Special Thursday Evening SalonMel ChinThursday, February 11, 2010, 7.00-9.00pmFree

There is no (a) solution, because there is no (a) problem

Or: Making a 300 Million Dollar Difference with Conceptual

Art in the Age of Disaster and other Repetitive Negativities

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Farmlab Public SalonMarcos Lutyens & Alessandro MarianantoniFriday, February 12, 2010 @ NoonFree Admission

Parts per million: Phase transitions in awareness

This Salon highlights Marcos Lutyens' and Alessandro Marianantoni's ongoing project CO2morrow, a large scale installation on the facade of the Royal Academy, London, UK in the exhibit eARTh: Art of a changing world. The installation will travel to various National Trust properties in the UK through 2010. The project explores the relationship between public awareness, perception and atmospheric conditions, particularly CO2 levels, and its effects on social and cultural issues.

Marcos Lutyens is an intermedia artist who has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale of Art and shows curated by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the image Festival in Italy and the the Royal Academy in the United Kingdom. He has often worked with the process of hypnosis to explore the unconscious and associated schema, and collaborated with Matt Mullican, Raimundas Malasauskas and other artists and curators. He recently performed at Artists Space, NYC, Kunstverein, Amsterdam and the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and is involved with continuing explorations into the mind. He engaged in experiments with Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, at the University of California, San Diego to explore the brain's neural pathways in the synesthetic mind. His work with the mind, has lead him to develop events and exhibits that reflect research with specific social or ethnic groups such as the Muxhe, from the Zapotec culture in Southern Mexico.

Building on his investigations into consciousness and social dynamics, Lutyens has worked on large scale projects that involve interactivity, the environment and new technologies. Works include data tracking, feedback from vehicle traffic and pedestrian flows, pollution and air quality levels, brain wave monitoring and other objective factors that are generally invisible to the casual observer, and yet as important to us as the subjective processes of the inner mind.

Alessandro Marianantoni works on projects across different fields: culture, technology, environment and art with a multi-disciplinary approach.He produced several interactive art installations exhibited between Los Angeles and Italy, receiving public and private sponsorships. He earned a degree in Computer Science from the University of L'Aquila, with a thesis on perceptual interfaces at the USC Integrated Media System Center, afterwards he was a researcher at the UCLA REMAP center at the Theater, Film and TV Dept where, across different projects he was able to enrich his research in technology. While based in Los Angeles he often travels to Italy where, with public funding, he started MEDIARS, an Experimental Center focused on Cultural Heritage and Technology. As a program director at MEDIARS he runs the international summer program Art, Technology and Cultural Heritage in the Castle of Contigliano. Over the last 15 years he has designed and developed innovative projects involving music, healthcare and environment.

Further Information: www.co2morrow.net, www.mlutyens.com

Image courtesy Marcos Lutyens

Metabolic Studio Public SalonSimon BalmFriday, February 5, 2010, NoonFree Admission

A Year at the South Pole

Simon Balm will describe his experiences during a year spent at the South Pole conducting astronomical research in one of the coldest and extreme environments on Earth.

A native of London, England, Simon Balm received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry from the University of Durham in 1988 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Sussex in 1992, working with Nobel Prize winning chemist Sir Harold Kroto. After graduate school he spent two years as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow in the UCLA Astronomy Department followed by four years as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA where he helped to design, build and install a radio telescope at the geographical South Pole. After several Summer visits to the Antarctic he wintered-over with the telescope at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station during the 1995-1996 season as a scientist with United States Antarctic Program.

Following his work in the Antarctic he spent several years teaching Astronomy as an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and then joined Santa Monica College as a full time faculty member in the Fall of 2000 where he is currently a Professor of Astronomy and Chemistry in the Department of Earth Sciences. In December of 2006 he traveled to the Antarctic again with renowned Santa Monica artist Lita Albuquerque as the science advisor on the first large-scale art installation to be placed on the continent.

Simon has many interests outside of academia including, hiking, mountaineering, swimming, scuba diving and horse riding. He also runs a small IT consulting business and is a musician, playing the trombone in a local community symphony orchestra.

Image: An aurora over the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station in winter

Courtesy: National Science Foundation

Metabolic Studio Public SalonAnne BrayFriday, January 29, 2010, NoonFree Admission

Ads or Art or ?

Ad companies want to add 800+ electronic billboards to Los Angeles. Thousands are up illegally in LA. What do we want to do with our public space? To whom will you sell your eyeballs? Is public space best used to pump the economy during global warming? As ads switch from intrusive to inclusive experiences, what is their difference from art? LA City has tried for 2 years to legally distinguish art and ads and has failed to find words. Can you help? Does free speech cover ads? What is zoning? How have other cities presented large scale art and contained ad space? How can the arts in Los Angeles respond to her streets as evocatively as ad companies? Must our city be covered with ads? Why?

MAK Center for Art & Architecture is commissioning over 20 artist billboards in Spring 2010 through its outdoor exhibition How Many Billboards. In advance of the three panel discussions she will be composing moderating for the MAK Center in conjunction with this exhibition, Anne Bray will ponder these questions and more. Sample works will amply illustrate ideas.

