Luminex 3.0 Downtown Los Angeles Survey

Courtesy of the author.

By ERIC MINH SWENSON October 23, 2024

I had an opportunity to check out the opening night of LUMINEX 3.0 in downtown Los Angeles as part of my ongoing film surveys of important artistic surveys throughout Los Angeles and beyond. The opening night was held Saturday, October 5, 2024, 7pm-11pm. It was partly cloudy with a waxing crescent moon phase with 9% illumination. I documented 10 large murals of video projection art as wall canvas within 3 to 4 blocks of each each other during the festival night.

The outdoor exhibition was ASMR-moving and visually unique and engaging for the participating art and culture citizens and casual at-large passerby’s, including a massive bicycling meet-up that rolled through the LAVA alleyway as part of their reconnaissance trek through DTLA. I found it interesting that a festival exhibition of this magnitude of high end projection and sound was juxtaposed in the mist of Pacific Standard Time’s Getty survey focusing on technology art, certainly appropriate and time sensitive.

The night was electric to say the least. The weather was perfect October vibes, especially with the Game 1 Dodgers/Padres game competing for the city’s affection close by.

LUMINEX 3.0 was spearheaded through the curatorial vision of Carmen Zella, Founder & Chief Curator of NXT Art Foundation and NOW Art, spanning sound art installations, performances, and multichannel works by artists JOJO ABOT, Refik Anadol, Alice Bucknell, Nao Bustamante, Petra Cortright, Marc Horowitz, Carole Kim, and Sarah Rara.

Here are the 10 films I documented that night…

REFIK ANADOL | LUMINEX 3.0. DTLA

“For LUMINEX 3.0, Refik Anadol presents Artificial Realities: California Landscapes. Throughout art history, humans have explored their relationship with nature in countless ways—through the precision of realist landscapes and the emotive power of expressionist colors. In Artificial Realities: California Landscapes, Refik Anadol reimagines this connection by using AI as his ‘thinking brush,’ painting with data to reveal new ways of experiencing the natural world. Collaborating with a dataset of 153 million publicly available images of California’s National Parks, Anadol and his studio transformed this raw material into an AI Data Sculpture that offers a fresh perspective on nature, shaped by human-machine collaboration.”

JOJO ABOT | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

“For LUMINEX 3.0, JOJO ABOT presents Re.Member, a spiritual call to gather oneself, reclaiming our worth as we reconnect with our true essence. It calls us to integrate fragmented parts of ourselves, rediscovering what has been lost or forgotten. A journey of acknowledging, uncovering, confronting, and releasing outdated beliefs, leading us to a deeper and more authentic truth that nourishes life and promotes harmonious well-being.”

SARAH RARA | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

“For LUMINEX 3.0, Sarah Rara presents ORCHIS (2024), a video and sound work that examines orchid flowers and their relationship to gender, queerness, politics, and desire. Wildly diverse, gender-bending, and found in nearly every habitat on Earth, ORCHIS looks at natural and cultural histories of the orchid as queer-coded, while also wielded as symbols of military and economic power.”

CAROLE KIM | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

“For LUMINEX 3.0, Carole Kim’s Chronicles of Touch: HOWDOESYOURMEMORYWORK sets out to be a textural/textual exploration of questions surrounding our relationship to memory, looping, tracing and slippage. Joining Kim for this multimedia durational performance will be a stellar ensemble of performers in dance, music and live visuals poised to jump into the soup of co-creation and discovery in the moment.”

ALICE BUCKNELL | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

Alice Bucknell - “In collaboration with LUMINEX 3.0, a special edition of The Alluvials will be produced. Combining scenes from the film and video game, this edition will feature an immersive, multi-channel, site-specific audiovisual work that is projected onto the length of an expansive site measuring (150’ length). The Alluvials is a video game and film project exploring the politics of drought and water scarcity in Los Angeles. It combines historical research and speculative fiction to look forward and backward in time, giving players an intimate and otherworldly window into LA’s relationship to water by embodying nonhuman playable characters, from animals to elements and bodies of water.”

LAVA | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

“LAVA is thrilled to host BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer) as a marquee event at LUMINEX 3.0. This ongoing project invites a diverse group of projection mappers, guerrilla projectionists, and visionary video artists for an extraordinary night of creative innovation. Set in the historic Morrison Hotel alleyway, LAVA BYOB at LUMINEX 3.0 will transform this iconic urban space into an immersive, interactive gallery of light color, and motion.”

MARC HOROWITZ | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

Marc Horowitz- “Extremely Limited” interrogates the pressures of time and productivity in contemporary society, exploring themes of chaos, control, loss, and recuperation. Inspired by Byung-Chul Han’s critique of burnout culture, the performance examines the struggle to maintain positivity and maximize achievement amid hustle culture. Through humor and improvisation, Horowitz challenges conventional notions of art and audience engagement, creating an immersive experience that reflects the relentless demands of modern life and encourages reflection on time, productivity, and human experience.”

PETRA CORTRIGHT | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

“Petra Cortright will present surrealist landscape videos inspired by dreams showcasing scenes that exude beauty, optimism, and freedom. Her work, deeply rooted in the history of painting, reflects a continuity with artists like Caspar David Friedrich and Claude Monet. Her landscapes echo Monet's delicate, transient beauty and Friedrich's sublime power. This Romantic sensibility blends traditional influences with Cortright’s unique contemporary vision.”

NAO BUSTAMANTE | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

Nao Bustamante- “For LUMINEX 3.0, Nao Bustamante will reprise her work Brown Disco, inviting the spectator to defamiliarize the optical trick by which a disco ball disperses light into fantasy. At once light source and spaceship, this exuberant installation interposes itself into the art historical debate over minimalism’s “theatricality.” Bustamante has long been one of the theorists and practitioners of brownness, seen here as the uncanny and sometimes awkward alchemy that happens when bodies collide. Brown Disco is a soft memorial, emphasizing the care and comfort we find in the club.”

ALAN NAKAGAWA | LUMINEX 3.0 DTLA

“For LUMINEX 3.0, Alan Nakagawa presents Conical Sound: Simon Rodia / Antoni Gaudi for South Park, an audio mash-up of recorded acoustics of two architectural works; the Watts Towers here in Los Angeles and the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. It is part of the artist’s ongoing series of sound works, titled Invisible Architecture. With this installation, Nakagawa highlights the tactility of sound waves and the concept of omnipresence, creating a third space that’s invisible but real.” WM