LABJ’s LA Stories
Overhead Art
The Jumbotrons in West Hollywood aren’t there just to show advertising. They’re displaying art videos through June.
Gallery 825/LAA is presenting the videos to promote the non-profit organization’s support of emerging artists.
Video art on display at the Key Club’s fa & #231;ade includes works by Anthony Goicolea, D. Jean Hester and Matthew Konicek. Those artists, plus Karolina Sobecka, also have work on display at the Jumbotron across from the Hyatt.
“It used to be called ‘Drive-By Art,’ said Ashley Emenegger, executive director of Gallery 825/LAA (the “825” stands for the address on North La Cienega Boulevard). The project is now called “Sunset 3.825,” and the artworks bear the logo of Gallery 825, a 79-year-old visual arts organization that teaches business skills and networking to 225 artists selected through a screening process twice a year.
“We can take this type of program to other parts of Los Angeles, spreading it all throughout the city,” Emenegger said. “That’s one of the goals of the organization, to make art a part of the daily life.”
Steve Silkin
Color Bind
Did you see that green Mercedes passing you on the freeway? Well, maybe it wasn’t green. Maybe it was red.
That’s what researchers from Pasadena’s California Institute of Technology say.
In an article appearing in the journal Nature, Caltech grad student Daw-An Wu, Caltech professor of biology Shinsuke Shimojo and Ryota Kanai, of the Helmholtz Institute, report that the color of an object can be misread due to the brain’s perception of motion and color. The professors call this a binding error (not a blinding error) in which the colors of objects in peripheral vision are rearranged to match an object at the center of vision.
The researchers tested the theory on a computer screen. Subjects watched red dots moving up and green dots moving down. No misperceptions there. But when the researchers reversed the motion of the dots on the edge of the screen moving opposite to the ones in the center, the subjects couldn’t tell. So what does this mean?
“It’s really just understanding how the brain works,” said Caltech spokesman Robert Tindol.
Andrew Simons
Rock Out
Long Beach will play host to partying teens as MTV comes to town for three weeks to film its “Summer on the Run” series.
David Ashman, manager of the three-person bureau of special events and filming, said MTV is paying a $9,000 fee to film on the beach and park trailers on the lot. The cable music channel also is responsible for paying any police and public safety costs until filming ends June 11.
Ashman sent a letter to residents saying 700 people would be on the beach each day from May 31 through June 4. Sound tests are to start at about 9 a.m. and rehearsals at 11 a.m., with extras bused to the scene at 12:30 p.m. Filming would be completed in stages by 6 p.m., and after each taping the extras would be escorted off the beach for bus pickup.
Performers include Nelly, New Found Glory, Murphy Lee and Ashlee Simpson, according to the Grunion Gazette.
Kate Berry
Healthy Hiring
Despite all the naysayers, small businesses are booming in California.
In the first quarter, the small business headcount grew by 6.07 percent, to an average of 5.28 employees. That’s significantly higher than the national average of 2.3 percent, to 5.55 employees, according to SurePayroll.com, a Skokie, Ill.-based online payroll provider.
Salaries at small businesses in California are also higher, and rising faster, than in the nation as a whole. In the first quarter, average salaries increased 4.01 percent statewide to $36,332, while rising just 2.2 percent to $30,911 nationally.
SurePayroll spokesman Ken Gaebler warned that the figures don’t include other factors such as investment in equipment. “We don’t have the full picture,” he said. “But clearly, if salaries are going up that’s a better sign than if salaries were going the opposite way.”
Rebecca Flass
The Roving Eye
Small Fly
The idea of planes swooping above war zones to collect critical photos could be shifted to a smaller scale. A micro-scale, in fact.
Officials from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the research arm of the Department of Defense, are predicting that micro air vehicles will one day be the aircraft of choice for the ground surveillance of battlefields.
At the forefront of the research movement is Monrovia-based AeroVironment Inc., which developed the Wasp Micro Air Vehicle, a radio-controlled, battery-powered “flying-wing” plane, 13 inches across and a weighing in at six ounces.
“The U.S. military uses unmanned air vehicles to perform a variety of functions,” said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for DARPA, which commissioned AeroVironment to design and create the plane. “It’s used for surveillance and reconnaissance, with a sensor taking an image of what it’s flying over.”
The Wasp went through several years of tests, which included what was believed to be a micro air vehicle world record endurance flight of 1 hour, 47 minutes in August of 2002 in Simi Valley.
Martyn Cowley, research and development marketing manager for AeroVironment, said the company developed the plane without knowing what the exact applications would be.
“It was an engineering challenge. We wanted to see if we could make it this small,” Cowley said.
The company once built a flying radio-controlled model pterodactyl with an 18-foot wingspan.
“Everything we do is uniquely challenging,” Cowley said. “It’s satisfying to be able to actually do it.”
Karey Wutkowski
