Although December 22, 2012, marked the end of the 13th baktun on the ancient Mayan Long Form calendar, it wasn’t really the end of the world: The Edge of Time, a “pocket” opera created by artist Elizabeth Cline and composer Lewis Pesacov, contemplates the Mayan approach to nonlinear, cyclical time.

George Herms has been making art and theater in California for over five decades. He was a founder of the West Coast assemblage movement and traveled in the circles of Beatnik poets and Wallace Berman’s Semina group. Mark Allen founded Machine Project, a nonprofit storefront in Los Angeles's Echo Park neighborhood, in 2003. Machine Project operates as a classroom, laboratory, performance venue and gallery, blurring distinctions between learning and teaching, amateur and expert, and various forms of artistic and scientific creativity. East of Borneo brought Allen and Herms together because of their impact in shaping the cultural landscape of Los Angeles, and their shared interest in questioning what it means to be an artist.