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]