Remapping LA Detailed Project Description
From REMAP
The last decade has seen the beginning of a re-habitation of Downtown Los Angeles. With the City’s River Revitalization Plan, community and civic leaders have now pointed to the health of the Los Angeles River and its neighboring communities as vital to the quality of life of Downtown’s growing population. From the time Los Angeles was an agricultural village through colonization, urbanization, and every subsequent stage of development, the River has been a force that fed and challenged the region’s expansive settlement, and the nearby communities have been central to LA’s history. UCLA’s Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP), in collaboration with California State Parks and local community organizations, will make one of five “Opportunity Sites” of the Revitalization Plan the first living laboratory of REMAPPING LA, a new project working with local communities to explore their own histories and identities with digital systems that they help to design. The Los Angeles State Historic Park, commonly known as “The Cornfield”, has seen each major phase of technological and social development in Los Angeles history, including the engineering of the railroads, water supplies and freeways. As the site’s history reflects the intersection of technological forces that have defined Los Angeles, this initial location of REMAPPING LA is uniquely provocative for community participation in shaping the next generation of urban technology.
Norman Klein said that Los Angeles is the “most photographed and least remembered” city in the world. REMAPPING LA aims to facilitate fluid and inclusive expressions of Los Angeles as communities explore their environments and retell their histories with technology built in a process they shape—perhaps seeding a new “collective memory”. Los Angeles has a reputation: crowded, interweaving freeways rupturing through and above aimlessly constructed neighborhoods with few pedestrians and without distinct flavors or tones. But Los Angeles also has a truth: innumerable ethnicities and cultural identities coexisting and interweaving and barreling through a unique, fascinating contemporary way of life. Yet for visitors and residents alike, Los Angeles often seems as if it does not have an actual or even figurative center, as if civic orientation is unattainable. In distributed mobile technologies and within the fluidity of digital media, the raw materials exist to build systems unique to the distributed, mediatized nature of Los Angeles—systems that explore, remember and express the real network of rhythms, tones, flavors, attitudes, events and points of view—systems that show how Los Angeles unequivocally debunks its reputation.
With community workshops this winter, REMAP will start a long-term process to collaboratively create indoor and outdoor media installations, performances and other cultural works that explore the history and identity of Los Angeles using new technology. The process will move in three-step cycles: first, exploring and documenting the city with digital media; then, shaping new technological systems that express what is discovered; and finally, inviting the city to experience and comment on what is created. Through the support of the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, the work will begin with teenagers representing the communities surrounding the Park. These students will map the real Los Angeles—immense, diverse and constantly changing—from their perspective. To start, the process will employ mobile phones, global positioning system (GPS) devices, digital cameras and geographic information systems (GIS) to document the city. Their discoveries, expressed in photography, maps, video and audio recordings, and written records, will add to a media repository currently being established. Emerging from this local, community-constructed online database fed by citizens’ own digital documentation of their Los Angeles, innovative works will be created and shown in the Park itself, as well as at the adjacent Chiparaki Cultural Civic Computing Center and nearby River areas. Repeating this cycle—urban investigation and distributed documentary, community shaping of technology and the resulting public exhibition of original cultural work—aims to draw the City into its own unearthing.
Exploring a collective digital memory of Los Angeles could begin in no more appropriate a place than the Los Angeles State Historic Park, where the River meets Downtown. During the last two hundred years, LA’s natural and human history has been repeatedly concealed or deleted. It is evident only in historical documents and in the scenery of Hollywood movies, so many of which UCLA has preserved in another “database”, its Film & Television Archive. As the region has been irrevocably altered by cycles of settlement, forced migration, mass immigration and surges of industrial growth, modernity has perpetually staked its claim. But where the River moves past the Elysian, Repetto and Verdugo Hills and enters the Los Angeles basin is the vital location (now the Park) that has witnessed not just technological change but the defining environmental, cultural and economic progressions of the region: the passage and sequential settlement of prehistoric animals, the Chumash and Tongva peoples, explorers and missionaries, Californio ranchers, Gold Rush adventurers, Yankee entrepreneurs, and Mexican, Chinese and Japanese immigrants. To this day, as the flow of transportation profoundly impacts trends in population redistribution, the working class and immigrant communities of this area (e.g., Lincoln Heights, Chinatown, Solano Canyon, Glassell Park) are the lifeblood of Los Angeles—one of the most technologically advanced hubs on the planet. REMAPPING LA positions these communities as specifiers and co-designers of new technological systems instead of only recipients—technological systems that make a new civic orientation possible.
REMAP is a joint center of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science. Its faculty and staff have over a decade of unique experience in cross-disciplinary research that brings together artists and engineers to explore the relationships of emerging technologies to culture, community and creativity. REMAPPING LA will involve UCLA researchers, Los Angeles digital media artists, and community facilitators from organizations such as The William C. Velásquez Institute (WCVI) and the Anahuak Youth Soccer Federation. Partners for REMAPPING LA include UCLA’s Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) and Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development. Additional support has been received from Cisco Systems, the Haynes Foundation, Nokia, and the Packard Foundation.
