Domus 1061 opens with an editorial by guest editor Tadao Ando, presenting the theme of the October issue: the frontiers of art and space. A reflection “on the history of artistic and architectural expression”, from the most renowned artistic movements, such as Cubism and Futurism, to the student revolutions symbolic of their time. Ando includes some historical examples, including Thomas Heatherwick's UK Pavilion for Shanghai Expo 2010 and Frank Gehry's house designed for himself in Santa Monica.

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Professors REBECA MENDEZ and CASEY REAS featured in DOMUS 1061.

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Casey Reas

Department Vice Chair, Co-Director Social Software

Professor

Custom software, digital images, computer, screen
Dimensions variable, vertical

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 Today’s Ideology

Sitting at the intersection of the art, architecture, and media arts departments in one of California’s leading public research universities, the UCLA Game Lab champions “conceptual risk-taking and the development of new modes of expression and form through gaming.”

KILLSCREEN - DOWN A RABBIT HOLE - UCLA Game Lab

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Eddo Stern

Department Chair, Director UCLA Game Lab

Professor Erkki Huhtamo is traveling around Europe, giving guest lectures at different institutions before Fall Quarter starts at UCLA.

Having already lectured at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, he has arrived in Luxembourg, where he will give the Keynote Address at the "Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice & Theory" Conference, September 7-9, 2022.

Professor Huhtamo's Keynote is titled "Device and Dispositif: Conceptual Tools for Experimental Media Archaeology." The time is 9-10am, September 9, 2022. The session will be held at the Science Center, Dondelange.

The conference is organized by the Université de Luxembourg and Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History.

Professor Erkki Huhtamo is traveling around Europe, giving guest lectures at different institutions before Fall Quarter starts at UCLA.

Erkki Huhtamo's Keynote at Université de Luxembourg

Professor Erkki Huhtamo has moved from Luxembourg to Amsterdam, where he will deliver an invited lecture at the EYE Film Museum. The topic of the lecture is "Fantastic Failure: Google Glass Ten Years After". The event will take place at the EYE Film Museum Collection Centre, Asterweg 23, on September 13, 2022, at 3pm.

Professor Erkki Huhtamo  will deliver an invited lecture at the EYE Film Museum titled "Fantastic Failure: Google Glass Ten Years After"

Erkki Huhtamo Lectures at EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam

Professor Erkki Huhtamo is getting close to finishing his European lecture tour. He has returned from Amsterdam to Luxembourg to attend the International Panorama Conference hosted by the Luxembourg City Museum. He will read a paper titled "Louis Dumoulin's Le Panorama du Tour du Monde at the Paris Universal Exposition 1900 - New Discoveries". The Conference takes place in various venues in the City of Luxembourg, September 14-17, 2022.

Professor Huhtamo is an internationally recognized panorama specialist. In this lecture he discusses how he discovered a lost panorama depicting a tour around the world by the French painter Louis Dumoulin. It had been forgotten and was languishing unidentified in the storage of the Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'Archéologie in Besançon, France.

Professor Erkki Huhtamo will read a paper titled "Louis Dumoulin's Le Panorama du Tour du Monde at the Paris Universal Exposition 1900 - New Discoveries" at the International Panorama Conference.

Erkki Huhtamo at the International Panorama Conference

Erkki Huhtamo Lectures at Boise State University, Idaho

Professor Erkki Huhtamo will give an invited guest lecture at the Boise State University, College of Arts and Sciences, on Thursday, February 2, 2023, at 7pm. The lecture, organized by the Stein Luminary and Boise State School of the Arts, will concentrate on Professor Huhtamo's pioneering work on Screenology, or media archaeology of the screen. The lecture will take place at the Micron Business Building, Skaggs Hall (MBEB 1301), 2360 W. University Drive (next to the Center for Visual Arts), Boise, Idaho.



Professor Erkki Huhtamo will give an invited guest lecture at the Boise State University, College of Arts and Sciences, on Thursday, February 2, 2023, at 7pm

Erkki Huhtamo Lectures at Boise State University, Idaho

Professor Erkki Huhtamo gives a public lecture at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago de Chile on Thursday, May 25, at 6:30pm. The topic of the lecture is "The Cyborg as a Topos: Media Archaeological Perspectives." The lecture will be held at Auditorio Manuel Larraín (Erasmo Escala 1822).

