At the urging of a friend, I attended the BIL 2010 Conference. BIL is 3 years running and is usually situated near the TED Conference (devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading). The event is free and open to all guest presenters. Usually scientists, futurists, technologists, artists, venture capitalists speak on inspirational and oftentimes niche topics. Usually with a Powerpoint presentation up their sleeves. They are able to throw the entire conference for less than the cost of one TED ticket. Tickets to TED run around $6000. As you can guess, TED caters to millionaires, captains of industry, and invited guess geniuses and creatives. Fledgling BIL, doesn’t cater to millionaires and embodies a true DIY aesthetic.

This year the venue was the Museum of Latin American Art down in Long Beach which felt far to me, as I’ve fallen out of the habit of going to these events. I should mention that I was rewarded for venturing out as I was one of a handful of people who won a free palm-sized HD video camera compliments of Google, one of the sponsors of the event. It looks like an iPod with a lens mounted flush on one of its sides and a flip out usb plug. This one.

These were two of my favorite presentations at BIL.

The first talk of the conference set the bar pretty high: it was a Powerpoint presentation with video by Steve Jurvetson about his enthusiasm for model rocketry. His profile on Wikipedia reads:

He was a Venture Capitalist (VC) investor in Hotmail, Interwoven, and Kana. He also led the firm’s investments in Tradex and Cyras (acquired by Ariba and Ciena, respectively). Current Board seats include NeoPhotonics, SpaceX, Synthetic Genomics, Tesla Motors and Wowd.
…
At Stanford University, Jurvetson finished his degree in electrical engineering in 2.5 years and graduated #1 in his class. He then earned an M.S. in electrical engineering and an M.B.A., also from Stanford.

Steve Jurvetson has a blog at http://jurvetson.blogspot.com

My other favorite was the presentation by Brad Templeton, “Before the Robot Cars.” On the BIL website he says:

At BIL 2008 I introduced the future of robotic cars. But they’re still a decade away. This talk will focus on technologies that are on the near term horizon, or even available now. It will also outline new thinking in the design of transportation and energy based on modern computer technology that can be used while the people are still driving. I’ll show videos of cars today avoiding pedestrians and valet parking themselves, and simulations of intersections without stoplights taking us down the path to automatic transportation.

His bio on the BIL site hints at the big impact he (and the groups he’s represented) has had on shaping the nature of the internet, especially by fighting the good fight for our personal freedoms. In some ways, I think of the Electronic Frontier Foundation as a better purer version of the ACLU:

Brad Templeton has just completed a 10 year term as Chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the leading civil rights defender in cyberspace. He is also on the boards of the Foresight Institute and BitTorrent Inc. He was founder of ClariNet.com, the internet’s first dot-com, rec.humor.funny and Looking Glass Software. He is also a panoramic photographer and Burning Man artist.

His photography is at www.templetons.com/brad/pano and his homepage is at http://www.templetons.com/brad.

The BIL website is at http://2010.bilconference.com

Unfortunately due to low energy and lack of time, I could only attend the LA Art Show for a few hours to grab this interview and have a quick look around on one of the days that this was here.

INTERVIEW:
My radio interview with Kim Martingdale (click here for his bio) and others is now up:

click here to listen

REVIEW:
My first stop was the live “graffiti” art in the entranceway. Three artists were simultaneously working on three large murals brought to the LA Art Show by the LA Art Machine Gallery curated by Bryson Strauss. World reknown artists El Mac and Retna collaborated on a monochromatic portrait of a Latina done in aerosol with text. Mear One was working on a deconstructed cityscape with LA’s Watts Towers in the background and a figure of a boy in the foreground with butterflies flying from his chest. Coffee was painting a cubist monochromatic piece.

Next I visited what was probably my favorite exhibit at the LA Art Show, a show called “Signs” (click here to read press release). Sundaram Tagore Gallery curated a grouping of Islamic artists. The paintings were heavily text-based because depictions of the figure are prohibited in that culture. What you have then is text used as a textural element in most of the pieces, text abstracted to symbols. Text sources could be anything from poetry to holy books. The alphabet and its forms was also emphasized.

I then stopped off at the Uruguay exhibit. This year’s LA Art show debuted their guest country program featuring Uruguay. Uruguay is the second smallest country in South America, but it boasts a healthy democratic government, high economic development with a high GDP per capita and the 47th highest quality of life in the world. It sits nestled between Brazil and Argentina and its art scene is world class. They did not have anyone English speaking at the booth so I was not able to interview them, but the artwork shown consisted of contemporary painting and installation work, with a video exhibit as well.

Sister Cities had an collection of artists work from sister cities of Los Angeles. Pete Sterns of London had a very calming color field piece which he rendered as both a richly pigmented painting and as a computer animation. Nori, an artist from Japan, had two paintings representative of “every city.” His work is heavily influenced by jazz.

The Luce Foundation, a photography incubator, curated the Group LA exhibit. The main video element was a series of slideshows from different artist of their neighborhoods.

Finally, I found myself at the cluster of Korean art galleries. My favorite Korean artist is Yong Deok Lee who is known for his concave sculptures. The images are carved into a flat plane.

