the GAP? There’s an Amoeba Music there too, which was huge and awesome.
JapanTown was excellent as usual. I’d say it’s even better than LA’s Little Tokyo. Much bigger and cleaner with more stores. The inside of the mall areas reminded me alot of the winding hallways of many of Tokyo’s larger subway stations (ramen shops, etc.). Okay, Art stuff:
Amisha gave me a VIP tour of The Exploratorium, which was really fun, but somewhat stressful at the same time. The space is really large and was packed to the rafters with screaming children on field trips. I felt bad wanting to shove them out of the way to play with the exhibits because they’re sort of the primary audience. . . But the exhibits were very cool. How could they not be? One great thing about the space is that the woodshop where some of the exhibits are made features very prominently as part of the museum, with clear walls to observe how things get made.
The Olafur Eliasson show at SFMOMA was as great as everybody told me it was. I don’t really intend to write a detailed review of the show, but suffice it to say that it was simply delightful. His work is always really impressive, fun and experiential. One highlight, was a room full of models, tests and experiments made of various cheap/raw materials. It was a bit like peaking into his studio. Seeing this sort of process work featured as a major part of the exhibition was great because it emphasized the importance of testing, iteration and failure, in my opinion. It was a good reminder to myself never forget how important process is. Then, there was an ice sculpture/car piece that I didn’t quite understand. I mean to say, I read the description and understand the political significance of doing it…But admittedly, it seems a bit “bloated” when compared to the other pieces which as you can imagine, are very simple, elegant and beautiful.
I got to meet Craig Baldwin, which was an unexpected surprise. One of my classmates and former student of his, took me to his studio/exhibition space (ATA) on Valencia to meet him. Having watched his films in college, I was nerding out a little bit and didn’t talk much. But I didn’t really need to because Baldwin was already quite excitable and talkative. He went into detail about the new film he’s working on (all about Scientology myths and scandals, and much much more!) and showed us around his crazy, messy studio space (which made perfect sense to him), including his massive, massive film archive, which is modestly crammed into a room in his basement. AMAZING. He’ll be lecturing at D|MA this fall as part of our grad “curated” lecture series. I’ll report on that when it comes!
That’s all that comes to mind for now. Now i’ll just blurt out some other great stuff; mostly places i’ve eaten. “Mission Pie” makes great…pie. We had a lovely breakfast there on New Years Day. Dogeared Books, Needles and Pens (DIY goods) and Aquarius Records on Valencia are all awesome establishments. David showed me an awesome alley full of wall paintings (Clarion Alley) that I would never have found on my own. Philz Coffee is my new favorite place to get coffee. I bought a pound of one of their many delicious handmade blends to take back to LA. Oh, and don’t ride on the rails. Dangerous!
San Francisco is a great city; You can get around without a car, people are interesting, Mexican food is amazing, and so on and so on. And now my girlfriend and best friends live here! What more could a guy ask for?
I’ll add pictures after I upload them.
Filed under: art
The REDCAT gallery downtown (next to the Disney Concert Hall) has an awesome show up right now of Barry Mcgee’s work.
Went to check it out last weekend and I was very impressed. Seeing really prolific graphic/street art/grafitti inspired artists always makes me a bit jealous. I sometimes wish I worked in a way that could be quicker and cheaper, like Mcgee. Seeing a huge room full of colorful drawings, quick paintings, grafitti and simple mechanical gags was really impressive. I especially love how he created these artificial bulges in the wall and hung the drawings/paintings edge to edge, salon style over the bulges.
My favorite piece in the whole show is a simple mechanical sculpture of a wooden head knocking itself against a wall repeatedly…..thud……thud……thud…..thud. Quick, cheap and clever; I’d like to maybe make some stuff like that next. Who knows?
That’s right folks, mkontopoulos.com is the new michaelkontopoulos.com
In the process of switching hosting services, I lost my old domain name! The silly thing is, it wasn’t bought by an individual, but instead, it looks like there are companies out there that buy recently expired domain names and sell them back for outrageous amounts. Long story short: I had to pick a new domain name. I suppose it’s not that big of a loss, aside from the hassle of having to report the change to everybody who is linked to me, etc. . .
My new website is very close to being finished! I am aiming to have it uploaded by tonight, and then I can finally go outside again. You would have found out eventually; really, I just wanted to show off the funny hipster picture.