Professor Huhtamo also participates in a two-day workshop/seminar at the same university, dedicated to his path-breaking work on media archaeology.


Professor Erkki Huhtamo gives a public lecture at the Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago de Chile on Thursday, May 25, at 6:30pm.

Erkki Huhtamo Lectures at Santiago de Chile

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Erkki Huhtamo

On Sabbatical in 2023-24

Few topics today are as controversial as Artificial Intelligence (AI). Indeed, AI is a technology that triggers euphoria and scepticism in equal measure, for it impacts us in our very souls as human beings. How reliable and neutral are automated processes? What sort of criteria does AI use to reach its decisions – and what are those decisions? Can our personal privacy and our self-determination when it comes to information content be protected from access by AI? Participating artists include Memo Akten, Timo Arnall, M. Eifler, Cheng Guo, Adam Harvey, Mario Klingemann, Lauren Lee McCarthy & David Leonard, Anna Ridler, Philipp Schmitt, Mimi Onuoha.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Machine Learning Human Dreams
06. Nov 2021 - 28. Aug 2022
Deutsches Hygiene-Museum
Postfach 120 162, 01002 Dresden

AI is a technology that triggers euphoria and skepticism in equal measure, for it impacts us in our very souls as human beings.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY and DAVID LEONARD exhibiting IA Suzie at Deutches Hygiene Museum

To address the circumstances created by the pandemic, in 2020 the Institute united its Film Music, New Frontier labs and Theater programs to create the Interdisciplinary Program, which brings a holistic approach and an equitable focus to supporting creators. Cultivating the cross-pollination of artists at various stages in their respective practices, the IDP fosters a dynamic, year-round interdisciplinary community, bridging silos by scaffolding experimentation and collaboration. Each grantee was supported in a designated field or combination of fields, including emerging media, interdisciplinary, music, and/or theater.


To address the circumstances created by the pandemic, in 2020 the Institute united its Film Music, New Frontier labs and Theater programs to create the Interdisciplinary Program.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY named Sundance Interdisciplinary Program Grantee

Starting this month, the Sundance Institute Art of Practice Fellowship will focus on these newly convened communities, offering opportunity, exploration, and inclusive recovery. Rooted in the qualitative research with artists and field leaders that helped shape the program’s design, including the commissioned Emerging from the Cave field study, the Art of Practice Fellowship uses long-standing Institute program infrastructures as a foundation. Testing, prototyping, and co-creating, the fellowship keeps a generous community of unique voices at its heart. Incorporating a collaborative approach to artist advisory, Xin Xin joins the cohort as one of five community leaders selected for their singular voice and excellence in activating their respective communities.

LAUREN LEE McCARTHY and alum XIN XIN awarded Sundance Institute Art of Practice Fellowships

DMA FACULTY LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY AND REBECA MENDEZ WERE AWARDED GRANTS FROM THE CHANCELLOR’S ARTS INITIATIVE

DMA faculty Lauren Lee McCarthy and Rebeca Mendez were awarded grants from the Chancellor’s Arts Initiative, which in the words of UCLA Vice Chancellor Roger Wakimoto, supports "creative research and practice together in order to inspire thoughtful responses to the most challenging issues of our times.” For more details, see link.


DMA faculty Lauren Lee McCarthy and Rebeca Mendez were awarded grants from the Chancellor’s Arts Initiative.

DMA FACULTY LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY AND REBECA MENDEZ WERE AWARDED GRANTS FROM THE CHANCELLOR’S ARTS INITIATIVE

LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY STANFORD HAI VISITING ARTIST IN RESIDENCE  11/1/22 – 6/1/23
Lauren Lee McCarthy is the 2022–23 Stanford Human-Centered AI Visiting Artist. At HAI, McCarthy anticipates hosting guest lectures and workshops and incorporating the perspective of students and the Stanford community into an ongoing project concerning human reproduction in the age of AI. “If we want a world that’s more equitable, then we need to look not only at what technology we’re building but who’s doing the building,” she says. “Art is a way to bring different people into that conversation and to ask questions that aren’t always easy to ask within an engineering or science framework. It’s a way of pointing out a possible future that we may not yet have imagined."



