Radical Practice Radical Practice is a series of podcast conversations between CalArts Graphic Design Program alumnae and current students. Each episode features an alumna with a distinct professional practice, including BFAs and MFAs whose endeavors range from cultural to corporate and from singular enterprises to ambitious ideas. We’ll discuss how they have defined success for […]

A laser pointer is pointed at a mirror attached to a balloon. Sounds from a synthesizer vibrate the balloon, causing the mirror to move. This moves the laser pointer, resulting in the visualization of how the sound causes the balloon to vibrate. The images produced from this process are called lissajous figures. The improvisation explores […]

A collection of melodies. Embedded like a small light in the corner. This piece engages themes and processes of transparency/translucence, copying/covering, and distance/absence: the traces of a thing not there. Melody fragments expand and contract. Here, melody crystallizes into harmony and harmony unfolds as melody. Like a constellation of stars; or in the direction of […]

Scenes Inspired by film, memory, and collage, “Scenes” uses found and original material to recreate three scenes from its author’s life.  

Originally located on the back wall of the MOD, IRIS was a 3-dimensional automated aperture that opened to about 17-ft in diameter to reveal a lit cyclorama in its opening. For the Virtual Campus, we will be modeling the iris in 3D software, then using lighting software to create various lighting looks. Christian Mejia (MFA2, […]

This is no dream

Apollo, Apollo! In this swift hell, firefighters wore upwards of seventy-five pounds of gear, as they walked atop a landscape rendered to burning coal. Guided only by headlights, the firefighters would soak the path in front of them. Every step released a fine silt of red embers and ash that moved weightlessly through the air, […]

Three kinetic sculptures explore relationships between circularity/co-opting/recycling and linearity/polarization/binary-ness, and how personal agency or positionality intersects with these linked mechanics. (They’re NOT “voting machines;” they reflect the operation of many large systems, frameworks and conversations, e.g., the relationship between the DIY ethos and capitalism, between the political far left and far right, and among nested […]