Sculpture consists of wall drawing, boom box, cut paper figures & there shadows.

Didactic Pyramid is based off of a performance where Persons B and C hold aloft Person A for the duration of a walk. While Person A is aloft, he suggests to everyone and everything he passes by, what they should  be doing.

The recording of Person A plays from the boom box.




Person A



Person B & Person C

 

The lovely Lumpen Magazine has within the pages of issue #114 an interview with Katie Bachler & myself, spokespeople for the Llano Del Rio Working Group regarding The Map For An Other LA.

Find a copy of the mag, download a pdf here, or read the interview, below!

Lumpen Magazine, Issue 114, Pg. 21

Edmar: An Other LA is a map, a directory and
document of activities and places that describe
LA as an interesting and progressive community.
Can you tell us why you created this project? You
mention an inspiration from Chris Carlsson's
Nowtopia project.

1) In any city, at all times, people are
creating the worlds they live in. Outside of
the stop and go fl ow of urban vectors, and
the history and myths surrounding a place,
we are planting seeds, riding bicycles, imagining
life as magical realism, as nature all
around us, we not buying corporate goods,
we are loving eachother, remembering mountains
and the tectonics that created them
(and us)---- This map aims to situate the
many "other", "radical" ways of being in this
city in the context of eachother, as a network,
as a politic. Nowtopia de-mythologizing a
utopia as something to strive for, an idea of
a whole shift in consciousness. We beleive
that something like a utopia is already taking
place, in secret hollows and mountain tops,
on roofs and under bridges. We made this
map so all the other LA folks could learn
about eachother, and feel powerful from
knowing that this is a movement, made of
lots of mini-movements.

Another LA Is Possible Parts One and Two is a two part exhibition I've organizing with my students at Otis College of Art and Design. Its basic form is call & response. Part One is the call, Part Two is the response.

Participants in Part One are  artists, architects & urbanists; all exploring ways to be in LA beyond a cookie cutter existence: Homegrown Evolution, Sandra de la Loza, Stephanie Smith, Wu Ingrid Tsang and Michael Parker.


Part One of the exhibition is taking place in a non-traditional space, the glass-cabinet of the
hallway  connecting a  parking garage and Lincoln Boulevard. The building is the a redevelopment of an Los Angeles Airport area hotel into the first permitted "mulit-use" residential complex in LA.

The exhibition is mainly trafficked by the buildings' residents, and the show takes advantage of that context. Participants where suggested to use the glass cases to make "didactic displays" to in a sense "teach" how they see other ways we can live together in the city.





Self Irrigating Pots are a planting system that is well suited for apartment dwellers. They are efficient users of water as well as space. For their display case Homegrown Evolution chose to write up, for residents of the building, directions for making there own self irrigating pots. The photo to the left was taken at a workshop held at the building- here Erik and Kelly are explaining apartment gardening techniques.



For the exhibition social architect Stephanie Smith has turned one of the glass cases into a free shelf. This is a graphic she's created suggesting ways that free shelves can be used




















This is a schematic drawing from Wu for the neon light they've put in his case at Another LA Is Possible. The light says both Convivencia and Existence on it. Wu explained that convivencia "is a word that has come up a lot through my silver platter organizing. it's a way people often talk about the social space and it doesn't have a direct english translation. politically historically it refers to "peaceful coexistence" but it also implies "sharing," which creates a kind of contradiction that i think really complexifies my understanding of community. particularly in terms of doing wildness, or any art project anywhere that is site responsive. i haven't seen your vitrines but i imagine that at least symbollically they may pose similar questions."

Part Two of Another LA Is Possible opens Dec. 10th. For that and the rest of the work in Part One check it out your self. Shows are iup through January at 18001 Lincoln Boulevard, in LA.

This Fall my New Genre's Art Class at USC has been collaborating with the Levan Institute For Humanities and Ethics. Come January students will be mounting an exhibition/event. It May Be Legal But Is It Right?, will be a show and happening made up of artwork that engage the students of USC in aesthetic and ethical questions. Students projects will interrogate the ethics of warfare, labor, privacy, business, speech, and authority. The show will be mounted outdoors in a campus quad, with some projects taking place off site, as interventions in the campus architecture.

This semester  our class focused on ways artist engage publics. We looked at rhetoric and theory surrounding the manner by which representational, abstract, and social/relational art are said to connect with people. We considered practice as a form of sociological or behavioral psychology. We looked at artists who create stages or situations for encounter. And we considered the genres of parodic art and service as strategies to interrogate publics.


Students of FA 335 discussing their projects to be made public this January for the show "It May Be Legal But Is It Right?"

Update 4/2/2010...
Show happened, article here!

It is a nice way to involve people.









Technology as mediating device
-hard to transcend to get to day to day

Fear of crossing boundaries.
guilt of talking to much
     Money is supposed to take emotions out of it.

Interpersonality of exchange vs the personal nature of time exchange?

How your value your time your personal worth and how you measure Self Value

The incentive of giving