Lauren Lee McCarthy is the 2022–23 Stanford Human-Centered AI Visiting Artist.

LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY STANFORD HAI VISITING ARTIST IN RESIDENCE  

LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY PERFORMING AT CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?   10/8/22 – 1/23/23
Can You See Me Now? illuminates a variety of artistic and social tactics that address these questions and explore the shift from surveillance as technology to surveillance as infrastructure. The artists focus on making surveillance infrastructures visible by “performing” the technologies in unintentional, experimental ways. Visitors are able to discover new modes of interaction with the technology as well as possibilities to intervene in the systems beyond the aesthetic experience. The exhibition opens a debate about the use of data collection in defining citizens’ rights and liberties, while illuminating a new dimension of its creative potential.

Löwenbräukunst Limmatstrasse 268 8005 Zurich


Lauren Lee McCarthy performing, Can You See Me Now? illuminates a variety of these questions and explore the shift from surveillance as technology to surveillance as infrastructure. 

LAUREN LEE MCCARTHY PERFORMING AT CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?

Join the Los Angeles Spoonie Collective for an informative workshop on the emergence and development of Disability Justice activism; a modern civil rights movement. We will discuss many topics and concepts of ableism and saneism (the forms of marginality disabled people encounter) including: Patty Berne of Sins Invalid’s Principles of Disability Justice, Christine Miserandino’s Spoon Theory, johanna hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, and more. Our workshop will close with a discussion on how folks can learn to stand in solidarity with disabled people in their lives, and how to appropriately support and affirm disabled, neurodivergent, and chronically ill people. This event is held as part of the curriculum for students enrolled in DESMA171 Disability, Design, and the Web, but open to all. It is hosted by UCLA Design Media Arts and co-sponsored by UCLA Disability Studies Inclusion Labs. 

Los Angeles Spoonie Collective logo two spoons bent to spell L A with a pill for the crossbar on the A on a pink background

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Hosted by UCLA Design Media Arts and co-sponsored by UCLA Disability Studies Inclusion Labs

Disability Justice 101 with the Los Angeles Spoonie Collective

Installation

Performance

Programming

Large distorted woman's head watches over spheres containing different homes.

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Lauren Lee McCarthy

Co-Director Social Software

 I attempt to become a human version of Amazon Alexa, a smart home intelligence for people in their own homes. The performance lasts up to a week. It begins with an installation of a series of custom designed networked smart devices (including cameras, microphones, switches, door locks, faucets, and other electronic devices). I then remotely watch over the person 24/7 and control all aspects of their home. I aim to be better than an AI because I can understand them as a person and anticipate their needs. The relationship that emerges falls in the ambiguous space between human-machine and human-human.

LAUREN is a meditation on the smart home, the tensions between intimacy vs privacy, convenience vs agency they present, and the role of human labor in the future of automation.



four electronic devices, camera with a cyan and magenta dye colored stand, a purple cylindrical speaker, a purple rectangular outlet and a white to purple gradient rectangular microphone with a lump next to one of the longer edges.  

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gallery space with a white bed, night stand and light above the bed header.

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exhibition space with five screens on the wall, a video playing on each one and a gray desk with a chair and lap in the corner.

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Lauren

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Peter Lunenfeld

November 4, 2021–January 9, 2022
Laguna Art Museum Art + Nature Festival
Opening: November 4, 6–9 PM
Open and free to the public

Any-Instant-Whatever, 2020
2-channel video projection, color, sound. 90 minutes, loop. 16 x 39 feet. Captured in Los Angeles in winter 2019–2020. Sound composition by Drew Schnurr.

Rebeca Méndez is a Los Angeles based artist who uses design, photography and video to connect the human experience to the environment and ecological issues of our time. Her monumental artwork Any-Instant-Whatever is a study of the Los Angeles sky filmed from sunrise to sunset on a sunny January day. Using Time-Slice Video, Méndez presents 48 vertical bands of moving sky, wind and variations of light and color. Together they represent 12 hours of time, each band 15 minutes of time ahead of the next. The technique impresses upon us that the progression of time and the forces at play in our atmosphere are ever in motion, inspiring and unifying us through the physics of light and sensation.

