Installation view of Final Projects: Group XXXVIII. Photography by Joshua White, 2014.
Copenhagen-based artist and trained cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff delved deep into the history and conventions of that classic representation of Los Angeles’s underbelly, film noir. After combing through archives and histories, von Hausswolff produced her own black-and-white film noir, shot on location at the MAK Center’s R.M. Schindler-designed Fitzpatrick-Leland House (1936). Posited as a distant memory from the house’s fictional past, the film references Hollywood clichés alongside glimpses into a world of secret scandals such as suicides, love affairs, murders and accidents. Scenes are frozen in silhouette, exposed through dramatic shadows as light moves around the building. The roving light accentuates the role architecture plays in constructing narrative and creates a dreamlike effect. The four-minute film was screened in the Mackey Garage Top.
Peter Jellitsch is a Vienna-based artist who, during his residency, investigated both the physical environment of Los Angeles, and parts of the invisible datascape that forms the city’s digital atmosphere, particularly wireless networks. Noting that technological progress can estrange people from their surroundings, Jellitsch considered how that may register on an architectural scale. In his work Data Drawings, the artist used his unit in the Mackey Apartments as a testing site for a drawing series based on the immediate and L.A.-wide network connectivity for his location. Produced in pencil and acrylic, the elegant drawings resemble a mash-up of technical charts, abstract patterns, and beautiful naturalistic forms.
In security-and-protection-obsessed Southern California, Vienna-based artist Björn Kämmerer shot a 35mm film focusing on the ‘bad guy’ targets used for marksmanship practice. Made by a company in Minnesota for law enforcement clientele, these poster-size images typecast American outlaws, lowlifes, and other imagined threats to suburban harmony. Similar targets are presented in sequence, as instantaneous flashes, some differently highlighting subtle anatomical details like organs and spinal position, others presenting more abstract graphics over certain parts of the targeted images. The looped film was shown in 16mm in the Mackey Garage Top.
Shanghai and London-based, respectively, architects Pradeep Devadass and Sushant Verma devoted their residency to the project adaptive[skins]. The project questions the static nature of architectural spaces, encouraging dynamism and motion in architecture via movable building skins. For the exhibition, the architects presented a prototypical interactive installation made of tensegrity components embedded with sensors that responded to human movement. This was tested as a potentially suitable building type for Southern California and other semi-arid locations. They also presented a beta launch of a mobile app: You’re The Designer which simplifies parametric design (complex, algorithm-based forms) and embeds it in an easy-to-use app that can be applied to disciplines such as product, fashion, and interior design.
This exhibition was made possible by the Austrian Federal Chancellery.