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Final Projects: Group XIX - Friday the 13th

  • Mackey Apartments 1137 South Cochran Avenue Los Angeles, CA, 90019 (map)

Held in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments, the screening transformed the building’s rear windows into a screening facility. The multi-media presentations presented image research gathered throughout the residency and related work-in-progress.

 

Stefan Roehrle developed a five part series of short videos with accompanying photos that dealt with the L.A. region’s many locales that had become cinematic icons, from the heart of the city to the desert, and the symbolism that often accompanies them. Using a minimum amount of information, three showgirls (guides for the viewer) must hunt for links and interactions, in the process underscoring the human need for narrative and dislodging us from conventional modes of perception. The disparity among the scene, the action, and the overall tone within the images questioned our desire to have the distasteful made amenable.

Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber’s Urban Oil was a research project consisting of digitally altered imagery with text based on photographic images. Urban Oil documented the limited geography of production in the L.A. area. In the current imbalanced economy of the US, production is hidden as the result of an economy driven by consumption, the sustained erosion of the rights of the very people involved in production, and by a masking of the modes and relations of production which renders the global economy placeless and obscure. Urban Oil entered into this long debate by proposing that aesthetics are mediated by the social and geopolitical just as the social can be mediated by aesthetics.

Throughout his travels to his childhood home of Lima, Peru, as well as his investigations of Los Angeles and Mexico City, David Zink Yi studied the tendency of Latin American cities to develop in reference to American capitalistic models. Why were these Latin American mega-cities adopting U.S. values that pressure the individual with priorities such as owning a single family home or ensuring abundant leisure time? His goal was to focus on the interactions between people and their socio-cultural environment, stressing the interplay between urban planning and personal lifestyle choices.

In Remember Me, Annja Krautgasser and Dariusz Krzeczek explored the phenomenon of spatial memory and the problem of orientation in the monolithic urban landscape of Los Angeles. Generally, a person utilizes memories of landmarks to orient him/herself in a city, but L.A. presents special challenges with its elaborate system of street numbers as the only means for navigating apparently endless, undifferentiated roads. Remember Me analyzed the structure of L.A. street numbers in comparison to the real street and block raster of the city—which were obviously not identical—to point out the situation of using a street system as a grid or tool of orientation in a seemingly abstract urban landscape.

 
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March 31

Günther Domenig: Structures That Fit My Nature

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July 15

Isaac Julien: True North