The video still images in this gallery freeze time and allow the eye to rest upon the complexity of the clouds and the spectrum of refracted blue light we experience in a day. Inside the gallery, and of equal importance to the video presentation, is a sound piece by Drew Schnurr. Crystal like water vapor naturally refracts light. The composition was created from playing crystal bowls tuned with water, digitized and played back in layers. The result brings union between visual frequencies and sound frequencies.

Any-Instant-Whatever asks us to be mindful of the non-human creatures who share our sky—especially those that use it as a critical path of migration from the far reaches of the north to the most southern skies of our planet. Light, noise, structures and pollutants—these human-added elements change the shared sky space for us all, and effect those who are the most vulnerable disproportionately.

A person is silhouetted in front of a projection.

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Any-Instant-Whatever is a study of the Los Angeles sky filmed from sunrise to sunset on a sunny January day.

REBECA MENDEZ: Any-Instant-Whatever

The theme around which the artistic path develops is that of refractions. Starting from a fixed point, the art of this painter from Piacenza follows exciting developments, and each of her creations enhances every moment, thought, material, object that led her to create. A fluid production, never banal, full of infinite facets, which draws on the World and touches deeply. 

Villa dei Cedri, Via Piva, 89, Valdobbiadene, Treviso, Italy

The theme around which the artistic path develops is that of refractions. Starting from a fixed point, the art of this painter from Piacenza follows exciting...

REBECA MENDEZ - SPAZIO: Visioni Intrecciate — Contemporary Art Exhibition

REBECA MENDEZ INAUGURATES WORK ON THE NEW SOUTH LA CRENSHAW CORRIDOR K LINE  10/7/22
Just hitting the magazine stands today.  Check out the Metro Art x Flaunt Magazine collab editorial, A TAP CARD TO THE FUTURE | EMBRACING SOUTH LA’S NEW CRENSHAW CORRIDOR K LINE VIA ART, COMMUNITY, AND A TOUCH OF FASHION, is out!  

The work of another commissioned artist, Rebeca Méndez, echoes the Metro K Line mission of inclusion and finding common ground. Méndez shares that as she was seeking out inspiration for her artwork within the Expo/Crenshaw Station, she similarly found herself looking outside the confines of the underground stop—well, she found herself looking up, to be exact. Once exiting each station, Méndez felt drawn to the sky, seeking comfort in the idea that all subway riders could find commonality in being under the same atmosphere. 

“No matter how idiosyncratic our neighborhoods are, we share something in common,” says Méndez. The artist explored this idea further; she camped outside on her rooftop, gazing and photographing thousands of shots of the ever-changing sky—what she calls an “emotional timepiece”—researching meanings behind times and dates, immersing herself to fully grasp the intricacies behind our atmosphere. “The more you start looking at the sky,” the artist shares, “the more you start actually seeing the complexity of the multiple kinds of clouds that we get. All of that diversity was there. So it became a metaphor for the diversity of the people in Los Angeles. It is constantly changing, and it’s constantly becoming other.”

Méndez’ process came to life as she strung together atmospheric slices at 15-minute intervals to create a 24-hour time-lapse from morning to night—a translucent blue and white mosaic entitled At the Same Time. To supplement the panoramic piece within the station, a second mosaic invites riders to find similitude with another commuter—the Arctic Tern, the longest distance traveling bird in the world. Méndez offers riders a view of celestial sunbeams against a wing of the special creature.

The voices of the Crenshaw community, the people that make up these neighborhoods, have been conjured in these artworks. As the backbone of the the K Line project, this major project not only opens the door to a multitude of urban opportunities, but re-conceptualizes the once colorless experience of riding the metro. Metro acknowledges this is a complex place of movement and purpose—not a museum. These artworks represent the people that make it special, as well as history. They also offer something new each time someone passes, even if it’s only a mere glance while running to catch the next train. 



“No matter how idiosyncratic our neighborhoods are, we share something in common,” says Rebeca Méndez.

REBECA MENDEZ INAUGURATES WORK ON THE NEW SOUTH LA CRENSHAW CORRIDOR K LINE  

REBECA MENDEZ - PANEL DISCUSSION: THE SEA AROUND US
Art & Nature, Laguna Art Museum 
Sunday November 6, 2022 3:00pm

WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT?
Join Art & Nature featured artist, Rebeca Méndez, along with distinguished panelists Lihini Aluwihare, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Alissa Deming, David Valentine, and moderator Rosanna Xia as they come together to explore the relationships between science, art, and the environment. With a specific focus on DDT, the panelists will discuss the multifaceted ways contaminant dumping have shaped our marine ecosystems and impacted the other organisms we share our marine systems with. The panel will also celebrate artworks that are an intersection of art and science in bringing out environmental issues and explore how they can be made more accessible.

