Cool Hunting

by Perrin Drumm

Last month, Santa Monica's pier hosted 12 hours of performance and installation art, attracting 200,000 revelers for Glow, a public light and sound extravaganza in the style of Paris' Nuit Blanche. This video navigates through both the throngs of people (almost more notable than the art itself) and the many luminous installations dotting the beach and boardwalk.

At the far end, Infranatural unveiled "The Amazing Mental Scope," which reads the viewer's emotions and translates them into changing colors on the body of the telescope. Skyglow (Jeff Cain) offered some respite from the crowd, projecting aerial footage of Los Angeles onto the ceiling of a room, which actually required you to stop moving and lie down.

Other crowd-pleasers included Dunnage Ball (Peter Tolkin Projects), a sort of illuminated, modern moon-bounce, and Usman Haque's show-stopper "Primal Source." Yes, that's the one with the projections onto the big wall of water that everyone pointed and gasped at.

Not featured in our video, but still worth noting, is the award for the best use of glow sticks, which goes to Illumination Migration (Frank Rozasy). Nine hundred and fifty glow sticks were stuck in the sand and rearranged over the course of the night in accordance with the change in tide and migration of grunions.