Film and Video Festival at Echo Park Film Center

Two of my video works are going to be shown at this show.
"Akai-ito @ Playa del Ray", and "Eating. -at home-"
I hope you can come and see my works.
I will be there, so please feel free to talk to me.
(And I am terribly sorry to all of my friends for not having free admission tickets for you...)


The Los Angeles Art Association
in association with the Echo Park Film Center presents:
Film & Video 825’s
“2nd Annual Student Film & Video Festival”

Thursday, July 13, 2006, 8pm

at Echo Park Film Center
1200 N. Alvarado Street (@ Sunset Blvd), Los Angeles, CA 90026
$5 general admission


Film & Video 825 is pleased to present the very best in international student video art. The artists selected this year comprise students from the 8th grade through the MFA level.


The festival will include the work of:

Tarik Abdel-Gawad, UC Santa Barbara
Manasi Ashish, Otis College of Art and Design
Jesse Bellon, York University, Ontario, Canada
David Callaghan, CSU Northridge
Alexis Disselkoen, UCLA
Brittany Lynne Jones, Loyola Marymount University
Jeffrey Magenheimer, LA City College
Hisashi Murakami, CSU Northridge
Dustin Patar, Howe Sound Secondary School, British Columbia, Canada
Mika Soma, Otis College of Art and Design
Alexandra Wetzel, USC



Film & Video 825 is a bi-monthly event or screening of local, national and internationally recognized video artists’ work, curated by LAAA/Gallery 825 and members of the arts community. It is the ongoing mission of Film & Video 825 to support and provide a forum for presenting in Los Angeles, bold, contemporary works that are outside the mainstream of narrative cinema. Our curatorial vision is open to both shorts and features in experimental, performance, animation, and documentary forms.
For more information on Film & Video 825 or LAAA/Gallery 825, please visit our website at www.laaa.org.

Back In Japan

I am currently in my home town, Ashikaga, Japan.
I will be sampling my favorite ambient sound here on Mini Discs, and videotaping whatever I feel like.
I am thinking of collecting sounds and footage from both Japan and Los Angeles in order to generate works that intergrades those two places that I consider as my "home".
By using the material I will have, I am thinking of a video work, a projection installation with sound, audio installation, photo collages, and some paintings possibly. (Not as a whole projetct. They are all separate projects at this point.)

Public Art Proposal

Proposal for our Zigbee Radio Waves transmiting project

see this link to see our proposal
http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=24631906

Impetus- what’s the drive to produce the work?
I am interested in creating an object that is accessible to anyone that causes questions to viewers. In this project, our audience is going to be indeterminate even though it is installed for an event, and the signage of the information about radio and its restrictions made by FCC, and by giving them the opportunity to “break the law” will cause fundamental, but often transparent questions about what is right and what is wrong. When can it be right/wrong, why can it be right/wrong, under what circumstances can it be right/wrong, who tells us what is right/wrong, and why do “they” want to do that to “us”? I am hoping that this project will question the power structure to the audience.

Research- investigation, sources, methodologies
Research on how the technology works :
We have read a lot about how a radio works, but I got to learn about transmitter by being in charge of assembling our transmitter. We will need a conductive substance in the trim cap for it to work the best. Otherwise the sound quality and transmitting range remarkably drops down. Armature radio people use a lot of powerful (and very expensive) equipments in order to find the unlisted frequencies and have very strong transmitters/radio receivers to get their station heard by the masses.


Investigation on FCC restrictions:
I found this pdf file that a lawyer created explaining the commity's reglations so it is easy to understand.
www.lns.com/papers/part15/Regulations_Affecting_802_11.pdf

Last years' Sound Walk info to get some sense of what it will be like this year:
SoundWalk is an annual art event produced by the Long Beach artist group, FLOOD.
In SoundWalk2005, there were 60 artists (from Southern California, Germany, Italy, UK, and New Zealand ), and about 1,000 viewers to particpate the event. "Many of the visitors had no prior encounter with sound art as sound installations and their responses to the event were overwhelmingly excited. The installations include a wide variety of combinations with visual and audible components. There are sculptures, environments, installations, and performances.The outdoor sound installations add a layer to and perform in concert with the sounds of the city, thus altering and intermingling with the ambience of their locations. Unlikely combinations of the ordinary and the extraordinary become chance encounters for the attending public. Galleries and stores within the Arts District will accommodate a variety of indoor installations in uncommon intersections of art and commerce."

http://www.villagesavant.com/mt/archives/2005/05/soundwalk_2005c.html
http://www.soundwalk.org/05about/aboutsw.html


Audience:
According to Michele Jaquis, who participated in last years' event, there will be a miture of art/non art audience.

Locus- geographic and metaphoric site, location, place; characteristics of the space;
Our site will be Long Beach Sound Walk 2006. Because Sound Walk still has not responded to my email regarding to their potential location for this years event, we do not have specific locations for our “Pedestrian Broadcasting Units”. But since I am concerned about our project’s site-specificity, we should have the list of the other radio stations as a part of the information provided at each unit.
According to Kate, for last year their site was about a couple of blocks in Long Beach, between Long Beach Blvd and Alamitos, 3rd St and 1st St.
The site is expected to be somewhat crowded due to the event, which will give our project better chance to be discovered and actually interacted.