Advance tickets recommended.
[https://lagunaartmuseum.org/events/panel-discussion-the-sea-around-us/](https://lagunaartmuseum.org/events/panel-discussion-the-sea-around-us/)
Museum members: $20
Non-members: $30

ABOUT THE PANEL
Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer and chair of the Design Media Arts department at UCLA, where she is also director of the CounterForce Lab. Her research and practice investigate design and media art in public spaces, critical approaches to public identities and landscape and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. In addition to her many great permanent public commissions, including two for the Metro Art Crenshaw/LAX project and three for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Méndez’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections. Among them are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca in Mexico, the El Paso Museum of Art and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. From 2017 through 2019 she served as selecting committee member for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award.

Lihini Aluwihare is a chemical oceanographer, she was born in Sri Lanka and lived in Zambia and England before moving to the United States for college and post-graduate studies. Arriving at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in 2000, she studies the cycling of carbon and nitrogen in the oceans using light isotope tools and organic matter chemical characterization. Aluwihare received her bachelor’s in chemistry and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College and her Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program in Oceanography.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey is a professor at UCLA who teaches postcolonial and Indigenous literature courses on the environment, ocean studies, and climate change. DeLoughrey holds joint appointments in English and the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA. She is the co-editor of multiple books and journal issues about postcolonial literature and the environment; her most recent book, Allegories of the Anthropocene, focuses on visual arts and literature in the wake of militarism and empire with a particular focus on the oceanic imaginary. Her research has been supported by institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, Rachel Carson Center (Munich, and the Cornell Society for the Humanities.

Alissa Deming is the Vice President of Conservation Medicine and Science at PMMC. She is responsible for the medical care of all in-hospital patients and provides medical care to live dolphins and pinnipeds that strand alive on Orange County beaches. Dr. Deming’s research efforts are focused on a commonly diagnosed cancer in wild California sea lions. She is the Chair of the Sea Lion Cancer Consortium (SLiCC) and leads the sea lion cancer research at PMMC. Her principal research interest is to study disease patterns in marine mammal populations to better understand the impacts of human and environmental factors on ecosystem health. Dr. Deming received her Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine and PhD in Comparative, Diagnostic and Population Medicine from the University of Florida. She has an extensive veterinary medicine background, having worked as a clinical veterinarian at The Marine Mammal Center, SeaWorld San Diego and the U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program.

David Valentine holds the Norris Presidential Endowed Chair in Earth Science, is the founding director of the Marine Science program in the College of Creative Studies and is a Professor of Geochemistry and Microbiology. He holds a BS in Biochemistry/Chemistry and an MS in Chemistry from UC San Diego, and an MS and PhD in Earth System Science from UC Irvine. He held an NSF postdoctoral fellowship in microbial biology at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has been a professor at UC Santa Barbara since 2001. Professor Valentine’s research interests focus on the interaction of microbes and chemicals – how the smallest living beings impact Earth’s environment and how the environment structures the ecology and evolution of the microbes. His projects include study of Archaea, methane’s biogeochemistry, hydrocarbon seeps and spills, accelerated microbial evolution, microbial symbiosis, ocean exploration, the application of microbial technology to address societal problems, and the development of stable-isotope-based tools. Dr. Valentine is also actively engaged in the communication of science beyond his peer group, through media and other stakeholders.

Rosanna Xia is an environment reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where she specializes in stories about the coast and ocean. Her reporting connects science and policy and has led to new laws and regulations. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2020 for an explanatory piece on sea level rise, and her coverage of a toxic dumpsite in the deep ocean has been featured in the “Best American Science and Nature Writing” anthology.


there are two frames, on the left a diver with a barrel, on the right coral

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there are two frames, on the left looking from underwater up at kelp with the sun in the sky, on the right a diver and barrel

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there are two frames, on the left a detail of hair floating underwater, on the right kelp underwater

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Rebeca Méndez, Lihini Aluwihare, David Valentine, Alissa Deming, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and Rosanna Xia participate in a panel discussion.

