Los Angeles and Its Afterimages
Los Angeles and Its Afterimages (tentative title) is an upcoming multi-author publication that dissects the transformations of urban culture and urban production of Greater Los Angeles in the years 1980–2020. With this project, SCI-Arc picks up on the legacy of trailblazing urban analysis by the likes of Mike Davis and Margaret Crawford who taught at the school in the late 1980s and 1990s, this time lending voice to a motley crew of cultural producers, entrepreneurs, chroniclers, cartographers, artists, and scholars. Reflecting on changes within multiple cultural spheres and territories of production, their stories point to distributed ways of acting and knowing which, the project argues, embody vital engagements with an emerging urban matrix in which a multitude of agents are destined to dream in parallel, against perpetually reconstituted notions of the Real. Positioning locally specific narratives against the wider backdrop of sociopolitical, economic, and urban restructuring, the project pieces together a composite image of L.A.’s evolving urbanity, beyond the city’s canonized ecologies and its enduring mythographies.
Funded by: the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts