Author: Claire Diggins
If by some misfortune you missed it, this past Saturday was one of the biggest beach parties of the year. GLOW is a biannual dusk-to-dawn festival celebrated in Santa Monica, as well as Toronto, Rome, Brussels and Paris. This free event, which went from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., featured 20 local, national and international artists. The event’s pieces address movement from light to dark and pay homage to the spirit of Santa Monica.
The art installations at GLOW were truly one-of-a-kind and not to be missed. Street performers included glow-in-the-dark gymnasts, acrobats, dancers and musicians. And a food truck heaven averted any fear of a hungry mob. For less than $10, you could gorge yourself in a court of Los Angeles’ finest food trucks, ranging from Vizzi’s Gourmet food truck, serving truffle popcorn and watermelon gazpacho, to the Flying Pig truck, featuring braised pork and peanut butter carnitas. The festival attracted an extremely varied demographic, from families, to older couples, to students ready to take over the streets. All joined together to dance, sing, eat, observe and engage in the wonders of the beach.
Amidst the artists featured was Oxy’s own Professor Bruno Louchouarn, whose film installation “Day for Night” was selected from hundreds of submissions. Louchouarn, an assistant professor of multimedia theory and practice, worked on the 12-hour piece over the course of four months. His wife Corey Madden wrote and directed the film with visual producer Keith Mitchell.
Professor Louchouarn is a sound artist, and he painstakingly created an original and continuous score for the film, which focuses on one section of the Santa Monica beach as it evolves throughout the course of one day, from dawn to dusk. “It was a very trying process,” he said, “but in the end quite meditative.”
The piece is a character study of the sea, and examines the way the beach environment changes from day to night. The film was projected from 7 p.m. to 6:44 a.m. right on the beach just south of Santa Monica Pier, in the exact location it was filmed, continuing on after street performers and pedestrians went home.
It was quite a visceral experience approaching the large screen and hearing Louchouarn’s beautiful and melodic score, which follows the movements of the sea. The score combined gracefully with the real sounds of the beach: the helicopters overhead, voices and crashing waves.
“Day for Night” is 12 hours long and the score shapes the passing of time in a way that allows the audience to linger, to appreciate its slowness until time itself almost ceases to be. “The rate of change is slow, but the scenes are very beautiful and mesmerizing,” Louchouarn said. “In some ways, it is like the hands of a clock. You don’t see them move, but every hour the picture will look different.” One could so easily lose themselves in the piece, not realizing it will ever end. Louchouarn recorded the score himself and plays most of the instruments, including the piano, clarinet, percussion, guitar, strings and electronics.
The other installations at GLOW also played tribute to the progression between light and dark, day and night. Some even allowed passersby to participate, like Anne Herlihy’s performance piece “La Bella Luna,” which invited karaoke performers to sing their own personal elegies to the moon underneath a beautiful quilted tent on the beach.
Another piece by French artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot represented the timelessness of the sea contrasted by the ephemeral constructs of man through the gradual disintegration of a lifeguard stand into beach foam. Throughout the night, the stand gradually fell under sea foam, which the artist had fall along the top of the structure, collecting at the bottom until completely submerged. The piece, “shapednoise,” demonstrated the way the fleeting nature of a man made construct, which, like the tide, will come and go.
One of the most noteworthy pieces of the night was “Luminous Passage” by Hadrian Predock and John Frane. This mesmerizing interactive installation allowed people to travel through a tunnel of light from the Bay Street Boardwalk right to the shore of the ocean. Two hundred feet of electroluminescent wire created a glowing corridor to the sea, offering a beautiful and surreal transition from the urban hardscape to the natural open seashore.
The day was a beautiful and inspiring tribute to the inherent art in our world. The artists drew inspiration from something that goes unnoticed – the movement from day into night. What they created, however, was nothing to go unseen.
Short video clips of Professor Louchouarn’s “Day for Night” can be seen at: http://web.mac.com/blouchou/iWeb/GLOW/home.html.
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