REBECA MENDEZ - PANEL DISCUSSION: THE SEA AROUND US

REBECA MENDEZ, THE SEA AROUND US
Art & Nature, Laguna Art Museum
November 5, 2022 – February 5, 2023

Creating an immersive 360-degree video art installation, Rebeca Méndez’s The Sea Around Us will transport viewers to an area of the Pacific Ocean located 30 miles from the Laguna Beach Coast, portraying the ocean as a fully animated body as well as a place of deep interconnectedness for all living things. Using scientific footage, the video shifts to thousands of oozing barrels of DDT on the seafloor being sampled by robotic arms. This hidden ecological calamity is revealed in conjunction with imagery that inspires awe and strengthens the bond between sea and viewer, inspiring the courage to face environmental wrongdoing, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating transgressions against our natural resources. Learn more about The Sea Around Us at this link. https://lagunaartmuseum.org/exhibitions/the-sea-around-us/


Creating an immersive 360-degree video art installation, Rebeca Méndez’s The Sea Around Us will transport viewers to an area of the Pacific Ocean located 30 miles from the Laguna Beach Coast.

REBECA MENDEZ, THE SEA AROUND US

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Rebeca Méndez

Director Counterforce Lab, On Sabbatical Fall 2023 & Winter 2024

2-channel video projection, color, sound. 90 minutes, loop. 16 x 39 feet. Captured in Los Angeles in winter 2019–2020. Sound composition by Drew Schnurr.

“Any-Instant-Whatever portrays the daytime sky in its textures and physics of blueness, its range of water formations sculpted by wind and pressures born of our nearest star—forces which, when synaptically processed, transform into emergent sensations of sublime beauty. This is the sky of our closest reach, the sky that most connects us in time to our deep evolutionary past through which we peered into the night’s other and its—until very recently—unreachable horizons.” Excerpt by Stephen Nowlin, director of the Williamson Gallery in Pasadena, curator of SKY exhibition, an immersive examination of how humans have conceptualized the sky throughout history, this group exhibition will demonstrate how the unfolding realities exposed by new science are affecting change in the understanding of ourselves, our planet and beyond.

Any-Instant-Whatever is a contemplation of a day in Los Angeles and a homage to philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson whose ideas around duration and time-space have inspired Méndez’s work for decades.

Full Description:

Méndez documented the sky of Los Angeles in winter 2019–2020 from dawn to dusk. Winter days are precious to Angelinos, as it’s when we receive most of our much-needed rainfall and the city comes to life in the aroma and colors of spring. For this video, Méndez chose to depict one day in early January when the typically blue skies are scattered with clouds—from the low, puffy layers of the ‘Stratocumulus Clouds,’ to the layers of bread rolls of the ‘Altocumullus Clouds,’ the regularly spaced cloudlets, often rippled ‘Cirrocumulus Clouds,’ and the delicate cloud streaks of the ‘Cirrus Clouds.’ All these cloud formations and more may be present in one single day in Los Angeles, as depicted in this video. A Los Angeles cloud-rich sky reminds us of the value of water, as well highlights our good fortune of living on a land enriched by sheer eternal sunshine.

It brings to mind the writer Albert Camus (1913–960), who grew-up dirt poor in the French colony of Algiers. Upon moving to Paris he observed that the people of the North were much poorer than he had ever been on the Mediterranean coast, as there at least he always had the sun, the sea and the open blue sky. Los Angeles is rich in the same way, with on average 186 days of full sunshine a year, and 106 days with partial sunshine, for a total of 292 days. Seventy-three percent of a year’s daylight time, the sun reaches the ground in downtown. The sky and the sun in Los Angeles are both great unifying forces, infusing a certain relaxed Southern Californian style in its people, as well as act as equalizers, whose light and warmth caress everyone. People in Los Angeles from all walks of life experience the same sky—something we all have in common.

The artwork also investigates aspects of color perception. Since blue light is at the short wavelength end of the visible spectrum, it is more strongly scattered in the atmosphere than long wavelength red light. The result is that the human eye perceives blue when looking toward parts of the sky other than the sun.

Any-Instant-Whatever can be understood as a ‘sensate’ or emotional timepiece, serving as a peaceful respite in our busy day, inspiring us to bring together our mind and body as we experience, if just for a moment, the fullness of time expressed in the sky above us.