Transactions- forms of engagement, collaboration, inquiry. Meaning development, planning
I have been collaborating with Aaron, Brooke, and Kate to put this proposal together. Through this project we had to learn how to communicate with each other better, and keep our ideas together.
I think that our project will cause some confusion and questions about the ideas of power and autonomy in turms of media producers and consumers, and also the idea of privacy and public, on the audience who happen to find our units.

I dont want art to be as special as right now...

Today, I was listening to an artist who was giving a lecture at Otis, and he both inspired me and also discouraged me a lot at the same time for saying that he does not care about outside the art-world audience because 'normal people' just do not get it.
But my concern in art making is to break through that kind of distancing of people by separating people by the idea of "insiders" and "outsiders". I am also concerned about closed-mindness of humans. I often find myself trying to find out some ways to smudge the line in between art and life. I want to make something that may be called "art" that doesn't limit the audience. I want to make something that maybe called "art" that brings positive questions for the audience. I want to generate the potential bond in between people through my creations as a part of the world.

"Moon Without Rabbits"

"Moon Without Rabbits" writing mika soma 2006

World without monkeys. Make marshmallow-bricks and build a soft, sweet, wall to block a view. Mortared crane flies over salty water. A suspended floor dripping over an ugly cake. A tightly connected scarf choking us to death. It scratches in my eyes and they pop out. Tomato juice is too green to me. The sun floats through shattered windows. Boil-Boiled-Boiled. Hard, heavy clouds fall down to the earth. Shadows grow into the sky. Kuramubon kuramubon, I want to see kuramubon. Childhood dream. A vast rice-cracker-fields over that marshmallow walls. Dirt-Driter-Dritest. A mouse takes me to the other side. Very far, and very close. Luke warm breeze stabs through my ears to deaf. Wavy and static voice calm my pulse. #? or $? A rooster with a secret-key-shaped beak. The day watcher looks at the Moon without rabbits. Excessive use of drier in June. Treasure of the island. The corner shrinks to spread. A shaking dog sleeps on a melting roof for tomorrow to Come-Came-Come. Fill the bowl with a bunch of universe. Vacuum the wethers out of a Luis Vuitton bag. Traces of airplanes. Ichigo-shoto hitotsu onegai shimasu. (One strawberry cake please.)

My interests in Senses and Textures***

Marshmallow:
I have been thinking about candy lately because my partner has been doing very interesting things with gummies and hard candies. (I am not telling the detail*)
But what interests me is how pretty it is, and its connotations of childhood and sexuality.
The hard candy that he made was so beautiful. I think its beauty can be used in some interesting ways in making art.
But I just happened to get some marshmallows from my friend Nick, and I was telling him how I never really liked its taste, but I have alwasy loved how it feels on my finger tips and cheeks.
Maybe I should make some marshmallow to play with.
http://home.howstuffworks.com/question128.htm

Its texture resembles that of a "daifuku-mochi". A soft sweet red bean paste covered with mochi, which is coated with very fine flower. I love how this feels also.
Daifuku matress, daifuku garmet, daifuku person.....

A Sketch for "A Trip To No-Where" Project

I decided to do a sketch for my "Trip To No-Where" project with Aaron Freeman.

We had a dice, video camera, a notepad, and a pen in my car.
I drove and rolled a dice whenever I had to make a decision to turm left or right, or after driving for 10 minutes in one direction. We decided that even #s would be a right-turn, and odd #s would be a left-turn. Aaron videotaped my rolling of the dice, and recorded the turns on a notepad.

Departing from our apartment in Westchester at 2:47pm, our first sketch went on for exactly an hour, until 3:47, which we ended up in a street in Hawthorn.

Originally, this sketch was going to be about a 4, 5 hours long.
However, as we went along, we discovered that there should be some adjustments in the system that we were using.

First, I wanted to be able to trace the rout that we took on a map later, but we did not rememeber to record the street names. It was a lot to do for Aaron and I did not want to ask him too much. Later in the process, we figured that we can just read the street names out loud for the camera to pick up our voice. (Maybe for the next try, we could have a map to begin with and trace it as we go?)

Secondly, we did not end up as far away as we would have liked.
It was an interesting discovery how the streets demanded us to make a decision to turn before we go straight in one direction for 10 minutes. Out of 14 turns that we made within an hour, there were only 2 turns, which I had to roll the dice because we drove for 10 minutes from the previous decision. What it did was that we kep going back and forth in between Westchester and Inglewood.
Aaron and I talked about how we should have a choice for going straight. Aaron sugested that we could try deciding the "directions"(North South East West) by rolling dice, instead of left or right turns. Then I thought about going as straight as we could go until we must make a decision for turning or deciding the direction to go.

I thought about the "good-old Yamato(Japanese) spirit" of well-determined straightfarwardness. Being on a road and letting go of our control over where we we go became symbolic of life as we went on. I have really been interested in Buddhism lately, which is from a Western philosophical view very illogical and irational. But I feel like that my frustration with the understanding of Western philosophies and Western way of thinking must stem from the fact that I come from a different culture, and I would like to examine that in my artistic practice, because I do not want to draw lines in between things, like in between art and life and everthing else, since everything is a part of whole (one).