According to its website, Glow 08 was a dusk-to-dawn event where “artists were commissioned to create unique and inviting works of art that welcome the public to be both audience and actor for twelve celebratory hours.” The pieces were supposed to take their “spirit from the fabled grunion that live in local waters and come ashore several times a year to spawn in the sand creating a momentary sensation of iridescence.” Although walking around the event with friends and strangers on the Santa Monica Beach and Pier made for a fun evening, only three pieces stood out as quality work and that doesn’t include the only piece that appeared to use the grunion run for inspiration.

Making my way through Palisades Park, I headed down the stairs and over Pacific Coast Highway to the north end of the Glow Zone on Santa Monica Beach. A few lit objects dotted the sands north of the pier. Unknowingly, I passed a video exhibit playing in cannons in the park. I saw that people were looking in them, but it wasn’t clear that it was part of Glow.

First up on my art walk was Peter Tolkin Projects’ Dunnage Ball. It appeared to be an oddly shaped bouncy house, lit from the inside, made up of white tubes criss-crossing to make an enclosure. Some kids and adults were inside it, but it was no different than what I have seen at many a child’s birthday party, so I moved on.

Closer to the water was a large net set up like a canopy and balloons were being filled and inserted into it. I wasn’t sure if it was finished or if the creation of it was part of the exhibit. Some cushions lay underneath, but no one was using them so I moved on. I missed the name of this piece and couldn’t find it later after doing research. For all I know it may just have been a lounge of some sort

Heading to the pier, I passed Nova Jiang & Micahel Kontopoulos’ Moon Theater, a large white circular screen where people could create shadow hand puppets that software would then create into visual images. A technical glitch caused an error message to appear, so I didn’t stop. This was the first of an unfortunate trend that repeated far too often throughout the night.