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?