The Playlist: Felicia Filer

Felicia Filer has been the director of the Pubic Art Division for the Department of Cultural Affairs in City of Los Angeles for more that 15 years.  In this post she shares the music she loves to listen to at work.

What do you listen to while you work? I mostly listen to Jazz during the day when I work, either instrumental or with words.  I will pepper in some Soul or World Music if I need a boost!  Erica Badu, Adele, Aretha Franklin, Corinne Bailey Ray, Angelique Kidjo or Toots Thielmans will always makes me happy! As the evening nears, I tend to play something a little more moody, like Gretchen Parlato, Jeff Buckley or Esperanza Spalding.

How do you listen? Since I have my own office I don’t have to wear head phones when I listen to music.  I generally listen through the speakers on my computer. I try to keep the volume at a respectable level, yet still serve my need for the music to change my atmosphere.

Do you have any favorite music websites/providers? I listen to Pandora on occasion.

Does music influence your work? Listening to music while I work helps me to stay calm.  My job can be tremendously stressful.  Mostly I am responding to people streaming into my office all day long with problems.  I try to use a creative approach to solve the complex and challenging issues surrounding art and politics, such as how to continually provide cultural and artistic services throughout the City of Los Angeles with diminishing human and financial resources. Music helps me to think outside of the box when searching for innovative solutions to these concerns.

Who influences your musical taste? My daughter Brynne.  She is part of an acoustic/indie duet called Le-Ti. She gives me a new mixed-cd about once a quarter with some amazing music on it.  That really pushes me to keep expanding my musical taste.  I find that the time of day or the beautiful California light and sunsets will also influence what I listen to!

What song or artist best represents the work you create/ If your work was a song or a musician, what or who would it be? Well, it’s the end of the year and everybody wants everything completed right now, so I would have to say today my work feels like the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch.

Felicia Filer’s Playlist

Esperanza Spalding, Fall In

Bobby McFarren, Invocation

Adele, Rolling In the Deep

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme

Wayne Shorter, Dance Cadavarous

The Beatles, Blackbird

Emanative & Ahu, Turn Your Lights On

Erykah Badu, Gone Baby, Don’t Be Long

Gretchen Parlato, Winter Wind

Azymuth, Free As A Bird

Jeff Buckley, Grace

The Playlist: Gabriel Mann and Rebecca Kneubuhl

Gabriel Mann and Rebecca Kneubuhl are composers and musicians who collaborate on music for film, television, video games, and pretty much all other visual media. And non-visual media. Gabe is currently the series composer for the ABC television show “Modern Family” and a member of the Rescues.  And Rebecca and Gabriel recently completed the score to Mattel’s “Barbie: A Perfect Christmas.” And yes, they are parents. Happy New Year from their studio!

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Ideal Live/Work Space: Jung Hyang Kim

Jung Hyang Kim is a painter and public installation artist who works and lives in New York. Recently she finished a 60 foot outdoor glass art piece and a 155 foot mosaic wall for LIG insurance company in Sacheon, Korea. Here she shares her work space – a country studio far from the bustle of New York City.

I have my studio and home in Southern Columbia county, New York. Even though I have had this property for over 20 years, it was not until 2009 when our daughter went to college that I made it my full time work and living space. My search for an ideal work and living space has been a long time coming.
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Ideal Live/Work Space: Amanda Walter

Amanda Walter, founder and CEO of Walter Communications, spent 15 years inside professional service companies, before starting her own firm. She served as Director of Media Relations for AECOM, the industry’s largest architecture and engineering design firm.  Before joining AECOM’s corporate communications department, Amanda was Communications Director for the renowned design and planning firm EDAW, Inc.  With Barbara Faga, Amanda co-wrote Designing Public Consensus. Her new book, Social Media in Action: A Comprehensive Guide for Architecture, Engineering, Planning, and Environmental Consulting Firms, is published by ZweigWhite.  Here she shares an aspect of navigating her own firm, and how developing the space for her life makes it all work.
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Ideal Live/Work Space: Staci Valentine

Besides her work as private chef for various celebrity clients and running her catering company that focuses on sustainable, local ingredients, Staci Valentine and her firm Staci Valentine Design, specialize in creating, styling and photographing food-related imagery. Currently, she is also working on a novel approach to producing cooking videos. Here Staci shares her ideal work space – the kitchen and backyard of her home in Los Angeles.

