BLUE KAMANDY

The iconic view of the city from the Griffith Park Observatory is a postcard contained within the collective memory of all tourists in Los Angeles. The recreation of this photograph is ritualized by all who experience it. It is a place that was built for photography. My interest in this location was to use that iconic image (recreated by many) as the starting point and to add layers of abstraction over it. The first layer of abstraction randomizes every frame in the video. Every frame is change, signifying human movement. The second layer has the video turn into a kaleidoscope. The third layer is having the video projected downward onto the floor, so we can look down at the view rather than out at it.

"There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds... ...You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before."

— Jean Baudrillard, West of the West: Imagining California