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I came out and attended your reading last Friday and still have a lot of questions. But to keep it brief, I have made a list of major ones:
Je ne sais pas, Monsieur Balibar.
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Neil Denari, former head honcho of SCI-ARC in Los Angeles and current faculty in the Department of Art and Architecture at UCLA came out to the UCSB campus on Friday, Feb. 25th, to talk about his book Gyroscopic Horizons.
A few points of interest came to mind with respects to Denari's talk. First, Gyroscopic Horizons was written 10 years ago. What did Neil have to say about his ideas of the Los Angeles landscape now in comparison to when he first came out with his book? Second, he made reference to John Boorman's film Point Blank (1967) ; what was his relationship to this film? And to throw in a third inquiry, how does he see his role as an architect in spite of his wily sense as a media and cultural theorist? Denari viewed media as an eidetic form of representation, as a world of illusion. "Most of our lives are played out in 2-D," he said, and that our spatial perception changes through media techniques. "Our experience becomes a 2-D image," with abstract signs ... more like the language of a graphic designer. The issue of identity is fluid and fluctual, as that could be said for LA and the 10 years that Denari has lived there. He imagines himself as the character Walker, which Lee Marvin portrays in Point Blank. And just like Walker, Denari is "looking for something that he wants" as he navigates through the streets of LA. He presented the idea of "inhabiting where you are as you are on your own," and related back to Walker reconfiguring his past and present in which he invokes LA, cities, the desert, concrete buildings... and ultimately providing an everywhere-ness. One of the "weird taboos" that Denari admitted during his talk is that "architecture doesn't communicate enough" and found weakness in discourse unless architecture is a spectacle. He wants both sides of the coin, where architecture can behave like media, but doesn't want to give up the structure of architecture. He wants to expose the problems in architecture and its role in media. After his talk, I asked Neil how he saw himself between a media theorist, the "horrible film snob" that he calls himself, and as an architect. He usually identifies himself formally as an architect, but hasn't necessarily thought about his role as an agent. Rather, he is simply an architect with specific interests. From his talk I still ask myself how this applies to the world of art and public/social practice: as artists, what things must we consider in engaging our viewers to experience their everyday eidetically? Last weekend I attended the GIS Conference hosted by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) here at UCSB. I watched one of my colleagues, Desiree D'Alessandro present her past work from her Desert Studies class with Dick Hebdige last year. Out of the presenters I was really interested in Brett Stalbaum's Transborder Immigrant Tool, a project that he and a group of collaborators from San Diego have undertaken for some years now. Brett had created a simple GPS tracking program and installed it into an old cell phone, which would be used by transborder immigrants find local water stations to keep them from dehydrating out in the desert. The use of this locative media serves as a short-term emergency tool for these nomadic survivalists to seek aid. This project stirred up plenty of controversy in the past (and it still does), which angered right-winged groups in San Diego. There is even a misguiding video of Glenn Beck with inaccurate information about the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Brett and his team are still refining their project as they have made efforts in working with local NGOs and a non-profit that already offer rescue aid to transborder immigrants. With technology advances in cell phones, Brett is looking forward to the decrease in value of Nokia phone models that will become relatively cheap for purchase and transform them into working locative tools. The Transborder Immigrant Tool project made me think more about my current undertaking with the parks in Isla Vista and using GPS tracking devices, Tracksticks, to record movement and collect data. I asked him questions and he and his wife Paula Poole stopped by my studio to see more closely where I am heading with this project. He mentioned that it might be worth pursuing having conversations with the homeless that are currently inhabiting the park spaces to see if they want to be tracked or to at least bridge a dialogue with them. For me, I have asked myself, "what will that relationship be defined as with my impending conversations with the homeless, and what do they really need?" among many other questions which I have yet to develop an answer. But I feel that there is one coming. The grads and I had our 1st-year review on Monday. Our presentation and work was satisfactory enough to the faculty for us to advance to candidacy and we are now one step forward - really that means we are one year and a half away from completing our MFA degree. Time flies fast.
Next spring will be our 1st-year exhibition, where our developing work will culminate into a group show. Information will be posted forthcoming. |
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Van (rhymes with "fun") C. Tran Archives
September 2018
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