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P!LA: Painting Sound, Ben Ball, Vampires, & MMOs, Oh My!

P!LA: Painting Sound, Ben Ball, Vampires, & MMOs, Oh My!

Though I already gave Mike the Poet pride of place, he was far from the only show in town Thursday night at Postopolis! LA. When I walked into the conference room–things had moved inside because the roof bar had been buffeted by a freezing wind all day–I saw a cluttered screenshot from World of Warcraft, something that had my inner-geek (aren’t we all?) terribly excited.

Indeed, Ben Cerveny of Stamen Design was talking about, among other things, deriving real life planning and tracking systems derived from more mediated sources, like MMOs. The talk was rather technical, and combined with my tardiness, I was kind of lost. Still, the potential is intriguing, especially after poking around Stamen’s website.

One of the examples Cerveny gave was the potential of cellphone apps. He proposed a program that would project one’s preferences onto a wall, usually calibrated to some set of sounds and colors. When one person comes into proximity with another, it would create a cacophony or a melody between the two, depending on their settings. Another was a replacement for the personal library. As books decline in the digital age, Cerveny proposed a projection, ironically or not, the projection of one’s digital self. “We’re losing out real digital culture,” he said. “Book-lined walls are being replaced with blank white ones, maybe a few modernist baubles.”

Whereas Cerveny and Stamen’s work is about as technical as it gets, Steve Roden‘s is almost ambivalent to its very existence. A trained painter, Roden is seemingly obsessed with transforming one mode of experience, one sense, into another. His first, and probably best, example is how he found a piece of sheet music in his grandmother’s attic. “I’ve never been able to let go of it,” Roden said.

But Roden does not play the music. Instead, he meticulously broke it down into its component scale–E-G-B-D-F, etc.–and then came up with a numbering scheme. That then gets plugged into a paint-by-numbers system that developed dozens of paintings. “I don’t know how to read or play music,” Roden emphasized.

And yet, another major project was his installation for Alvaro Siza’s Serpentine Pavilion in 2005. Roden, with the help of lay assistants working at the pavilion, mapped the structure in a rainbow of five colors, then transformed it into a painting, which, when he looked at it, resembled the scheme on a Tyco xylophone.

He decided to turn the painting into a “player piano strip” that led to a recording played over an hour in the space. He played a minute of the composition. It had a haunting beauty for someone who seemed as though he could care less about what he was doing. Perhaps that was the genius of his art.

Someone who cared very much, perhaps too much, was Gary Dauphin. An LA resident, Dauphin apologized for giving a presentation largely about New York, namely his home-hood of Fort Greene. As a gentrifier myself, Gary’s talk about the cultural vampirism of gentrification really hit home.

Dauphin argued that gentrifiers, specifically in Fort Greene but also beyond, are not always (white) outsiders, but generally ethnic (black/Latino) educated returners who make way for their new friends and thus feel guilty for it. The same goes for vampires, at least in the popular culture of Buffy/True Blood/Twilight/Blacula. More often than not, the story is about the “good vampire,” the vampire who is trying to get beyond his vampirism, drinking synthetic blood or animal blood and not that of humans. When I asked if there was a solution to either problem, the answer was no.

Finally, Benjamin Ball of Ball-Nogues Studio. I shared a beer with Ben afterwards–more on that later–but his talk was mostly on what he’s done and everyone knows–Maximillian’s Schell, P.S. 1, Venice–and what’s yet to come–a teepee in Woodstock, a bird installation at Johns Hopkins Children’s Hospital.

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