Join Lars Jan and Marcelo Spina on SCI-Arc Channel as they discuss the nature of artistic collaborations, crossing genres, emerging technologies and progressive activism as a prelude to the West Coast debut of The White Album—Jan’s timely adaptation of Joan Didion’s seminal essay about California’s shifting cultural landscape of the late 1960s.

Jan’s multidisciplinary performance work juxtaposes Didion’s searing, highly theatrical text—delivered in its entirety by Obie Award-winning actress Mia Barron—with a glassed-in microcosm of social unraveling featuring the participation of twenty-five young audience members nightly. The work underscores stark similarities between 1968 and the present challenging us to look critically at the past and incubating real-time conversation around new paths forward.

Lars Jan is a director, writer, visual artist, and the son of émigrés from Afghanistan and Poland. His work has been presented by the Sundance Film Festival, Whitney Museum, and BAM Next Wave Festival. His climate-change-themed performance installation in Times Square, Holoscenes, garnered international attention when the US withdrew from the Paris climate accord in June 2017. His play The Institute of Memory (TIMe) was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and has toured widely. As the winner of the third Audemars Piguet Art Commission, Jan built a kinetic pavilion on an acre of beach during Art Basel Miami in December 2017. He is represented by Charlie James Gallery, is a TED Senior Fellow, and serves on the faculty at CalArts. Early Morning Opera is a genre-bending art lab specializing in technically innovative performances charting complex ideas through language and other media, and asserting the vital function of live events in our increasingly screen-based lives.

Marcelo Spina is an internationally renowned architect and educator. Along with Georgina Huljich they direct P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S, an award-winning architectural practice based in Los Angeles with a well-established design presence worldwide. The firm brings a critical and progressive approach to projects across scales, programs and geographies, insisting on the cultural and social relevance of architectural form and contemporary aesthetics. Mr. Spina is a Design Faculty and the coordinator of Architectural Technologies Postgraduate Program at SCI-Arc.

P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S collaborated with Lars Jan in the design and architecture of The White Album.

For more information about The White Album
https://cap.ucla.edu/calendar/details/lars_jan_3

Early Morning Opera
http://earlymorningopera.com/wp/

P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S:
http://patterns.work

Crew Credits -

Production:
Creator and Executive Producer - Hernan Diaz Alonso
Producer - Marcelyn Gow
Director - Reza Monahan
Director of Photography - Sean Morris
B Camera - Robert Moreno
C Camera - John Keifer
P.A. - KC Liu
Sound Engineer - Chris Trueman

Post-Production:
Story Producer: Caroline Post
Editors: Sean Morris/Reza Monahan

Soundtrack:
Broke For Free "Night Owl"
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Broke For Free "Day Bird"
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Daniel Birch "Trying My Best To Move Forward"
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Additional Images and Video courtesy of: Lars Jan

©2019 SCI-Arc Channel