serial consign

A while back I had promised to divulge some of the projects that I've been working on. Now that my infovis text is complete, I've been updating the ol' CV and preparing some applications for upcoming opportunities. I'll be discussing some of these projects more substantially in the future, but here is a snapshot of my creative practice at the moment:

• First and foremost, my Critical Sections project is moving towards completion. Critical Sections is a database drawing project that indexes notions of domesticity in 20th century architecture and film in Los Angeles. My goal with this work has been to conflate the mythos surrounding eight seminal Los Angeles movies (and related utopian houses) into a new composite narrative. I've been working with interactive designer Erik Loyer on this project and he has developed an extremely rich interface for it (the above screen capture doesn't begin to do it justice). Critical Sections will be published in the upcoming issue of Vectors and I can't wait to share it. For anyone that is interested, there is a bit of additional information about the project in my portfolio.
• Vague Terrain is trucking along quite nicely and the outlook for the remainder of the year looks promising. Neil Wiernik and I have opted to dedicate the spring issue to digital dub. With the issue we're interested in tracking the influence of dub studio culture and the manner in which it has mutated into and informed subsequent genres and styles. We also recently confirmed that Franz Thalmair (of the prolific CONT3XT.NET collective) and Luis Silva (a Curatorial Fellow with Rhizome and initiator of LX 2.0) will be guest curating Vague Terrain 11: ((( CUREDITING ))) later this year.
• Neil Wiernik and I are also collaborating on a new audio visual project (imaginatively titled Smith & Wiernik) which we will be presenting at a pair of shows at the upcoming soundaXis festival. Our project is inspired by the Rosedale Valley Bridge, an elegant concrete subway conduit nestled in one of the ravines in the Don Valley. The event series, entitled Concrete Toronto Music will feature a host of architecture inspired performances by CCMC, Sandro Perri & Tony Dekker and Knurl amongst others. These concerts will take place at two iconic concrete-centric venues, the Polish Combatants Hall (designed by Wieslaw Wodkiewicz) and the Ontario Science Centre (by Raymond Moriyama) on May 25th and June 1st respectively. Hats off to Jonathan Bunce and Carl Wilson for programming what will no doubt be amazing events.
• On the topic of CONT3XT.NET, I will be curating a future edition of TAGallery, although I have yet to decide upon the exact theme. I'm quite jazzed about this as this project has been one of my favourite web ventures over the last eighteen months.
• Last but not least, my girlfriend Jordan Hale and I just launched the site for our nascent freelance outfit, Mission Specialist. We're knee deep in our first wave of collaborative projects and hope to have some work to share in the next month or two.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled digital culture blogging!

On contextualizing the several years I've spent on the west coast, I've often remarked that while you can take somebody out of Los Angeles, you can't get the Los Angeles out of them. More than any other city I've spent time in, Los Angeles gets under your skin and alters your perception.

I spent two years studying architecture in Culver City at the beginning of the decade and a variety of internships, research projects and a fellowship at USC have pulled me back to the city time and time again. I used to joke about L.A. being the cultural black hole at the centre of the universe, and while I can't speak for everybody I can certainly attest to the mysterious force the city exerts on me. To define my relationship with the city in terms of love and hate is far too simple. Binaries are altogether inadequate for describing a city clouded by ambiguity and characterized by veneer.

I've recently been challenged to come up with my own personal "Los Angeles aesthetics" and in thinking about this daunting task I've returned to 74 nights, a photo essay tucked away in the depths of my archives and covered by a fine layer of dust. This project (and this post for that matter) is as close to autobiography as you'll ever see here so please excuse this divergence from my usual fare.

In the summer of 2005, I accepted an internship at an architectural firm in Koreatown in midtown Los Angeles. In hindsight, accepting this gig was sort of a golden parachute, a means of escape from a dysfunctional relationship that I was involved in at the time. So that June, I checked into the first of a series of Mid-Wilshire temporary residences with little more than a camera and a copy of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project.

Some combination of my chronic insomnia, post-relationship emotional detritus and a fascination with Benjamin's "indexing" of Paris inspired me to take a stab at archiving my summer. At the time I thought I was simply trying to capture my exploration of the city. In retrospect, I can really see melancholy tattooed all over the vast majority of the shots. Regardless, it was great to get beyond the whitewashed idiosyncrasies of my earlier life in West L.A. and the obligatory archi-tourism demanded by my vocation to get a broader understanding of the urban fabric and texture of the city. I went through two pairs of shoes that summer and my legs perpetually ached as each night after work I often would just pick a direction and walk for six hours straight or until my camera ran out of batteries. I named the project 74 nights, the precise duration of my sojourn, and built a flash interface to share the ever growing body of images with my friends over the course of that summer.

I recently decided to upload 74 nights to my flickr account, so I invite anyone who is interested to give it a look. I have no pretensions of aptitude in photography, and a lot of these images are completely unremarkable. That said, given the personal nature of this work I still consider this project one of my favourite undertakings. A lot of these photographs are burned in my retinas and serve as constant frames of reference in thinking about (my reading of) the essence of Los Angeles. Since I'm looking at this material at the moment it only seemed appropriate to share it here.