Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art

Dan Finsel's E-thay Inward-Yay Ourney-Jay

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*Getty's Pacific Standard Time Series on L.A. Architecture: A Preview
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a panel of architects and a performance at a science fiction conference imagine a high-tech future L.A. and an artist uses Pig Latin to title the work in his half-biographical, half-fantastical show.

5. Home for a wayward shopping cart
The lot on Traction between Third and Fourth Street, in Little Tokyo, used to be a gas station. Recently, it has become a pop-up art spot for street artists. Right now, there's a reshaped shopping cart angling up off a concrete slab at the center of the triangle and an eagle at the top of a found-object totem pole along the outskirts. Traction Avenue, between Third and Fourth streets.

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Courtesy Night Gallery

"Made in Space" at Night Gallery

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*Getty's Pacific Standard Time Series on L.A. Architecture: A Preview
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, the painter who pushed for a "superflat" aesthetic brings his formerly 2-D monsters to the big screen, three artists clean an alt space from floor to ceiling, and a group show makes Night Gallery's big new space feel maze-like in a good way.

5. Mr. Clean as a conceptualist
Starting the morning of April 5, Human Resources, the vintage Chinatown theater-turned-art space, will be cleaned. The designated cleaners, who will use designated cleaning supplies (the press release mentions Mr. Clean), include Hailey Loman, whose wearable sculpture includes a blanket with a plastic sleeping compartment in the middle of it. Sleeping "wearers" of this sculpture look shrink-wrapped, safe in a sterile way. Cleaners also include Gaea Woods, who photographs objects of beauty, and Lucy Campana, who appeared in Opening Ceremony's ethereally clean "Spa Heaven" videos. Cleaning has been an art act before, but often to bring attention to labor hierarchies or gender roles. This time, the primary subject is the elusiveness of being perfectly clean. You can come to watch or help. 410 Cottage Home St.; Sat., April 5-7, starting 11 a.m.; free. (213) 290-4752; humanresourcesla.com.

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@urbanpirahnatwo

Alex Fraser's shot of the Santa Monica Pier on Instagram

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Best L.A. Novel Ever: The Tournament
*50 Reasons Los Angeles Is the Best City in America

Just before the end of Instagram's wild year — bought by Facebook for $1 billion, publicly eviscerated by its community for new privacy policies — the photo-sharing app posted a list of the 10 most Instagrammed places in 2012.

Although top honors went to two locations in Bangkok — Suvarnabhumi Airport and Siam Paragon, a mall — the rest of the list read like a local guidebook. Southern California was home to five of the 10 locations on the list: Disneyland (third), Los Angeles International Airport (sixth), Dodger Stadium (seventh), Staples Center (ninth) and the Santa Monica Pier (10th).

In fact, the only locations not in Bangkok or Southern California were Times Square (fourth), AT&T Park in San Francisco (fifth) and the Eiffel Tower (eighth).

OK, I know what you're thinking. A Thai mall is more popular than Disneyland? And Dodger Stadium's more photogenic than the Eiffel Tower?

Well, not exactly. I joined Instagram last year and have spent the last year diligently, if not scientifically, studying the app (you all take far too many unappetizing food photos). With my iPhone in hand, and my trusty Lo-Fi filter at the ready, I set off to find out why Instagram loves L.A.

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Ian Evenstar, Unincorporated

Trimpin with his instruments for the evening at USC's "An Evening with Trimpin" last week

Trimpin is a sound artist, a sculptor, an engineer and inventor, a musician... All of these characterizations describe the work he creates, housed in museum and public collections around the globe. And yet none of them alone pin down Trimpin's enigmatic art.

The work of this German-born, Seattle-based artist is larger-than-life. In many cases, yes, very tall. One of his better-known works, If VI was IX, is a 50-foot tower of 700 guitars programmed to play on their own and tune themselves. Trimpin utilizes traditional instruments, such as guitars and pianos, in innovative ways, and non-traditional instruments, such as wooden clogs.

But his work is not just about clever combinations of sound. As Trimpin told me in a chat just prior to a lecture and performance last Thursday night presented by USC's Visions and Voices series, "it's about combining sound and space. It's using sound to move through space, and to make sound moving."

What's fascinating about his work is his use of media and technology -- inventing kinetic mechanisms, motion and light sensors to play his sculptures -- within and despite progress. As our society becomes more and more one of mp3 players and podcasts, Trimpin's work explores our ongoing connection with sound its spatial environment.

In a series of PowerPoint slides presented by Trimpin at his lecture last week, the artist described the trajectory of his work from learning about radio, engineering and playing musical instruments at a young age through developing an allergy to metal that made him unable to play and venturing into an exploration of what it means to play an instrument.

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Carol Cheh

Artist Chadwick Gibson gives a virtual tour of his gallery, while inside his gallery

In the race to see which high-tech super-company is the creepiest and most Orwellian, Google has recently pulled far ahead of the rest of the pack. Its various tools, from Google Maps to Gmail to Google+, have become so powerful and indispensable that they are literally everywhere you look. The company's mission statement is quite simple -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -- but it's also frighteningly comprehensive. Is there any area of our lives now that is free from Google's touch?

