The current A+D Museum exhibition Come In! DTLA celebrates creative practices in Los Angeles. On June 11, the LA Forum will host a discussion with exhibitors Jessica Fleischmann, Tim Durfee, Lisa Little, Guvenc Ozel, Erin Besler and Ian Besler, moderated by Danielle Rago, exhibition curator and Jennifer Marmon, architect and LA Forum Board Member. We spoke to Fleischmann, Little, Ozel and the Beslers about what grounds and inspires their creative work in the city.

How do you think living in Los Angeles influences your creative process at this moment? 

Erin Belser / Ian Besler: Our creative process is entirely determined by our access to material goods and fabrication processes. We spend a lot of time engaged in shop talk with talented and motivated people in Los Angeles about where’s best to buy things. Otherwise, mostly we spend all of our time trying to figure out how to sneak our way into various fabrication shops. Los Angeles enjoys a kind of embarrassment of riches of these resources and facilities.

Tell us about your work in the show; what were you exploring creatively in this project?

Lisa Little: This work explores the intersection of craft and computation, both of which are part of my design and fabrication processes. I’m intrigued about a new order at the intersection of multiple opposing forces: organic versus computational, hand versus machine, and biological versus mechanical; provocations that challenge the primacy of the purely digital object and set forth an embodied structural methodology.

How does your work begin to engage with the city, architects and designers, and the greater public?

Guvenc Ozel: The exploration and dialogue regarding the significance and application of Virtual Reality is at its infancy. By providing a playful yet accurate depiction of our project, which is meant to exist in an extraterrestrial context, we hope to engage our colleagues and the larger entertainment and aerospace industries in this debate while finding powerful tools to communicate our designs.

What are your intentions for the work post-exhibition and how might they inform a later project or your practice?

Jessica Fleischmann: The idea of an infinite grid is behind all of our work—a base structure that everything responds to, either through alignment or refusal. This work uses foil-stamped paper produced specifically for the show. It’s a custom version of the paper used in our Grid by Line stationary.