virtual care lab
virtual care lab is a series of creative experiments in remote connection, co-founded by myself and Alice Yuan Zhang in 2020, and subsequently organized with a shifting group of contributors. VCL has created innovative openings for joy, empathy, creativity and invention, and explored issues in digital commoning, mutuality and collective care. From 2020-22, VCL created over 40 workshops, performances, and collective research groups including virtual soundwalks, experimental poetry labs, writing a “collective terms of service”, and various magical online portals, and has maintained a very welcoming Discord space. The project was developed in partnership with NAVEL, a non-profit cultural organization and community space in Los Angeles.
A few highlights:
Collective Rest Portal (website & performance at University of Toronto’s 4S Conference)
Terms That Serve Us (public research for The Bentway Conservancy)
José Miguel Portal
Care as Practice initiative
Press:
VCL in Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles
VCL in Artillery Magazine
nocturne
An 8mm film commissioned by Echo Park Film Center for its 20th Anniversary in December 2021. Insomnia or sleepwalking, observations of a city at night.
Again I awoke as the sun was setting
Went wandering –
At dawn, the sky still obscure
Watermarks
Watermarks is an expressive study of Richmond, Virginia, where post- Civil War monuments obscure the buried traumas of enslavement along the James River. Through analog film processes and unconventional sound design, the river becomes a line to trace a history that remains invisible beneath an illusory surface. Seemingly stable landscapes unfold to unearth a buried world, observing a land polluted by histories of violence and questioning how the past has been recorded or suppressed.
14 minutes, 2018 (excerpt above)
Screenings (2019-20)
Los Angeles Filmforum at MOCA
Slamdance Film Festival
Fracto Experimental Film Encounter
Iowa City Intl. Documentary Festival (ICDOCS)
Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Feminist Border Arts Film Festival
Treefort Music Festival
NOFLASH Video Show
CalArts Directing Showcase, REDCAT
Los Angeles Is Endless Like a Scroll
Sound composition & performance, in collaboration with Spatial Awareness Network and Roundhouse Platform
WUHO Gallery, April 2019
A soundscape composition and live visual media performance in collaboration with Spatial Awareness Network, commissioned by Roundhouse Platform for a series reenvisioning works in the public domain. The piece reimagines the short story “The Pedestrian,” by Ray Bradbury, which envisions a future Los Angeles where pedestrians are surveilled and policed by automated law enforcement. Using the 1960s radio adaptation of the story as source material, the 25-minute performance offered a fractured vision of Los Angeles through soundscape, landscape footage and analog video synth textures.
I created and performed the live sound piece, collaging the original radio dialogue with sound effects, analog synth and field recordings of sites in Los Angeles. The layers of sound compose an illusion of a complete environment, one that can only exist in soundwaves.
