The Central Library Video Wall is a 28-foot video screen located in the library’s Tom Bradley Wing. A component of the S. Mark Taper Foundation Digital Commons, the video wall is a space for storytelling—about our community, our institution, and our world. Video Wall content is intended to delight, inform and educate library visitors with compelling visual stories.
Commissioned Work
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.
Curated Selections
In addition to original content, the video wall features original art, films, and animation. Current selections include works by the following artists:
The Alchemist by Enrique Agudo
Enrique Agudo’s work explores the limits of digital media by focusing on the pattern recognition of digital indexes and shedding light on how they affect the way we behave. Agudo continues to use immersive and experimental digital media as the tools to question and challenge anthropological discourse around identity.
The Monolith by David Guerreron
LA-based artist, musician, and coder David Guerrero mixes generative analog and digital music with code to create abstract and expressive pieces. With an interest in how math shapes structure in nature, his static and A/V artworks combine to create surreal, minimalist environments.
{fireflies of the {ocean} deep} by Sofia Crespo
Sofia Crespo is an artist working with a huge interest in biology-inspired technologies. Her main focus is the way organic life uses artificial mechanisms to simulate itself and evolve, implying that technologies are a by-product of the organic life that created them and not a completely separated object. Her work brings into question the potential of AI in artistic practice and its ability to reshape our understanding of creativity. In her work, organic and bioluminescent creatures seemingly dissolve into their own landscape, becoming something of an optical illusion in their hybridity.
Lateral Duality by Jeff Frost
Jeff Frost’s work exists on a spectrum of duality between creation and destruction. His primary mediums are time and sound, often expressed through painting, photography, video, and installation. His piece Lateral Duality is a meditation on simultaneous states of being and the communication between them. We exist both as a universal consciousness and as the self.
Slipstream: Begin Again by Nancy Baker Cahill
Nancy Baker Cahill is a renowned media artist and the Founder and Artistic Director of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) art platform exploring resistance and inclusive creative expression. Her Slipstream artworks begin as graphite drawings on pape which are then torn into pieces and reconfigured into bespoke, sculptural configurations. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit and animated using CG software. Once composited, they exist as discrete looped videos.
5 Body Problems #3 (Afterlives) by Dev Harlan
Dev Harlan is a multidisciplinary artist working within the mediums of sculpture, installation, and digital media. A self-educated artist and designer, Harlan’s deliberate use of polychromatic color palettes and geometric patterns encourages the viewer to enter into a liminal mode of awareness, allowing for perception of the dimensional relationship between surface and light.
Octavia's Haunts I and Octavia's Haunts II by Ainslee Alem Robson
Ainslee Alem Robson is an award-winning Ethiopian-American director, writer and media artist, and current Sundance-NEH Fellow. Her interdisciplinary practice involves an alchemy of working with film, archives, VR, and emerging technologies in digital art to create counterimaginings and emancipatory narratives speaking to the liminal spaces between Africa and its diasporas.
Discovery by Lifeforms.io
Born out of observations of an emerging rooftop culture of urban gardening and alternative lifestyles in DTLA during the pandemic, Discovery is a simulation of The Airborne Collective, a radical environmental hacker group seeking to make a flourishing roofscape ecosystem and unleash hope and optimism in the face of looming ecological threat.
Lifeforms.io is a design studio that operates at the intersection between video games and design, with focus on making virtual worlds and experiences using real time technologies. They view games as the next step in the evolution of expressive media, and they believe that the format allows for ways of seeing and storytelling that is completely unique, and entirely different from older media like film or animation.
Phase Transition by wonderscience.com
In "Phase Transition", artist Danielle Parsons explores themes of emergence and transformation using basic chemistry as a system of generative art. Her process involves applying fire to initiate changes in various chemicals, then documenting at a microscopic scale the period during which they cool from a liquid to a solid state of matter. The artwork further incorporates stop-motion animation of hand-cut paper circles. The resulting liminal iterations create unique but related polychromatic geometries that exist as pure molecular expression. Field-of-view 2mm.
Wonder Science is a creative studio and streaming channel hybridizing art and science into mindful learning.
Past Artists
The following artists have previously exhibited work on the video wall.
- Andreas Fischer
- Tom Carroll
- Christy Lee Rogers
- Dan Chen
- Pascual Sisto
- Sabrina Ratté
- LIA
- Casey Reas
- Andrew Bryce Myers
- Johnathan McCabe
- Dirk Koy
- Robert Seidel
- Leo Isikdogan
- Sean Capone
- Teun van der Zalm