SpacePost Labs
The STEAM accelerator and boardwalk maker space I ran in Venice Beach — home base for Crow Language, the community dinners, and the Art of Tech festival.
SpacePost Labs started on the Venice Beach boardwalk, the summer Snapchat moved into the neighborhood and absorbed the coworking spaces that had been holding both the local artists and a growing crowd of mission-driven builders. Instead of arguing about it, we built something to replace what was disappearing: a solar-powered VR co-working space and art incubator, set up on the sand every morning through spring and summer.
It was one of the first solar-powered VR stations anywhere — early Quest units running off a battery and a panel. Each week a different local artist painted live in VR with Tilt Brush, projected on a big screen so anyone walking the boardwalk could stop and watch, with 2D and 3D prints of the work offered as a way for the artists to earn from it. That first season featured more than ten local artists and gave the builders a safe, powered place to work. It also caught the eye of Jim Budman, the art patron who ran Budman Studios. He invited us in as "the tech guys," and the pop-up became SpacePost Labs — the STEAM accelerator I ran as Technical Director alongside his foundation.
What SpacePost really was, was a room. A maker space where a graffiti artist, an ML engineer, and a high-schooler could all be working on the same afternoon. The Crow Language project — the Coral TPU rig we pointed at the local crows — grew out of that room, and so did the edge bio-monitoring idea it turned into. So did the Venice Beach Dinner Club, the boardwalk dinners we cooked and crowdfunded for housed and unhoused neighbors alike, and the Art of Tech festival, where LA artists came to try their hand at digital tools. Early versions of Bright Moments Gallery, Lab.Bio, and New Atlantis took shape in that room too.
The rule never changed, and it was the opposite of tech saving art: hand real tools to people who already have something to say, then step back. Technology was the partner, never the point.
The boardwalk chapter is closed now, but the pattern didn't go anywhere. This was my DeSci before DeSci — community-run science before the word existed — and the line runs straight from that solar panel on the sand to the KINN and Science Sunday today.