Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

If you've been to the website of a buzzy new tech startup in the last few years -- Groupon, Airbnb, Square -- chances are you've seen the work of Adam Lisagor. Not just his short videos, which are passed around the Internet to promote and teach you how to use these products, but also Lisagor himself, the 34-year-old creative director who stars in them. He's the guy in the thick-rimmed glasses and frizzy beard, an uber-accessible Everyman who walks you through a complicated idea with refreshingly deadpan yet thoroughly earnest delivery.

"The purpose of the videos is to make the information exciting," he says. The result is somewhere between a Michel Gondry movie and an OK Go music video: highly visual, rich with metaphor, giddily clever.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

Standing in his studio at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Dan Goods places a small cube of gel in a visitor's hand. He looks the visitor in the eye.

Then he gets out the blowtorch.

"Trust me," he says with a grin.

The flame hits the translucent cube, but there's no heat coming through the cube's bottom. When the flame is extinguished and you pass your hand over the top, it's barely warm.

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Photo by Vincent Gallardo

Caine's Arcade

A homeless seven-year-old in Russia named Pjotr is addicted to cigarettes. He must navigate the streets of St. Petersburg, doing whatever he can for a smoke -- steal liquor to give to his prostitute mother for a few bucks and trade Mercedes hood ornaments to black market dealers for a spare stoge. If he goes for a minute without nicotine, he falls to the ground shivering and then dies.

The storyline becomes a little less messed up when you realize that it forms the narrative backbone for a video game called Ultitsa Dimitrova, designed by Lea Schönfelder. The sad part is that it was inspired by a real anecdote she heard from her brother, a social worker in St. Petersburg, Florida. But in real life, it is oddly cute -- maybe because of the plot's absurdity, but also because there's an airy flute playing in the background and all the characters are drawn with blue pen ink. Ultitsa is one of dozens of new, offbeat games featured at the 2012 Game Art Festival, which took place this past Wednesday and Thursday nights, at the Hammer Museum and UCLA's Broad Art Center respectively.

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Patrick Connor

Jennifer Moon, Prison Relic #2: Typewriter, 2012.

This week's list includes a show about incarceration, Lena Dunham's dad and art for gamers.

5. Behind bars
Artist Jennifer Moon was incarcerated for nine months, though nothing in her current exhibition at Commonwealth and Council tells us why -- except to say she was "a common criminal," not a "political" one. The show does tell us that Moon obsessively picked loose hairs out of her cell bedsheets each morning, dabbled in tobacco smuggling and had a prison romance. Spare photographs of objects she possessed or acquired behind bars hang above little cardboard shelves. There's a book called Where I Learned of Love resting on each, and if you read the bookmarked paragraphs -- which doesn't take long at all -- you'll piece together how Moon learned to assert herself, let herself go and love what she had all at once. 3006 W. Seventh St.; through May 5. (213) 703-9077; commonwealthandcouncil.com.

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Photo by Lynton Gardiner, courtesy of the Mingei International Museum, San Diego

Herman Van Goubergen's origami Skull (2010), made of elephant hide, paper and mirror

What do cutting-edge developments in heart stents, air bag logistics and space telescope lenses have in common with a folded paper frog? These advances in technological design all are based on the principles of origami -- an ancient sculptural art form with strong links to mathematics, engineering and science.

Origami once was dismissed as a simple children's craft, and for many of us the word still brings to mind images of folded paper toys and those little cootie catchers used to tell fortunes in elementary school. A major new exhibition, "Folding Paper: The Infinite Possibilities of Origami" at the Japanese American National Museum, rapidly disabuses us of this simplistic image, showing origami to be a highly sophisticated and significant contemporary art form.

Featuring 150 works by 40 international artists from 16 countries, the exhibition demonstrates that not only can origami be exquisitely beautiful but it's also capable of inspiring engineers, conveying complex political commentary and acting as a conduit for spiritual expression.

"Many of the folders who have elevated origami to its new place in the art world are not only accomplished artists but also respected mathematicians or scientists," says exhibition curator Meher McArthur.

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Susan Vielmetter Projects

Karl Haendel's drawing Tired Dylan (2008)

[Update: This article previously referred to the MOCA festival curated by Mike D as a fundraiser for the museum. Mercedes sponsored the exhibit, but it was not intended as a fundraiser. The item has been corrected below.]

A festival run by a rapper, a Cadillac in a gallery, a soap opera cast with women in white, "taking account of oneself" taken to its extremes: It feels like spring.

5. So what'cha what'cha what'cha want
Until May 6, the Beastie Boy's Mike D is moonlighting as a MOCA curator. He's organized a festival of audio-video art at MOCA. Backed by Mercedes Benz, the festival has no admissions charge and will, MOCA hopes, bring in several thousand visitors. The artist line-up includes Public Fiction, which is the name of the experimental space Lauren Mackler runs in Highland Park. Mackler has orchestrated her own, quirky festival-within-a-festival at the Geffen. She'll present a panel on cults, a set by electronic improvisers NGUZUNGUZU and a broadcast by homeless, artist-run radio station KChung. 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo; events daily through May 6. (213) 626-6222, moca.org.