If you are interested in interactive art and digital music, you’ve probably watched this video on youtube about 1,200 times already, or have seen other works by Toshio Iwai. Now, if you had decided to set aside $1 each time you watched that video, you’d have enough to actually purchase one.
Last Tuesday, there was a UK launch of Iwai’s Tenori-On, which is now being made by Yamaha. It’s pretty amazing to see a piece of digital interactive art being manufactured as a high-end product. But then again, for Iwai, that concept is not completely foreign, as one can see by the success of other endeavors like ElectroPlankton for Nintendo DS. Still, for me it is interesting to consider the strange space between commercial product and art object that Tenori-On occupies: Even though the price is outrageous by ordinary commercial standards, it does tend to foster a sense of art-object “preciousness”. Plus, the “launch party” photos look more like an art gallery opening. How much could it seriously cost to manufacture one of these? It reminds me of Jacob Ciocci from PaperRad talking about the fishiness between selling a DVD in an art gallery for hundreds of dollars vs. burning one free for his friends.
Check out this website for a more detailed account of the launch party
Last night, north of Silver Lake was the annual Frogtown Artwalk, which is where a bunch of artists who live in loft spaces by the LA river opened up their studios. One of my new classmates was DJ’ing there so I went meet him and see the studios. The work was okay, mostly photography and 2D work. And there was the occasional sculptor and steel worker. For me though, the highlight of the night was hanging out at Brand Name Label, a group of fabricators/artists who seemed to work mostly with steel and other industrial materials.
They had built this incredibly fun “swing” that is counterweighted at the top so that the participant makes smooth 360 degree rotations. The seat also rotates 360. Riding it was like living that childhood fantasy of swinging so high you go over the top bar. This was excactly that sensation but on a much larger scale (and with a more secure harness). It was really great fun. Check out the video:
After a short period of hibernation, I had a pretty eventful weekend.
Oddly enough, Thursday and Friday were punctuated by two monkey-related events. The first being
Gorilla Thursdays at ghettogloss, a small gallery in Silver Lake. I saw some local art, watched a bit of planet of the apes, had my picture taken with a girl in a gorilla suit. What really sealed the deal though, was stumbling across the Red Lion, just up the street: a proper, campy, German beer garden. As soon as Doug and I walked in I thought to myself “oh hell yes.” The walls were wood-paneled, there were Germany decorations everywhere and a guy was playing jazz piano. Plus the waitresses were all wearing cute German dresses. Friday night found me at the third happy hour worldwide at the El Portal Theater in north Hollywood, which also featured some monkey shenanigans. It was basically a party in a movie theater that revolved around an hour-long screening of independent and commercial short films and videos of all shapes and sizes. The screening finished with a live clarinet/accordion/tuba band playing the Star Wars theme song while beach balls started flying everywhere. Believe it. We left around 11:30 which luckily left just enough time to speed over to this next gem:
At midnight, the Nuart Theater in Santa Monica screened, to a sold out crowd that we barely got into, Troll 2. This film is notoriously one of the worst-made, worst-acted and most preposterous B-horror movies of all time. All the funny reviews and second-hand accounts of it are dwarfed by the asphyxiating hilariousness of actually seeing it for ones self. To put things in further perspective, the neighboring artsy-video store has it listed in its “Holy f*cking sh*t!” section. Apparently, eighteen or so years after being made, Troll 2 is experiencing a camp renaissance. It’s got this huge cult following that became apparent to me when practically the entire theater recited all the funny lines and scenes (every line and scene). So its on a screening tour with the cast and director, who were there for an equally side-splitting Q&A afterwards. The child that played the protagonist of the film (now much older) is making a documentary about it called The Best Worst Movie.
Tonight was more laid back. I got to the MOMA downtown to see a performance from Saul Williams, the celebrated spoken word poet, singer/rapper, writer. I don’t usually go to see spoken word being performed, so in fairness, I don’t know how to judge it. But it was certainly enlightening and entertaining to watch. It’s always a pleasure to witness a really great orator and performer at work. Plus it’s just cool, in general, to see a bunch of hip, well-dressed people come out to watch poetry on a Saturday night in LA.
Sorry I didn’t get a chance to write from Siggraph. The installation went smoothly, but I always felt bad sitting at the computer while other people were working!
First things first: I didn’t make it to the zoo. I know, I know; No need to twist the knife, people. But SD is so close to LA, I’m sure I’ll see panda’s soon enough.
