Historical Portraits Project

In partnership with StandardVision, we've produced a series of digital art pieces for the Central Library Video Wall. This project involved creating cinematic moving "portraits" of Los Angeles historical figures, portrayed by library patrons and community members.

Read more about this project.

Generative Animations

A series of generative digital animations which draw inspiration from the art and architecture of Central Library, especially the decorative ceiling patterns painted by Julian Garnsey. There are roughly 6 or 7 unique patterned rooms in the Library—each with their own color palette, shapes, and compositions. The generative pattern system is organized as a series based on these various rooms—freeing the ornament from the bounds of ceiling decoration and reintroducing it as dynamic digital content. The final result is a piece that illustrates a systematic approach to decoration, placemaking, and interior design—both new and old.

Learn more about this project.

Universum

Universum is the first product of Substrate, a LACMA Art + Technology Grant project by artist Nancy Baker Cahill, which examines the equitable distributive properties of mycelial networks, and how they relate to emerging data-sharing technologies. Substrate connects civic institutions, cultural resources, and data storage systems as a collaborative test case for civic hubs citywide, including the Los Angeles Public Library, LACMA, and Long Beach City College working in tandem, imagining new ways of eliminating barriers to access, of structuring permission, and of producing and sharing knowledge. Using blockchain, Substrate connects these public resources as metaphoric "Mother Trees" with the potential to nourish communities through distributed networks of multi-stakeholder cultural initiatives.

WE by Sarah Elgart

Sarah Elgart is a Los Angeles–based choreographer and director whose award-winning work spans stage, screen, and site-specific performance. Her film WE situates dance in the layered landscape of Venice Beach, where displacement and scarcity coexist with affluence. Through a meeting between two men at an alleyway intersection, the work navigates themes of belonging, isolation, compassion, and disdain— painting a portrait of the city’s contradictions and the human longing that lives within them.

Western Fronts by Rick Silva

Rick Silva is an Oregon-based artist whose digital media works explore the aesthetics and politics of the natural world. His film Western Fronts responds to the proposed reductions of four U.S. national monuments, juxtaposing sweeping drone footage of the American West with geometric overlays and a foreboding soundscape. At once beautiful and unsettling, the work critiques authoritarian threats to public lands while reflecting on the urgent intersections of environmental exploitation, climate crisis, and cultural preservation in America today.

In Our Time by Jaime Yao

Jaime Yao is a Los Angeles–based digital artist whose work blends advanced software and generative AI to craft immersive, human-centered narratives. His short film In Our Time unfolds over a single night in Barcelona, following an ordinary volunteer in the International Brigades. A quiet tribute to solidarity across borders and languages, the piece reflects on fate, transformation, and the unseen ecosystems born of sacrifice. Using emerging technologies as storytelling instruments rather than spectacle, Yao expands the emotional possibilities of narrative, illuminating intimate histories and collective memory in ways that feel both timely and deeply humane.

Micronaut Odyssey by Wendi Yan

Wendi Yan constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI, game engines, and documentary practices to probe and play with the artifice of knowledge. Inspired by scientist Michael Levin’s research in bioelectricity and regenerative biology, Micronaut Odyssey imagines speculative biological robots with different shapes and movements wandering in space, against the backdrop of Martian terrains under a microscopic lens. Yan’s film visualizes a science fictional world centering the soft, the living and the microscale high–tech futures.

The Perfect Mashed Potatoes by Elena Rendina

Swiss-Italian visual artist Elena Rendina works across photography, performance, and animation to create stylized, intimate worlds that explore the tension beneath traditional ideals of femininity. Often using her own image, she stages ironic and uncanny vignettes that subvert domesticity through hand-crafted sets, costumes, and props made from everyday materials like bread, pasta, and tablecloths. Her work humorously reclaims the language of homemaking as a form of self-expression and critique.

Mountains by Daniel Savage

Daniel Savage is an artist and animator based in Los Angeles CA. Daniel’s work is inspired by printmaking techniques, creating a grid-like structure that brings consistency to organic forms, often depicting nature with an aesthetic that blurs the lines between digital and physical. This piece expands on his Mountains series, exploring the layers and vibrant colors of an abstract landscape, drawing rhythm from the natural waveforms of mountains.

Winter by Jamie Scott

Jamie Scott is an artist and visual effects specialist whose work captures the quiet poetry of nature in transition. His time-lapse films are composed from thousands of meticulously gathered photographs, revealing seasonal change as a slow, immersive rhythm. Scott weaves shifting colors, light, and atmosphere into cinematic portraits of landscapes in flux. His process blends patient observation with technical precision, allowing viewers to experience transformation as both intimate and expansive.

LA Impression by Jaime Yao

Jaime Yao is a Los Angeles–based digital artist whose work blends advanced software and AI to create immersive, human-centered abstractions. LA Impression drifts between clarity and disappearance, rendering the city as something remembered more by feeling than by sight. Familiar structures dissolve into thousands of shifting particles that collapse and rise in gentle, breath-like rhythms. The piece gathers, disperses, and reforms with patient fluidity, inviting viewers into a space of quiet reflection.