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Studio Tour: Treehouse Design Partnership

Jennifer Bass and Lance Glover are founders of Treehouse Design Partnership, a Los Angeles-based firm specializing in environmental graphics, identity, book and furniture design. Jennifer’s book on her father, Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, co-authored by Pat Kirkham, is due out in November 2011. Lance also teaches at the Art Center College of Design and is a member of the improvisational music/video collective Health and Beauty. Below, the couple describes how the studio integrates their design practice with their many other interests, including art-making, instrument-building, writing and music.

We moved our office to this space about 12 years ago, a modest 1,000 square foot corner of a 1950’s bow-string truss warehouse on what was then a sleepy industrial block of Culver City– since then the neighborhood has changed dramatically, with new art galleries, restaurants and bars cropping up almost daily.

Our intent for the space, in addition to being a home for our graphic design studio, was to balance our various activities and interests. To that end there is a soundproofed shop for building things (with a combination of new and inherited tools from Lance’s grandfather), space for making music and storing music gear (the main floor often becomes one big rehearsal room, and our daughter Amanda’s drum kit sits in a loft space above the shop), places to stash Lance and Amanda’s silkscreens and Jennifer’s many objects from nature that she uses both in and for inspiration in her art (tumbleweeds, branches, seed pods, rocks etc.), an area for flat files, samples library, bookshelves, a small kitchen, and a few under-the desk snoozing spots for our two dogs, Ben and Puma.

It is a space unstructured enough to allow for continuous experimentation– the only fixed elements, aside from walls demarcating the shop and Jennifer’s office are the kitchen and the bookshelves- everything else is on wheels or portable sawhorses.

We find that working in this environment brings an open-ended sense to our time there– on those days we’re not crunching a deadline, when the skylight darkens it’s a cue that it’s either time to go home or to step away from the desk (or workbench) and make a little noise…

Ideal Live/Work Space: Zoe Melo

Zoe Melo has worn many hats in her life: she’s been an international model; she has worked as a product developer; she’s a mother; she’s Brazilian but has also lived in New York, Portugal and now Los Angeles. A few years ago, she brought the various aspects of her life together in her design consultancy firm, zoemelo.com, which she founded with her partner Peter Scherrer, a graphic designer, out of their home in Culver City. The two then launched a product design firm and showroom called TOUCH that collaborates with emerging international designers and artisans and is specifically focused on social and sustainable design. Most TOUCH products are handmade or made in limited editions; in this design studio relationships and quality of life come first. The studio provides a structure for TOUCH designers, helping give them a global reach as well as educating the world that good design and sustainability go hand in hand.

We began TOUCH from our home, but after a year or so, the business grew and the space felt too small. We found our new studio, this terrific open ceiling space with room for our studio and a showroom for the amazing products we feature.

Above: TOUCH LA showroom

My desk there is usually full of objects, prototypes, samples, new materials, a travel journal and catalogs. I like to have objects around me, they are my inspiration and I constantly change them. I call it a curator’s mind revealed.

Above: Melo and American intern Jessica Hudson at the studio in Brazil.

Right now I am setting up our new studio in Brazil.  It is a fantastic experience opening a new market and developing new projects and products with communities. I have reached my dream by combining travel and work, and have this mobility of using technology to coordinate various projects in different places at the same time. This is very satisfying work for me; to learn a lot about different cultures and places, while helping people to have a better living condition.

Above: A meeting with designer makers at Aglomerado da Serra Slum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

I now travel to many countries to develop products in artisan communities and to organize exhibitions during design fairs and events. Since I am on the road for work constantly, I can say that my “office” goes with me wherever I am working. So I work from hotel rooms, airplanes, friends’ houses, cafes. In fact, after we created our office in a cloud, things became much simpler. Truthfully, wherever I am connected to the internet feels like an office.

Above: At designer Domingos Tótora’s studio in Maria da Fe, MG – Brazil. This encapsulates Melo’s ideal live/work space – a studio open to nature.

An ideal work/live space for me is the combination of having a studio, showroom, home and nature. It is a place that feels like I can produce much more without much of the stress of the big cities.

But when I am on the road, a library at a hotel is my favorite. The Unique hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil is a very inspiring social space; the bookshelf, the Campana Brothers beautiful pouf, and the Gaetano Pesce chairs make it a perfect place for a design talk.