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Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

Alfred A. Hart's photo entitled Locomotive "Gov. Stanford," circa 1865

Long before studios, hippies, method actors and reality-show wannabes headed out west, the Pacific Coast was a destination for farmers, miners, prospectors and other wagon-wheeling homesteaders who were looking for a new way of life. Two years after California struck gold in 1848, it became a part of the United States in 1850, and along with the Gold Rush, there was another rush to build a railroad linking the country's growing network of cities together.

"Visions of Empire: The Quest for a Railroad Across America, 1840-1880," on view through July 23, chronicles the construction of America's transcontinental railroad through original paintings, lithographs, magazines and other prints and ephemera from the permanent collection at the Huntington Library in San Marino.

Curator of the exhibition and the Huntington's H. Russell Smith Foundation Curator of Western Historical Manuscripts Peter Blodgett explains: "As much as the exhibition will cover the technological marvels, engineering feats and entrepreneurial audacity of the railroad age, it also tells the story of how the vision of American continental expansion evolved through a range of historical contexts -- from the age of Andrew Jackson through the Gold Rush, Civil War and Gilded Age of the late 19th century."

Here is a selection of images from the exhibition, with a few nuggets of valuable historical info sprinkled throughout.

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Four hundred years ago, stargazing was practically illegal. The Roman Inquisition sentenced Galileo for supporting Copernican astronomy, and most people still believed the Earth was flat.

Fortunately, science has since come a long way, and now, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena has made space exploration a viable industry in Southern California -- on par with film, television, improv and bikini waxing. Today, we're still welcome to join the Flat Earth Society, but most of us accept the fact that we're not the center of the universe, with the exception of the Scientologists, perhaps.

As a celebration of our achievements in the field of space exploration, the Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design presents "The History of Space Photography" -- one in a series of exhibitions that examines the nexus of art, science, history and literature. On view through May 6, the show features 150 images that chronicle the advancement of extraterrestrial picture-taking, from black-and-white images of the moon to incredibly detailed digital photos of galaxies outside our solar system.

In the words of none other than Leonard Nimoy, aka Star Trek's Mr. Spock: "If millions of people will contemplate the images in 'The History of Space Photography,' perhaps for a moment, politics can take a rest and compassion, social justice, the dignity of humankind can be advanced an inch."

With this in mind, check out our mini-collection of photos from "The History of Space Photography," with insights from the exhibition's guest curator, Jay Belloli.

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Max Danziger

Rick Allen and his work Shape Shifter

"I threw my drum kit down the steps outside. All the drums landed in a heap on the driveway and I said, 'I don't want to do this.' I was almost 15 and that was it. I was giving up my career," says Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen, rolling his eyes at the bratty 15-year-old-version of himself.

"Almost simultaneously," he adds, "there was an article in the newspaper that said, 'Leppard Loses Skins' and it talked about Def Leppard, a local group that had lost their drummer, so I called up, got an audition and I got the job."

The 48-year-old, one-armed British drummer, who has lived in California for 21 years, is relaxed and seated at a table on the patio of a busy Santa Monica cafe. He's wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, earrings and a brown beaded necklace. Though it is lunchtime, Allen hasn't ordered anything to eat or drink. Instead, he has brought a Thermos filled with distilled water and Himalayan sea salts. "Excuse me if I seem a little spacey," he says, explaining that he's on the second day of a three-week dietary cleanse.

Allen also has brought a clear plastic drum stick, one of two types used to create the images for his upcoming fine art debut, "Electric Hand: Rhythm + Change," a limited collection of abstract images created from computerized tracking of Allen's drum strokes, on display on his website www.rickallenart.com.

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Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery

Elad Lassry, Man (Ice), 2012

Future and past feel like they're on a collision course this week -- especially in William Leavitt's deceptively mundane drawings of suburbia gone awry and Dennis Hoekstra's and Noah Olmsted's ghostly, garish re-envisioning of the Pacific Design Center.

5. Modern-day mythmaker
Charles Garabedian didn't get the memo, or maybe he just tossed it out. While his peers veered further toward pared-down abstractions (Robert Irwin started making white acrylic discs) and hard-to-grasp conceptualism (Doug Huebler exhibited typewritten "explanations" of black-and-white snapshots), Garabedian dug deeper into mythic narrative: He painted biblical characters topless on TV screens or floodwaters sweeping through Culver City. Work from 1966-76, the first decade of the 89-year-old artist's still-going L.A. career, currently hangs at L.A. Louver, on the second floor. 45 N. Venice Blvd., Venice; through May 12. (310) 822-4955, lalouver.com.

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