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City of “Beautification Forrest” : Buffing Practices

In a world where Policing powers and Exclusionary Zoning codes are a crime, there exists a new now called Graffiti Heaven. The adventure of Graffiti Heaven begins with the challenge of escaping the Beautification Forrest by buffing and chopping out the destructive and displacing authorities, law enforcement officers, code enforcement signages, and the restrictive and fixed density zones of the Beautification Forrest. The aim is to go beyond the boundaries set by powers and authorities that continue to implement social and economic segregation zoning, institutionalization, and the arbitrariness of the colonial map-maker’s pen. Graffiti Heaven, is a world that provides equitable coded zones for consent, flexibility, rationality, transparency, accountability, and more importantly a continuous and evolving living city that will benefit for future generations to come.

What if Zoning codes, Police Powers, and Exclusionary zoning practices did not exist? What would this future world reveal to us now and for future generations?

How might an equitable coded language system enable an alternative zoning practice?

Abstract Legend: Red: Commercial / Retail, Yellow: Residential, Green: Agriculture, Orange: Industrial, Purple: Government

Keisuke Kuniyoshi

Hollywood Walk of Fauna: A Re-Wilded Future of Los Angeles

What if we altered rangeland policy enough to allow wildlife to gain a foothold? What if we mandated that municipalities plan for wildlife corridors? What if we re-defined wealthy as meaning “able to do the most common good,” the common good being defined as leaving the most intact, optimized system of biodiverse resources and ecologies for many generations of human society to come?

Natural California is under attack now, and always has been. The ever-growing human population, unsustainable resource extraction, and continued march of invasive species eat at it’s breadth of diversity. There are those who do not mind if the dwindling and isolated, disparate islands of natural landscape become islands of extinction for 10,000 species of plants and animals that call this land home. There are those that believe in the rights of wild landscapes to be left to live.

One way or another, California will eventually rewild itself, and all humanity can do is get in front of that rewilding and attempt to direct it. How can Hollywood stars use their powerful status in efforts to better shape our natural systems of Los Angeles, California and how it will be governed in the 21st century and beyond? If we were to establish new land protections and rearrange our current land rights uses in uninhabited areas, we could build a network of habitats for wildlife access?

Amor Bizarro

City of Operational Textiles

I imagine a city that has different operational textures that could replace walls, doors, and even traffic signals. Through the poster, I visualized feelings from different textures, wet, slippery, rough and Crispy..., by using patterns that help viewers to imagine.

In nature, I can get diverse feelings from the ground but in the urban area especially on the roads, they are all covered with quite similar materials. I got an inspiration from different textures in the Salton Sea and also inspired by how Target prevent losing their carts. They groove certain pattern around the market so carts can't function well in the outside.

In the poster, different neighborhoods have a different texture. I think it is common to imagine fully digitized security facilities such as doors, walls, and fences. What if in the future, there is a way to physically prevent someone to come in because of an unpleasant and dangerous feeling from the floor. Similarly, for cars, there are a traffic signal grooves that control the traffic flow smoothly.

City of Operational Textiles

City of Waves

We live in a world where we often rely on our visual sense to describe our day-to-day environment. But on the contrary, our other senses just as much can help materialize the world around us.

Welcome to the city where we see space through sound waves. In this piece, I created an ever-changing reality where sounds constantly reshape and alter our memories. By mixing the found sounds of a city, the tones reconstruct a sense of familiarity. Accompanied with a map, one can journey through different parts of the city, imagining the space around them.

Do soundwaves play a bigger role in our society? What sounds do we take for granted? How do we relate specific acoustics to our own emotional experience?

The City of Relational Perspectives We are by nature distinct, separate beings, each with our own body and our own faculties of existence. But what is it that really differentiates us aside from the experiences we have in respect to other objects, places, and people? As individuals who are often only aware of a subset of experiences we forget about the collective intersections and histories — past, present, and future — that underpin our truths. The City of Relational Perspectives investigates the idea of democratizing the memory, senses, and emotions of its’ citizens through space, place, and time. While in the city, one is all but unconscious of the things around and perpetually cognizant of the collective. Context is brought to the forefront as one travels through, perceptually shaping notions of everything from the inhabitants to the city itself. Inspired by the long-lost L.A. borough known as China City, the images before you stand to pay tribute to memories of what has largely been unseen and forgotten. What becomes of our perspective if our city collected and synchronously took on tangible memory signatures of the past, present, and future? How might this dynamism change our understanding of one another and reshape our realities?

the city of glitchy murmurs album https://vimeo.com/album/5472524

City of Post-Disease and Altars

A recent plague has wiped out parts of the city, leaving the landscapes occupied with floating, augmented altars in territory that is now inhospitable. Culturally left to accompany those who are no longer amongst the living, altars (flower arrangements, religious and angelic statues) in this imaginary city, are used to operate as networks that amplify the awareness of a condition left by an unseen disease. Schools of magenta crosses signify the areas of post-infestation at the most extreme levels. Seen at a macro level, the city is settled upon a petri-like dish as an overview of the polluted city.

Thinking historically about the land of Los Angeles, once inhabited by majority Native Americans (Chumash and Tongva tribes), it was essential to analyze the ways in which they were affected by modern diseases and bacteria that were brought over by settlers, colonialists, and Spanish padrés. Radiation and plague maps, nuclear dosage and damage calculators, were also tools of influence when creating this two-part city. It brings about the questions of what has nature and disease done here? How has this imagined reality transcended existing tools to visualize what has been left behind after a plague?

#dave #final

"Here in LA, as we are increasingly inundated with new condo developments, endless freeways and invasive advertising, the graffiti often seems like the city fighting back against the urban sprawl–the true voice of the population speaking up, reclaiming the city." —Los Angeles Graffiti