Artist Chadwick Gibson has found a unique way to deal with the quagmire of Google domination. In a solo show titled "Googlegeist: Mirrors Behind the Curtain," now on view at Smart Objects, a new art space in Echo Park that Gibson also founded, the artist presents a series of images extracted from Google Art Project. That app functions like a Google Street View for museums, letting users look at works of art and virtually wander down the halls of museums all over the world. The images presented in Gibson's show all have one thing in common: in them, one can see the Google photographer and/or his nine-eyed street view camera reflected in the museum's mirrors.

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Karen Marcelo

This happened last weekend in L.A.

If you really want to see a festival that deals with the extremities of the future, any retirement home will do.

The 2nd Extreme Future Festival, which took place over two days at the L.A. Center Studios this past weekend, focused on arts and technology produced by "radical voices of the new evolution." It was in fact two days of strobe light, slam poetry and lectures on the sorry state of a world, all transfixed on fixed points in the future that, to the presenters, matter more than the crumminess of the "now."

It was also to closest thing to a reunion of the minds behind the groundbreaking industrial music and performance art book Industrial Culture Handbook from Re/Search publications, with V. Vale, Naut Humon (Rhythm & Noise), Sinan (SPK) and Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) all making various appearances over two tumultuous, chaotic days.

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Courtesy MOCA

Still from Ryan Trecartin's P.opular S.ky (section ish)

This week, a frenetic, 40-minute-plus video airs on MOCAtv, a photo show gives famous and anonymous photographers equal play, and a short film brings together 21st-century preteens and a slavery-era hymn about deliverance.

5. Spirituals and sea creatures
Artist Lili White organizes the Another Experiment by Women Film Festival annually in New York, and then does several other showings throughout the year. The Armory Center for the Arts will host one of those other showings this weekend. The program includes Alessandra Cianelli's Story of an Octopus With a Heart-Shaped Head, a surreal dreamscape that really does feature heartlike organs and shapes floating around under and above water. It also includes Rebecca Louise Tiernan's One Mississippi, in which four preteen girls nap and stare and frolic in fields while old spirituals play -- at one point they circle a goth scarecrow while the words "I want to live with God" are sung aggressively. 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; Fri., Dec. 28, (626) 792-5101, miascreen.com.

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BLU at Tou Scene, Nuart 2010

In Stavanger, Norway, every September for the past 12 years, Nuart, one of the largest street art festivals in the world, transpires. Closeted in the beautiful Fijords, Stavanger is a quaint, oil-rich community with a high standard of living, sometimes making the list as most expensive in all of Europe. However, it is not easy to get to, rains 20 hours out of every day (at least in the fall) and has a zero tolerance law when it comes to tagging and graffiti. A perfect spot to host preeminent street art and its artists?

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The #SMTA gang

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*More L.A. Weekly Film Coverage
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

On December 5 of last year, a few self-described movie geeks put a simple idea into practice: they all watched a movie at the same time and tweeted along to it. Called the Sunday Night Movie Tweet-Along (#SMTA for short), the open-to-the-public activity took off in a way that few in the group seem to have expected.

Jenn Hoffman, one of #SMTA's founding members, says that "several thousand people" join in on any given given week before adding that, "We generate around 30-40 million impressions through retweets and favorited tweets." In one notable instance just last weekend, Corey Feldman was tweeting along to The Goonies from the Playboy Mansion and wound up being retweeted by none other than Hef himself.

Credit #SMTA's growing popularity to both the simplicity of the endeavor -- all you have to do is start the movie in question at the appointed time and tweet at will -- as well as the growing pool of celebrity guests who have joined in: Ethan Embry of Empire Records, Omar Epps of Juice, William Zabka of The Karate Kid.

It was Zabka, Hoffman says, whose involvement took things to a new level: "There was something special about poking fun at a film that was so beloved by our generation. It really sparked outside interest from new people and dramatically boosted our number of participants."

Next on the docket is James Cameron's True Lies this Sunday night, with special guests Tom Arnold and Eliza Dushku.

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Courtesy FLAX

Jim Shaw's Didactic Art installation in the show "Lost (in L.A.)"

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*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*Our Latest Theater Reviews

This week, artist Jim Shaw pops up in two places, a TV phenomenon loosely inspires an exhibition and a playwright known for breaking the fourth wall breaks it before finishing his new play.

5. Be like an ant
"Just be like an ant carry something this way, carry something back," says filmmaker Mike Plante's uncle Paul in the film Be Like an Ant. Plante made the film for and about his uncle, who bought a trailer to live in with his family after moving back from Vietnam and then began building it out, and kept building for 20 years, until it turned into a free-form house with more than 100 windows and a shape entirely its own. This film and others by Plante screen at the Armory Center for the Arts this weekend. 145 N. Raymond Ave., Pasadena; Sat., Dec. 8, 7:30 p.m.; (626) 792-5101, armoryarts.org.

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