Pershing Square Renew Win

Video for winning Pershing Square redesign project! As seen on LA Times, Archinect, SoCal Public Radio, ABC 7, and more!

In April 2016, I directed the interviews and live action shooting for Agence Ter and Team’s redesign for Downtown Los Angeles’s Pershing Square. Their design was one of the final four in a larger Pershing Square Renew competition. The proposal was focused on a flat, democratic, and green design – one that would be timeless and open to new generations. Ultimately the team won, beating out the three other teams (including notable figures such as James Corner and Thom Mayne).

Now that Agence Ter has won, there is talk of me creating a larger video installation based on all of the remaining (and unused) interviews and city footage.

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Project Reel 2015

Writer/Director/Cinematographer/Editor

Reel of work from 2011-2015. Includes documentary, fiction, and experimental video.

Music: Dan Deacon “True Thrush”

Ride South LA video at the Guggenheim

The video I made for the Ride South LA group was featured in the Guggenheim Museum’s new exhibit on the Participatory City. Our contribution is a response to the term “Collaborative Urban Mapping,” based on our work in South LA with the Healthy Food Map. The video was funded as part of the Guggenheim’s exhibit, which addresses “100 Urban Trends from the BMW Guggenheim Lab,” and is showing from October 11, 2013 through January 5, 2014. The exhibit explores the major themes and ideas that emerged from the Lab during its travels to New York, Berlin, and Mumbai. See all videos in the collection in a YouTube playlist (ours is #25).

The Leimert Phone Company

The Leimert Phone Company is a community design project in South Los Angeles. By repurposing payphones, the project seeks to reclaim public space and create cultural portals to local arts, music, and business. South LA is set to change over the next 10 years as planners focus on development around a new subway line through the area. In the face of possible gentrification, how can a community art project deepen neighborhood identity and broaden access to local business? Our collaborative team chose payphones as sites for public intervention and transmedia storytelling tied to justice.

The Leimert Phone team is composed of students from USC and local artists from Leimert Park. Through a 5-week workshop participants formed 3 project groups to develop unique designs. The workshop used rapid-prototyping and playtesting to facilitate lo-fi transmedia designs to share stories and access local music, history, artwork, and business. Each group presented their work on April 6, 2013 to local residents, students, and a panel of expert community organizers. The groups’ presentations included concept videos, detailed design handouts, visual mockups, and a hardware demo. Examples included a phone to play, download, and purchase tickets to local hip-hop acts. Other one sent you on a scavenger hunt to local businesses to collect stories and receive discounts. (Check out group videos http://leimertphonecompany.net/week-4-concept-videos/)

Livingverse

Livingverse (2010, Mobile/Mixed Media)

The Livingverse thesis project consisted of an interactive locative media project, a feature length documentary, and a research paper. The locative media tour used binaural recordings and archival audio/video to create an immersive narrative world to explore our contemporary global networked society through layering other historical places onto the architectural contours of the Digital Arts Research Lab at UCSC. Rather than presenting global networks through abstracted graphical representations of nodal relationships, the Livingverse project creates an interactive experience that directly engages the embodied perceptual and affective elements of the individual in relationship to these larger historical events and social transformations. Originally exhibited at the Things that are Possible DANM Thesis Show in 2010.

Lebenverse: Living Video Memory

Lebenverse: Living Video Memory (2009, HDV 73mins)

The documentary analyzed the Gulf Wars, the Rodney King beating, and the Iranian “twitter revolution,” focusing on the emerging social formations and shifting power relations accompanying the proliferation of personal technologies. It was filmed across the US as I interviewed Gulf War veterans, LA Riot witnesses, and cultural studies scholars such as Marita Sturken, Hamid Naficy, and Alison Landsberg. The documentary was funded by the competitive UC Berkeley Human Rights Grant and was a collaborative research project with the Witness organization in New York.

Mundos especulares (Mirror Worlds)

Mundos especulares (Mirror Worlds) (2008, HDV 37mins)

Documentary focused on the development of Argentina’s post-traumatic history after the dictatorship of 1976-83, particularly on the role of film production in the construction of national memory and recovery.  The documentary maps the general trajectory of increasingly nuanced and complex filmic representations, while contextualizing each film’s production within the shifting and often contradictory political discourses surrounding that traumatic period. Funded by Ohio State Honors Research Grant and International Affairs Grant.

Extended Preview

Occupy Oakland

Occupy Oakland (2011, HD)

The ongoing video series is part of a commitment to political activism and community participation.  The documentation helps present a movement structured around alternative forms of democratic participation.  The concept of the General Assembly within the Occupy movement is an inclusive consensus-building model of participation that has become a statement against the failed and corrupt representative republic of the US government.  Because of its inclusivity as well as its critique against government corruption and unrestricted global capitalism, the Occupy groups have come under increasing media attacks and governmental crackdowns.

First Day GA and 10/22 March
Forced Eviction/Tear Gas 10/25 
General Strike/Port Shutdown