Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess of Materials & Applications, aka M&A, will be the next guests of Farmlab's Friday Salon. They'll review four years of joy and trouble, growing their organization from the seed of an idea to an innovative local force in art and architecture.

Their outdoor project space in Silverlake has been called a showcase for "the frustrated artist inside every architect." Last year's installations included Maximilian's Schell, a parking lot sized golden vortex of mylar, and Here There Be Monsters, a hyperboloid-shaped bamboo foot bridge, spanning an aquatic habitat created from rainwater cachement.

"We have a "Cradle To Cradle" approach," says Oliver Hess. "We try to push a social agenda in a very mild way. M&A is about reforming the consideration of design, architecture and space. How the space is used, how it is appreciated. Anyone can participate to that."

This takes the form of workshops like the one Freya Bardell of Rana Creek taught on green roofs last October. This Blow Up Your Mind lecture series featured eight weeks of free thinking young designers and social engineers, including artist/architect Natalie Jeremijenko.

M&A Climate, a semi-annual digest of ongoing research and exhibitions, will publish its first issue this month. M&A's current interactive installation is called "Bubbles." It's a "spatially adaptable pneumatic environment at an urban scale." That means it's made of large airbags/bubbles that inflate and deflate in reaction to visitors pushing or bumping them. The exhibit will be up between 10 am to 10 pm at 1619 Silver Lake Blvd., Los Angeles, until February 15.

See "Bubbles" in action, and some of the other M&A installations in this short video from Cool Hunting.

This Friday's Salon will focus on the process of deciding what gets constructed and how the space demonstrates on a micro-scale the trends of the construction industry. The speakers will also talk about community building and the value of removing individual authorship to increase productivity and diversity of outcomes.

Along those same lines, Jenna and Oliver will participate in a panel discussion in San Francisco next month, called "This Is The Public Domain," part of the Wattis Institute's exhibition Radical Software.

This FREE Salon will be held on January 26, 2007, at noon, at Farmlab, located at 1745 N. Spring St. #4, Los Angeles, CA 90012. All ages are welcome; refreshments will be served.