Postopolis

I'm participating in a five day long series this week:

On the occasion of Los Angeles Art Weekend, Storefront for Art and Architecture and ForYourArt are pleased to announce Postopolis! LA, a live five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, and design to be held in Los Angeles from 31 March to 4 April 2009. Six bloggers, from five different cities around the world, will host a series of discussions, interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and presentations, fusing the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face-to-face interaction.

Over the course of five days, the six host bloggers will invite 40+ participants from a multitude of fields including architecture, urban planning, geology, defense, publishing, game design, artistic practice, oceanography, music, politics and many others to give brief presentations, each followed by a public discussion.

For more information, follow this link.

Publication announcement

We're pleased to announce the third volume in our Surface Tension Supplement series, documenting projects originally based on the Surface Tension exhibition from 2006 held in Curitiba, Brazil. The exhibition led to a further series of urban activities and research, resulting in a number of collaborations and investigations taking place in Brazil and documented in the publication.
A book launch will be held in Curitiba on April 16th at the Ybakatu Gallery.

"Manual for the construction of a cart as a device to elaborate social connection"
Edited by Octávio Camargo and Brandon LaBelle
Errant Bodies Press: Surface Tension Supplement No. 3
ISBN: 978-0-9772594-7-2
19, euro (72 page, color & b/w; English/Portuguese)

Extending artistic research and work taking place since 2006 in Curitiba, Brazil, the publication brings together documentation and related texts that aim to elaborate on the question of finding common space. At its core is an engagement with communities from the local favelas that subsist by traversing the city in search of recyclable materials. Occupying this economic margin, a number of informal expressions arise, from the making of hand-built carts to the circulation of urban myths. Originally as an exhibition developed between international and local artists held at Ybakatu Gallery in Curitiba, the publication raises pertinent questions, such as, what are the consequences of an artistic practice aimed at developing commonality, and how might difference and disparity find productive manifestation in built form?
With contributions by Ricardo Basbaum, Alex Cabral, Octávio Camargo, Ken Ehrlich, Jennifer Gabrys, Brandon LaBelle, Margit Leisner, Josina Melo, Rubens Pileggi, and Ines Schaber.

Charlemagne Palestine in Los Angeles

Performing Schlingen-Blängen on what was described as the world's largest church organ. March 16, 2009.

Jeff Perkins slide performance

On Sunday night a small L.A. audience encountered a performance of light by pioneering artist Jeff Perkins. Associated loosely with Fluxus and known for producing hallucinatory light shows for rock concerts since the 1960's, New York based Perkins was in town screening his documentary film about the painter Sam Francis in conjunction with the CAA conference. Artist Jon Pestoni organized a low key event at the studio of Evan Holloway where Perkins performed a two hour improvised collaboration with musicians Greg Lenczycki and Ted Byrnes. Beginning with a minimal black and white grid like pattern, Perkins produced a mesmerizing, flickering light show with the relatively simple use of four slide projectors and two spinning disks. The musicians performed relatively well but at times it felt like they were attempting to compete with the masterful hand of someone who's been playing with shadows to astonishing effect for all these years.

Bruce Sterling, novelist and tech writer, has an interesting take on what referred to web 2.0 over at wired. Beware of the techno-philia but there are certainly some interesting ideas in the piece.