Cultural Interchanges

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An interchange is a place or thing where there can be an ongoing alternating or sharing (a constant back and forth, collaboration, participation). An exchange is a one-time trade, which can happen within the context of an interchange (like people exchanging trains at a cross-platform interchange).

Islands of LA uses traffic islands as a vehicle to “generate cultural interchanges” or an ongoing sharing of culture and ideas.  A place where we listen and play, trying on and inter-changing with other people’s ideas as if we are not afraid of the unknown, of imagination, of examination, of changing our minds. As if those ideas were our own.

The intention is to question how we use public space by using traffic islands to promote open discussion and inquisitive/critical thinking in public for a brief moment, limited like a traffic island.  We visit, participate and then we go away, split up, go to work, whatever. This is not utopic.

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7 responses to “Cultural Interchanges”

  1. To me, utopia is about the desire for stasis. That is what is striking about More’s Utopia. But also about the utopic project. Nazi utopia was the “reich to last a thousand years.” Fundamentalist utopia is all about the resistance to change and evolution (there is a reason the fundies find Darwin so threatening–they are opposed to the idea of evolution in doctrine–be they Christian fundies, legal fundamentalists, islamic fundies etc). Even the 50s are, in imagination, the time when “time stood still.” In brief, they resist time itself and fortuna. They yearn for death, for an afterlife where nothing changes, for the millennium, for a time “after history,” for all those virgins that a martyr will get, etc. There is a poem I love by George Herbert (17th cent. religious poet) called The Flower.” It is about change (of seasons, analogized to his shifts from despair to hope to despair) and at one point he yearns to be with god, where he will be “past changing,” but he eventually comes to a line that says “These are thy wonders, lord of love, / To make us see we are but flowers that glide.” WOW. He wrote all the poems for which he is known in the last few years of his life (died at 40), and he seems to have come to something in those last 3 or 4 years. (He started writing young, but the poetry we know him for is all late.)

    SHIFT: WE ARE BUT FLOWERS THAT GLIDE.

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  2. You’ve discovered something that most of us don’t know exists. But something is nebulous to me, I don’t understand what shape or form this will take.

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  3. Shift the idea, build the shape!…4 me the important shape is the one that we are actually forming in our minds…the shape that it’s taking in every individual that is getting touched by it…that is forming a social involvement.

    Far from utopia; reality. The real moment where the mind shakes and induces…evokes curiosity-inter and exchange- of ideas…of creativity.

    The real moment where culture takes shape – forms and transforms blooming through our life.

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  4. Take back the public spaces in your community and use them to promote the unique character of your neighborhood.

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  5. We love it!!!

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  6. Wow! It looks really novel.

    Concerns:
    Will it hold up traffic?
    Can we sit on the floor?

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  7. Islands of LA does not do anything that would hold up traffic is be risky. What can be done on a traffic island is based on the given island as well as city. For ex., in Santa Monica you are only allowed to walk or jog on traffic islands. As a result, the 3/9 activity on a traffic island in Santa Monica is a walking activity. In short, everything is done in a responsible manner.

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