Big City Forum 3

Big City Forum 3, Thursday, April 23rd from 5 – 7 pm (check-in and refreshments 4:30 pm). The Craft & Folk Art Museum, 5814 Wilshire Boulevard (at Curson), Los Angeles, CA 90036, 323.937.4230 www.cafam.org Featuring: The Institute for Figuring: The Institute For Figuring is an organization dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. The Institute’s interests are twofold: the manifestation of figures in the world around us and the figurative technologies that humans have developed through the ages. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding, the tiling patterns of Islamic mosaics and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring. http://www.theiff.org/ Ball-Nogues Studio: Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice that creates experimental built environments to enhance and celebrate the potential for social interaction through sensation, spectacle and physical engagement while striving to infuse the matter of the built environment with a downstream purpose. To achieve these results, we work with unusual materials, develop new digital tools, and apply architectural techniques in unorthodox ways. We share an enthusiasm for the fabrication process as it relates to the built object both physically and poetically by letting the properties, limitations, and economic scenarios associated with a material guide a structure’s ultimate form while developing methods to extend the intertwined boundaries of a material’s aesthetics, physical potential and lifecycle. http://www.ball-nogues.com/index.html *Capacity is almost full for this event. If you would like to attend please rsvp to this email asap. If you have already done so, then your name will be on the check-in list. Save the Date: Big City Forum 4 5/19/09 Featuring: -Mike Blockstein and Reanne Estrada of Public Matters, building creative, civic, and social capital in communities -James Rojas of Latino Urban Forum, hands-on workshop - reimagining more vibrant urban environments G727 Gallery, Downtown LA Big City Forum is a project designed to push forth a creative cities agenda and help foster dialogue around sustainable creative communities. It seeks to link up the intersections, relationships, and shared interests between urban planning, economic development, education, architecture, art and design, cultural exchange, and community activism. Furthermore it hopes to help foster the idea of mapping creative spaces and places in which these conversations can take place. Potentially this web of dialogue can develop into an “idea lab” in which new collaborations, projects, actions can be shaped. Meetings are by invitation only and take place across Los Angeles, highlighting the efforts of cultural and community activism within the big city. www.bigcityforum.org