(YouTube turned up a few examples which gives an idea of the visual illusion created of 3-dimensionality when the viewer walks around his pieces:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaG271TqqE)

I was happy to see a new piece, an aerial view of a swimmer underwater.

PHOTOS:
I didn’t have much time to appreciate the artwork this year, but this is a small sampling:

[View with PicLens]

 

My friend’s brother Jason drove us down to the San Diego Convention Center and paid for parking. He was also nice enough to take many of the photos. All-in-all, I think it was worth the effort of going and being packed in tight with people everywhere. It has turned into such a flashy event with Hollywood and the videogame companies vying for space.

It was also like a giant swap meet of people trying to sell things and there was a strong commercial element. I didn’t buy anything, so it was not so much fun in that way.

My favorite part was browsing through the several tables of independent artists’ work and the creativity that goes into what amounts to creating your own reality or separate world on the page, from the storytelling to the illustration. I left Comic-con inspired by some of the work I saw there.

ARTIST ALLEY:

Freddie Arts

Fat Mitch & Zuda Comics

Deva Shard

Power Comix

Alain V Arts

Panda Store

Art Toy Manufacturer

Harold and Kumar

Art Dealer

Doug Snyed

Girls of Gaming

ISSUE: The Nature of Evil

WE RAN THE FOLLOWING PROGRAM TO ADDRESS IT:
Jordan Peterson Lecture on the Nature of Evil

DATE: Saturday, January 17, 2008
TIME: 20:25
DURATION: 00:30

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE PROGRAM:
His name is Jordan Peterson and he’s a University of Toronto Professor of Psychology and he discusses the nature of evil and its distinction from tragedy in this lecture presented at the 2008 Conference on Personal Meaning.

If you missed any part of it – I had to cut it off ten minutes before the end – you can catch it again with video -

http://www.tvo.org/TVO/WebObjects/TVO.woa?video?BI_Full_20081213_834110_JordanPeterson

He also wrote a book out on Routlege called "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief""

http://www.routledge.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?sku=&isbn=0415922224&parent_id=&pc=

He has a 14-part television series on Maps of Meaning at:

http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/peterson/MOM/TVseries.htm

And here is some biographical information I found on him. He’s a clinical psychologist by background -

Biographical Information

I am a clinical psychologist, licensed in Massachusetts and Ontario, and see clients on a relatively regular basis. I am a professor at the University of Toronto, and have been since 1998. Before that, I was a professor at Harvard University, from 1993-1998. I completed my graduate and post-doctoral work at McGill University, under the supervision of Dr. Robert O. Pihl, studying alcoholism and aggression. I am currently interested in the formal assessment and theoretical nature of self-deception, construing it as voluntary failure of exploration rather than as repression (although both mechanisms appear to obtain), and also do experimental work on creativity, achievement, personality, narrative and motivation. I published a book, Maps of Meaning, in 1999.

.

Air Date: Saturday, June 03, 2006
Time of Day: 2000 to 2100
Duration: 60:00

Program Title: Robert Hass Reading

Issue: N/A

Misc.: From the Lunch Poems series at UC Berkeley.

Robert Hass Bio from http://clinton2.nara.gov/Initiatives/Millennium/hass.html

ROBERT HASS is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley and served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1995 to 1997. During his tenure as Poet Laureate, Professor Hass battled illiteracy by putting into action his belief that, “Imagination makes communities.” Of his passion for promoting iteracy, he explains that, “when I got the (Laureate) job I did a lot of reading about literacy…One of the things that struck me was just how powerful a presence poetry has been in our culture when we were, as a people, teaching ourselves to read. At the beginning of the 19th century, less than 60% of American males could write their name, and that was far higher than in most of Europe. If you were black, you could get killed for reading. But we made literacy a civic religion from the idea that you couldn’t have a democracy without it, and we taught a whole people to read. It’s one of the great achievements of the American democratic experiment — and one of the indicators of the hunger for literacy, was a taste for poetry.”

As Poet Laureate, he also sponsored a weeklong celebration of American nature writing called “Watershed.” His commitment to environmental issues led him to found the River of Words poetry contest which is run through the International Rivers Network.

Born in San Francisco in 1941, Professor Hass remembers as a child happening on a poem which, “made me understand what the word `swoon’ meant…It was the first physical sensation of the truthfulness of a thing that I had ever felt.” He went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from St. Mary’s College, Moraga, California and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. While beginning his teaching career, he entered the Yale Younger Poets competition and won it for his first book, Field Guide. He has also published Praise (1979) for which he won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, Human Wishes (1989) which won the Commonwealth Club of California Medal for Poetry, and Sun Under Wood (1996) for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.

Professor Hass has also won acclaim for his work in translation and editing, including his work with poet Czeslaw Milosz which won two PEN/BABRA Translation Awards. He edited and translated The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa and wrote a collection of essays, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984) which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Among his many honors, one which is especially meaningful is having been named Educator of the Year by the North American Association for Environmental Education in 1996 for his work on the River of Words project. Thousands of schoolchildren participate in the program which helps students learn their watershed and their ecological address.

Mr. Hass lives in the Bay Area with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman. They have four children.