A few words on Siggraph: It seems to be one of those events that is worthwhile to show in, at least once if you get a chance. The collection was unapologetically odd, however. There were a couple big names, some even CMU and UCLA related. But then there was also a TON of painfully mediocre digitally manipulated photography. I mean, c’mon people! Aren’t we over this yet? I got that feeling about some of the media art projects too, but mostly from the projects in the “Emerging Technologies” section. Oh, I also got a peek at Microsof Surface, which is basically a giant iPhone on its side by the look of it. I think the most interesting feature of Surface will be its ability to interface with physical hardware. To me though, this is a clear sign that its initial marketing will be almost exclusively to hotel lobbies, phone stores and things like that. For example, imagine going into a phone store, placing your phone onto the surface and, using some interface, dragging ringtones or package options into the circle drawn around your phone or something like that. Or putting your mp3 player (made my Microsoft, duh) on it and dragging mp3’s from your library onto the area where the player. Then they go wirelessly into it. What annoyed me about the presentation of it though was how they talked about gestural interfaces as though nothing like it had ever been conceived, completely omitting any mention of all the other research being done by interaction designers in the field of multi-touch and gestural interfaces. Jeff Han, comes to mind.
Events will continue there all week, but I only planned on going for the installation. I am kinda disappointed about missing a few things, notably the (slightly out of place) Siggraph fashion show, the animation theater will all the 3D animation shorts, and a performance by DMA alum, Takeshi. Some cool work I saw there included Ingo Gunther’s WORLDPROCESSOR project, Mark Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden, Shawn Lawson’s Wu Wei.
San Diego is a lot smaller than I thought. There seem to be some interesting pockets and the weather was nice, but overall I don’t think i’d ever want to live there. I spent most of my time around the southern end of the city, by the convention center and the “gaslamp district” which is full of overpriced restaurants that cater to the convention center’s company credit-card type crowd. The padres were playing at the nearby stadium so that area was also full of bros. Also bike-taxi’s are HUGE there! As an unexpected and pleasant surprise, though, I also got to see my friend Ali again, who was volunteering there.
To sum up — Siggraph: Kinda cool/kinda weird. San Diego: Meh…
Oh, and don’t ever, ever, ever drive a rental car to Tijuana…ever… (ever). There’s a story there, but i’m too embarrassed to tell it!
I’m off to San Diego tomorrow for a couple of days. I’ll be helping Osman Khan install his piece, SEEN, in the SIGGRAPH gallery. I’ll try to update from San Diego if possible. SIGGRAPH is an annual conference on creative research of many different sorts.
I’m looking forward to seeing SIGGRAPH, as I’ve often heard quite a bit about it. If I have any free time, I really want to go to the San Diego Zoo and see the Pandas. They fascinate me…
If there’s one thing i’ve learned about LA so far, it’s that if there’s a free event and it’s even mildly cool you’ve got to show up really…really early for it! The Hammer museum was having a screening of David Lynch’s new film Inland Empire tonight with a Q&A after. They’ve been having cool events all summer and I was so excited to go to this one. Well the screening filled up FAST so I didn’t get in, unfortunatly. But dammit, I came back for the Q&A session even though I hadn’t seen the film!
Seeing Lynch talk was a pleasure. He’s a really funny guy despite what you might gather from his aesthetic. I also learned that he’s got his own brand of coffee, and every morning he reads the weather forecast on Indie 103.1. The talk itself was pretty short but entertaining. I’m really looking forward to watching the film; it comes out on dvd in about 2 weeks and from what I gather, is rather unique because Lynch shot it all on digital video and (I think) did a lot of the camera work himself. It was interesting to hear him talk about how the project started with him just getting ideas for a scene and shooting it. Through this process happening several times, he started to get new ideas about piecing them together into a feature length. I like how that methodology mirrors art-making in a lot of ways. Not to say film isn’t art-making, of course, but…you know, usually films are more planned out.
At the end of the talk, 9 “valley girls” that appear in the movie came out onto the stage and did a choreographed dance to “The Locomotion”. God Bless America.
I was at a gallery show downtown last night and in the adjacent building I just happened to see this excellent project by Graffiti Research Lab that I’ve seen online many times, being “performed” live:
The whole system was really impressive and robust. People were having a great time using it and tagging their names up huge on the side of the building.