Anne Bray is an artist, teacher and Director of Freewaves, a media arts organization in Los Angeles. She developed the concept of the multicultural network of media artists and venues in 1989 and has continued to see the organization through the technological, social and aesthetic changes of the 1990s to now. As an artist she exhibits her work as temporary installations in public sites and art venues combining personal and social positions via video, audio, slides and 3-d screens at gas stations, malls, movie theaters, on TV, in department stores, on billboards, and now wants art to be everywhere. She teaches public art and multimedia at Claremont Graduate University and USC.

Image courtesy of Anne Bray

Chosen as a “Best of Los Angeles Art Month” by ForYourArt

Farmlab Public SalonJ. Eric LynxwilerFriday, January 22, 2010 @ NoonFree Admission

Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles

The acclaimed Los Angeles history book by J. Eric Lynxwiler and Kevin Roderick, Wilshire Bouelvard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles, tells numerous stories from what has been called the backbone of the city. The Brown Derby, The Ambassador Hotel and Bullock's Wilshire create a holy trinity of our city's culture, but there are other aspects to Wilshire's development that make it a cross section of Los Angeles life. Please join J. Eric Lynxwiler as he shares stories of the Boulevard and historic photos from numerous public and private archives.

J. Eric Lynxwiler is an L.A. native and active member of the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee who specializes in signage issues. A former board member of the Museum of Neon Art, he still celebrates the city's neon as a guide aboard the museum's famed "Neon Cruise". He co-authored and researched the book "Wilshire Boulevard: Grand Concourse of Los Angeles" and leads Miracle Mile walking tours for the Art Deco Society of Los Angeles.

Metabolic Studio Public SalonJoanne PoyourowFriday, January 15, 2010, NoonFree Admission

A Resilient Los Angeles: What Could It Be Like?

The Transition movement is a worldwide network of grassroots communities and neighborhoods that are preparing for a post-petroleum future. They're doing this by growing local resilience, our ability to flex and adapt to great change. And it has been said that their approach at times looks more like a party than a protest march.

Climate change plus the end of cheap oil are converging to create a potent stew. Add economic contraction, and forecasts show that our future will be vastly different from what we have today. Yet if we plan ahead with creativity and imagination, the future with less oil could be even better than what we have now.

Through the Transition approach, we look at each aspect of our current lifestyles (food, water, transportation, energy, money, livelihoods, etc.) and begin to redesign it so that our local communities can become self-sufficient and resilient.

What might a resilient Los Angeles look like? As part of this salon, you'll be invited to share your vision.

Joanne Poyourow of Transition Los Angeles will explain the initial steps of the Transition approach, and update you on all the Transition-type activities blossoming throughout the greater Los Angeles basin.

Joanne Poyourow is the initiator of the Transition Los Angeles City Hub. Over the past year, Transition initiatives have formed in Culver City, Mar Vista, and South Bay, with groups under formation in Santa Monica, Inglewood and the San Fernando Valley. Joanne is the co-founder of the Environmental Change-Makers, a community group in the Westchester/LAX area that pioneered Transition ideas for many areas of Los Angeles. For five years, the Change-Makers have offered free public sessions that highlight environmental solutions, from bicycle transportation to local foods to alternative finances. Joanne designed the beautiful and prolific Community Garden in Westchester, which is a teaching garden as well as a supplier of fresh produce to the local food pantry. Joanne is a homeschooling mother of two, and helped found one of the LA basin's major homeschooling support organizations. She is the author of two books: Legacy, a novel which envisions a positive environmental future in Los Angeles, and Environmental Change-Making, a nonfiction how-to book on making that positive future come about. Joanne was a CPA in public practice for 13 years, and is quite proud of her intricate knitting projects.

Transition LA's Website: http://www.transitionla.org/

Image Courtesy: Christine Budzowski

Metabolic Studio Public SalonNance KlehmFriday, December 11, 2009, NoonFree Admission

Everything Comes into this World Hungry:

Soilmaking and Building

There are three fundamentals that guide this time of descent into northern-hemisphere darkness. The winter season is one of decline and decomposition, activity below ground and general shadowiness. The fundamentals that guide us are:

Everything comes into this world hungry.

Everything wants to be digested.

Everything flows towards soil.

This salon will discuss various methods of transforming what is perceived as waste and turning it into soil or building/healing existing soil.

Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria.

She works with Simparch to create and integrate soil and water systems at their Clean Livin’ at C.L.U.I.’s Wendover, UT site. She uses decomposition, filtration and fermentation to transform post-consumer materials generated onsite (solid and liquid human waste, grey water from sinks and shower, food, cardboard and paper) as well as waste materials gathered offsite (casino food waste and grass clippings, horse manure from stables, spent coffee grounds) into biologically rich soil. The resulting waste-sponge systems sustain or aid: a habitat of native species of plants, digestion of the high salinity of the indigenous soils and the capturing, storing and using of precipitation.

She has shown and taught in Mexico, Australia, England, Scandinavia, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Her regular column WEEDEATER appears in ARTHUR magazine.

Read Nance's interview in the current Time magazine

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1945764,00.html

Nance's Website: www.spontaneousvegetation.net

Image Courtesy: Nance Klehm