Big City Forum: Design by Deferral

Elizabeth Chin, Dance for Joy, Media Design Program in Kadampa, Uganda

Big City Forum: Design by Deferral

Wednesday, April 3rd

7 – 9 pm

 Armory Center for the Art
145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91103

Big City Forum returns for a second residency at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. “Transforming the Social" will present four discursive panel conversations that aim to recognize and celebrate the ability to create transformative moments within the scope of the built environment and social space while acknowledging our core potential for human value.

The second of these conversations BCF: Design by Deferral explores the academic and professional conventions that keep research about everyday urban life separate from the practices of design and planning. Research practices such as ethnography conduct description and analysis and may lay the groundwork for architectural or planning projects, but are rarely integrated into the design process. 

This panel will explore emerging practices of research that turn this paradigm on its head, deferring to everyday social practices and diverse, multidisciplinary forms of expertise in order to re-imagine how the daily life of the city will be designed for, and in whose interest.

Featuring:

Elizabeth Chin, anthropologist, Professor, Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design (topic: public space and dance in Kampala)
http://works.bepress.com/elizabeth_chin/

Adonia Lugo, anthropologist and bike activist, University of California, Irvine (topic: ethnographic experiments and bicycle advocacy, CicLAvia)
http://www.urbanadonia.com/

Michael Powell, anthropologist and strategist, Shook Kelley (topic: corner store conversions in South LA, collaboration with architects)
http://culturalanalysis.tumblr.com/


Curt Gambetta (moderator and discussant), architect, Woodbury University

Big City Forum: Music as Urbanism

image courtesy of B+

Big City Forum: Music as Urbanism
Wed. March 6th
7 - 9 pm

Armory Center for the Art
145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, CA 91103

Big City Forum returns for a second residency at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena.This new series "Transforming the Social" will present four discursive panel conversations that aim to recognize and celebrate the ability to create transformative moments within the scope of the built environment and social space while acknowledging our core potential for human value.

The first of these conversations BCF: Music as Urbanism explores the power of music to shape and define culture, to set the contours for a vital urbanism, and to activate vibrant social spaces. It will feature presenters who are deeply committed to using music as transformative agent related to themes of culture, community engagement, and history.

Featuring:
JOSH KUN, Assoc. Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication, Director The Popular Music Project, Co-FOunder, The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation
BRIAN CROSS (aka B+), photo journalist, film maker, Founder, Mochilla
EAMON ORE-GIRON, contemporary artist, DJ Lengua, member OJO collective
Moderated:

Susannah Tantemsapya, Founder, Creative Migration

bios:

Josh Kun is an American author, academic and music critic. Kun is an Associate Professor of Communication in the Annenberg School at the University of Southern California.He also holds a joint appointment at USC's Department of American Studies and Ethnicity. He is the director of The Popular Music Project at USC Annenberg's The Norman Lear Center and co-editor of the book series "Refiguring American Music" for Duke University Press.Kun serves on the boards of Dublab, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and the Latin American Cinemateca, and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly, the International Journal of Communications, and The Journal of Popular Music Studies. He has also worked as a consultant and curator with The Los Angeles Public Library, Walt Disney Concert Hall, The Autry National Center, and the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

B+ (aka Brian Cross) was born and raised in Limerick, Ireland. He attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin graduating in 1989 with a degree in painting. In 1990 he came to Los Angeles to study photography at the California Institute of the Arts. While at Cal Arts he began work on a project entitled, Its Not about a Salary: Rap Race and Resistance in Los Angeles which was subsequently published by Verso Books in 1993. It was nominated as a Rolling Stone Music Book of the Year and made the NME critics best music book of the year list.

Eamon Ore-Giron was born in 1973 in Tucson, AZ. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Institute of Art in 1996, and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2006. He has had solo exhibitions at MUCA ROMA, Mexico City (2006); Queen’s Nails Annex, San Francisco (2005) and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia (2005). His work was also included in group shows at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; and in the traveling museum exhibition, Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, which was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and which has traveled to venues in Mexico, New York and Texas.
Ore-Giron has lived in Peru, Spain, Mexico and the Southwest of the United States which has informed his visual vocabulary. His paintings and works on paper blend contemporary style and subject matter with cultural iconography and folklore in a surrealistic composition. Ore-Giron currently lives and works in Los Angeles.