Literary Los Angeles: Machine Project

“Sound Synthesis Workshop;” “Intermediate Welding for Aesthetes;” “Paleolithic Bone Tools Workshop.”   Those are a few of the lectures you could have (should have) attended in the last two months at Machine Project, a non-profit arts and sciences organization that hosts workshops, events, installations, performance art pieces, and lectures on topics from crochet to sea slugs.   Their goal, according to their website, is “to make rarefied knowledge accessible.”

Yesterday I sat down for my second interview with founder Mark Allen, who moved to Los Angeles from Vermont in 1997 to attend California Institute of the Arts and founded Machine Project in 2003.   I asked him about the relationship between Machine Project and the city.

“Los Angeles is a little bit of a hidden city,” Allen says. “A lot of the really interesting cultural things in L.A. aren’t immediately apparent.   It’s a city that unfolds for you over time.”

Many people that live in the Echo Park neighborhood near Machine Project are still discovering it, Allen says, perhaps because the Project is located in an unprepossessing storefront that always looks slightly abandoned despite the fact that it’s staffed nearly every working day.

“Los Angeles has this unique infrastructure,” Allen says, “there are all these different forms of cultural production and unusual available spaces.”

When designing his own cultural production laboratory, he felt it was important for Machine Project to have its own permanent, bricks-and-mortar space.   They set up in a pedestrian-friendly part of town where visitors would have the opportunity to come across the Project by accident. (Many of my very favorite things in Los Angeles I came across on aimless strolls, by accident, including the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the former site of the Velaslavasay Panorama.)

“We wanted a venue where things could happen,” he says, “a meeting place for all these different kinds of activities, a model that allows us to be a tangible presence in the city.   We want to keep it informal and accessible, so people feel they can come on by.”

Yet on-site events are only part of what Machine Project does, and many of their most high-profile events (like their “takeover” of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art) have been hosted elsewhere.

“This is a different model of growth than many non-profits,” Allen says.   As many non-profits become more well-funded and well-established, they seek to carve out a bigger physical space or to make improvements to the ones they have, ending up eventually as large, rooted, museum-like organizations.   Instead, Machine Project maintains their small, bare-bones home base while sending out satellites.   From Echo Park the Machine is slowly colonizing the city, showing up at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, then the Hammer Museum, then on the Santa Monica Pier.

This growth model is perfectly suited to Los Angeles, a city that likewise radiates from a few cultural centers and sprawls dozens of miles in all directions.   Los Angeles’ sheer size ensures that unfortunately, many residents of Westwood Village may never make the trek over the mountains to see a gallery show in Echo Park.   But by hosting site-specific installations at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, for example, Machine Project spreads its messages across a wide swath of the city while keeping its eastside headquarters small and easy to maintain.

In recent years they’ve partnered with the L.A. Opera, 826 L.A., Santa Monica’s GLOW festival, LACMA, and the Echo Park Film Center, as well as Critter in San Francisco and Cabinet in New York.   One ongoing project is a series of concerts at The Little William Theater, located in a coat-room in the lobby under the stairs at the Hammer Museum. Each week different musicians provide very personal concerts in this intimate space, which seats only two people at a time.

Machine Project’s proximity to the city’s entertainment industry also allows them to marshal vast talent resources in things like model making, lighting, props, and set design.

“I know I’m only one or two people away from anything I need, from a nuclear reactor to a glass eye,” Allen says.

(Occasionally Machine Project will also appear in front of the camera, as when their project to construct a forest inside the storefront later appeared in the film “Greenburg.”)

I suggested that one thing many people dislike about Los Angeles is how atomized it can feel — a lot of separate communities with their separate passions.   Does Machine Project’s very specialized programming encourage that kind of mentality?

Here Allen stops to sketch a series of diagrams on a piece of scrap paper.   First he draws a tall, thin pyramid that ended in a sharp point.   He labels it “Experimental Poetry.”   This represents one possible approach to programming: present deep knowledge of a narrow subject.   Experimental poetry experts, he explains, could gather for very technical disquisitions on their field of choice.   But once the organization had gathered up all of L.A.’s experimental poets, then what?

In order to expand their audience the experimental poetry organization could start offering a broader range of topics: other forms of poetry, or other literary arts, or arts in general.   More people would be interested, but the depth of complexity for these talks would suffer—the pyramid would have a broader base but a shallower depth.   (Here Allen draws a sort of ungainly, lopsided parallelogram.)

Machine Project, Allen explains, has a different approach to expansion.   If they want to gain a larger following—not just experimental poets but also arc welders, biological engineers, and Bulgarian folk singers—they simply offer more very in-depth, highly specific lectures on an ever wider number of themes.   (Here Allen draws a many-pointed star comprised of tall, sharp pyramids shooting off in all directions.)   With enough hyper-specialized workshops, you eventually get everyone, and no one is talked down to.

Nor must these populations of poets, welders, engineers, and folk singers remain forever separate.   The experimental poets who show up for one event may later come back to learn at least a little something about growing their own medicinal molds.   Now there is a core of dedicated Machine Project devotees that will simply show up for anything they present.

“I like the experience of being immersed in a new subject, of being in another world,” Allen says.   He recalls a recent Machine Project talk with Caltech scientist Jennifer Jackson on methods used to discover what elements are present in the center of the earth.   For about the first five minutes, Allen says, he was able to follow along gamely with the science presented.   Then for the next 20 minutes, he was in well over his head ““ an experience he finds pleasurable, not frustrating, a sort of aesthetic immersion in jargon and diagrams and statistics.

Immersive aesthetic experiences are guaranteed pretty much every week.   Up next at the Machine, Allen promises a “giant boat that will be sinking into the floor” alongside a series of nautically-themed workshops, and the special kids’ Partners in Crime event, where you and your child can learn together how to hot-wire a car.   Or you can donate a houseplant, as I will, for a month-long plant vacation where your neglected fern will be exposed along with hundreds of others to thirty days of cultural and poetic demonstrations in front of one of the Hammer Museum’s sunny windows.