Above: Melo meets with designers at Unique hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil – another ideal work space.

Maybe the best of all worlds would be a mobile office space, where I could travel around showing our projects and exhibiting our products and living deeply within the talents of the world’s creative peoples.

Ideal Live/Work Space: Aeolab’s Nikita Pashenkov and Elise Co

We first worked with Aeolab when Broodwork presented a short film of theirs at the Trajector Art Fair in conjunction with Art Brussels last April.  We also love the OUIP! and Sony ODO - both designed with children in mind, plus their many other technology-based solutions for modern problems.  Aeolab is a partnership between husband and wife Nikita Pashenkov and Elise Co. Their consultancy integrates technology and design to work on many types of projects from hardware and software to graphics and research. Their multi-pronged approach, in which they tackle a wide variety of problems and work with different groups depending on the scope of the project, is reflective of what we see in similar partnerships that cross boundaries to visualize new ways of working.  Here they reflect on their ideal live/work studio, which needs to include both their son Felix and space for inspiration.

Some notes for the fairy-godmother who is planning to conjure up our dream studio* for us.  We like a clean, minimal and zen space with lots of natural light but we are pack rats who like to leave things out (e.g. we don’t put things away), and we have many things in progress in parallel which need space for the following:

- A place for our son Felix (2.5 years old) to start apprenticeship via crayon and cars

- Place for innumerable gadgets, pieces of gadgets, materials and objects

- A past-projects archive and storage for lots of books

- 4 permanently-allocated computers, with another 3 in various rotation with no glare on computer screens

- Space for 1 etching press, 1 small cnc mill, 2 sewing machines, dedicated space for thousands of tiny electronic components and, lastly, a dedicated space to use a blowtorch.

*Please fit this into 450 square feet.

Some places that inspire us:

Above: Brancusi’s studio, tool area. A dedicated place for every tool. If only cables could make such a composition.

Above: Eames House. Our current fabrication lair has a buckled floor, sloped roof, and crooked walls, so rectilinearity is a dream.

Above: Brodsky and Utkin Turtle House etching. An encapsulated jumble of assorted spaces, with the bonus of being portable.

Above: STORA+NYGATAN: Eclectic, tidy, and we have a lot of paper prototypes to turn into lamps.

Above: Library in the Ryotaro Shiba Museum, Tadao Ando. This is the kind of storage we need.

Ideal Live/Work Space: Shawn James Seymour and Yoshimi Tomida of Lullatone

Rebecca first heard of Lullatone when her daughter was an infant and  she was looking for soft ambient music… Lullatone soon became a household favorite. Lullatone’s founders, husband and wife Seymour and Tomida, have released 9 albums, made music for films, commercials, apps, museums and much more for clients including Target, Adobe, Toyota, NHK, and MOMA.  They also host a weekly children’s TV show that airs in central Japan every Saturday morning. Their ideal live/work space? They are living in it. Here is a small glimpse into their simple house and studio, nestled in the north of Nagoya, Japan.

Our whole home is 1200 square feet.  200 of it is dedicated to the studio room, but the lines tend to get blurred a little. For example, right now, the recording room has some coloring book pages on the floor from our son Niko coloring in here while I am mixing our new record. And, sometimes we use the other rooms for recording a little. And we’ve used the stairs and hallway before as a kind of echo chamber to add a real at-home kind of sound to some tracks.

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Ideal Live/Work Space: Artist Eamon O’Kane

Artist Eamon O’Kane is Professor of Visual Art at Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway and has had over forty international solo exhibitions.  His artwork hangs in numerous public and private collections worldwide including Deutsche Bank, Microsoft and Bank of Ireland Collection.

His paintings have focused on classic examples of modern architecture, including the Eames House, while his more recent work includes installations like the Eames Studio Limerick and Froebel Studio: A History of Play (pictured below). This installation, with its playroom quality, was inspired in part by the fact that Eames, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Piet Mondrian, were educated using the Froebel method of teaching with blocks and shapes.

Above: Eamon O’Kane and his installation Froebel Studio: A History of Play which was part of the BROODWORK: It’s About Time exhibition.

Here O’Kane describes his live/work studio in a wonderful abandoned plant nursery in Denmark.

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