Big City Forum @ LA Design Festival

Brian Roettinger "Dyptich for Saint Laurent"

Big City Forum hosts an interdisciplinary conversation for creative and progressive thinkers during LA Design Festival this year. 

“Independent Publishing and Print Culture in the Public Sphere,” will explore the impact of self initiated and independent publishing in the Los Angeles community.

Panelists include designer, musician, and educator Brian Roettinger, designer and curator Lauren Mackler, and designer, educator Willem Henri Lucas. The conversation will be moderated by LACMA’s Head of Publications Lisa Mark.

Design is intrinsically linked to visual language and through print and publications it dessiminates this language to a broad audience. What are the collisions and intersections between visual language, print culture, and the social sphere? How does print culture and independent publishing generate new platforms for these intersections to be recognized? “Independent Publishing and Print Culture in the Public Sphere” considers collective knowledge, layered histories, and the function of design and art in our community.

Big City Forum for LA Design Festival at The Standard, Downtown on June 19 from 7–9 p.m.

Creator of Hand Held Heart record label and Los Angeles resident BRIAN ROETTINGER never thought his simple phrasing of “Hand Held Heart” could encompass such an enormous round up of music, art and talent. Beginning in 1998, his project Hand Held Heart has grown exponentially since, as has Roettinger’s admirable passion. Supporting fringy death metal albums and makers of experimental noise, Roettinger is no novice to the music scene. A fan of chaotic punk rock himself, Roettinger was the bassist for This Machine Kills, a Southern California hardcore fixture that featured Steve Aoki on vocals. Roettinger now balances a life between work and play, teaching as the art director for the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His imagery is communicative and complicated, both disturbing and accurate, making him a perfect candidate to dissect the function of visual language on a diverse community.

Finding the fanciful in a city of fantasy and recreation, LAUREN MACKLER revels in opportunities for experimentation presented in Los Angeles. She created PUBLIC FICTION (the museum of) in 2010, a proud Los Angeles gallery-gone-publication that refuses to stop “reporting fearlessly on the factual, the fictitious and the imaginary.” Promoting art in all shapes, styles and forms, Mackler has created an exceptional space at 749 Avenue 50, incorporating the daily happenings of Los Angeles into art through exhibitions, shows, music, and more, following every event with a publication of Public Fiction’s journal. Her constant immersion in the avant garde arts world, coupled with her experience as a professor has prepared Mackler for Big City Forum’s discussion over the intersection of community and art culture in Los Angeles today.

WILLEM HENRI LUCAS is the final featured panelist for Big City Forum. His projects translate the connections between media, politics, and relationships in a very abstract way. His extensive amount of projects began in book design. He has posed himself with the artistic challenge of uniting humanity, culture and art. He began this endeavor designing book covers, and from there created installations, posters, and even a mixed tape in print reflecting YouTube video’s of sad love songs. Lucas concentrates on the subjects of war, love and humanity, trying to bring design “back to the streets” and back to community. His intentions as an artist align smoothly with the conversation topics Big City Forum looks forward to creating.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Community

Big City Forum in residence at Armory

What I talk about when I talk about community: Reframing practice in the public sphere 

Wednesday, May 1, 2013
7–9pm

Armory Center for the Arts, 145 North Raymond Ave, Pasadena
This panel discussion brings together four practitioners from the fields of art and architecture to discuss the complexity of social engagement. Speakers will investigate the agency of art and design when shaping spaces for a public. What I Talk About When I Talk About Community asks for more refined understanding of community, in order to reveal the politics, pitfalls, and pleasures of these practices.

Featuring:

Victor Jones, principal of Los Angeles-based Fievre Jones, cultural activist, and writer, whose research lies at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and community building within cities. Recent design projects include the Platform for Watts House Project (2011) and a skate park for New Orleans' City Park (2009). His design work has been supported by numerous grants, including the Graham Foundation, Artplaces, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California.

Jennifer Su and Laura Noguera, co-owners of Thank You for Coming, a communal restaurant/residency program that “aims to give people with varying experiences and backgrounds an opportunity to explore and execute ideas around sharing food. Residents are invited to utilize our restaurant space as a platform for public engagement and creative experimentation.”

James Michael Tate received his Masters of Architecture from Yale University and Bachelors of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University. He has previously worked for MOS, Peter Eisenman, and Samuel Mockbee. Tate co-taught a studio with Michael Maltzan at Rice University this past spring; the experience motivated him to move to Los Angeles. Tate designs, makes, writes, and participates in a variety of architectural affairs. His current affinities include narratives, oppositional dialectic blends, seeking refuge in unsettled territories between art and architecture, the latent potentialities of history in contemporary experiments, and the Korean taco food-truck.

Moderator:

Mimi Zeiger, editor and publisher of loud paper, a 'zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse. As writer and critic she covers art, architecture, urbanism, and design for the New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World; Tiny Houses; and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature.

Big City Forum returns for a second annual residency at Armory Center for the Arts with a new series, entitled Transforming the Social, which features six panel conversations that recognize and celebrate the ability to create transformative moments within the scope of the built environment and social space. Armory is pleased to have been hosting Big City Forum in residence since 2012, which saw the launch of Mapping LA, a series of four events exploring current creative practices that inform the landscape and geography of Los Angeles. Through its residency at Armory, Big City Forum is deepening its ongoing investigation of social and civic space within the built environment of the Los Angeles region. The residency builds upon a shared interest between the Armory and Big City Forum in advancing public discourse on the notion of social and civic engagement.