One of the oldest human inventions is the clock—‘rationally measuring time intervals.’ Water clocks, along with the sundials, were possibly the first time-measuring instruments. Our modern lives are tightly organized around the clock, yet our bodies relate to and are influenced by natural time—night/day/twilight (dusk/dawn)—differently. As the viewer enters the gallery they are greeted by a field of harmonious tones of blue, that announce a more natural rhythm to our daily grind.

The sky is also shared between humans and non-human creatures who, through migration, interconnect Southern California with the rest of the Pacific Flyway, from the far reaches of the north to the most southern skies of our shared globe. As we change how our skies look and what threats we’ve added along the way—from light to noise to structures to pollutants—our skies are also a space of added threats and population declines. Within human communities across Southern California, the pollutants we release and that wander through our skies affect our human and non-human kin, often disproportionately those who are most vulnerable already.

The blue sky of our atmosphere contains a concentration of manmade carbon pollution that is undoing the very stability of our existence. In the words of Sir David Attenborough from a few days ago at COP26, “it’s easy to forget that ultimately the climate emergency comes down to a single number—the concentration of carbon in our atmosphere. We've surpassed 414 parts per million and the safe number is 350 ppm. This single number is the measure that greatly determines global temperature, and the changes in that one number is the clearest way to chart our own story, for it defines our relationship with our world.”

Inside the gallery, and of equal importance to the video presentation, is the sound composition for Any-Instant-Whatever by Drew Schnurr. The sounds are derived entirely from resonating crystal receptacles tuned by water. Much in the same way that water vapor in the atmosphere refracts light, crystals (also a refractor of light into component colors) resonate to produce pure sound spectra built upon natural frequency fundamentals that are akin to frequencies producing visual colors in the sky.

The composition process involved tuned performance and recording of the crystal resonances, sonic processing of the recordings (akin to how textural water vapor and pollution effect light and color in the sky), conversion of the recordings into digital instrument patches mapped to a keyboard, and then composition and performance of music for these original instruments.

The resulting layers and linear musical arrangements of sonic crystal resonance composites unfold according to the video’s designed sequential arrangement of natural visual ranges of frequency (as color spectra in the sky) rendered both simultaneously and over time.

Methodology:

To create Any-Instant-Whatever, Méndez used a commonly practiced technique in photography called Time-Slice Photography. A Time-Slice image is built from the photographs of a time-lapse and each ‘slice’ is a photograph taken at a different point in time, usually a few minutes after the previous slice. Time-Slice Photography and Time-Lapse Photography are commonplace techniques of Chronophotography, which has been the preoccupation of hundreds of thousands of photographers, artists and scientists for over 150 years. As a video artist, Méndez adapted such technique to video, to compress one day, from dusk to dawn, in 90 minutes, alluding to abstract time, and in turn creating a poetic expression of atmospheric time. The 12-hour day is abstracted into 48 moments of atmospheric time, each 15 minutes ahead of the other so one can experience the ever changing sky above.

A person standing in front of a projection. The projected image is of abstracted bars of tinted images.

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Any-Instant-Whatever

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Steve Anderson

Joint Faculty in Theater, Film, and Television

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Victoria Vesna

Director Art | Sci Center

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Mindy Seu

Associate_Professor

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Ramesh Srinivasan

Joint Faculty in Education & Information Studies

Close-up of the face of a white man with curly hair and a short salt and pepper beard. He is wearing glasses and a black t-shirt. The image is tinted purple.

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Chandler McWilliams

Director Conditional Studio

Assistant_Professor

The text "pass" made out of clear glass tubing. The tubing has a red thread threaded through it. It falls to the floor and sits on a small plinth.

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 Who does not depart (Ariadne’s thread)

A large piece of black cloth with the word "collapse" emboidered on the front in white. Another word that is hard to make out is embroidered in reverse in red. The fabric if pinned to the wall and draping over a shelf.

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These are also the conduits

Overlapping words "NEVER WORK" in blood red neon, mounted above a door next to a large wall drawing.

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NEVER WORK

The words "ALMOST NOTHING" are sculpted out of clear glass tubing, they are mounted on the wall overlapping.

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Points Prized Open

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