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 Guerrero
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.
Cuboid Vortex City by Kristen Roos
Kristen Roos is an artist and educator based on the unceded territories of the Tsleil-Waututh, Musqueam, and Squamish people, also known as Vancouver. His practice includes a wide range of mediums including electronic and electroacoustic music composition, sound design, sound installation, animation, printmaking, textiles and media archaeology.
Machine for Living by Sabrina Ratté
Video artist Sabrina Ratté investigates virtual environments generated by analog technologies, largely relying on impersonal and formal spaces such as malls and offices to create new worlds that defy our conventional perspectives. The combination of both digital software and conventional modes of analog video art production are essential to each piece she creates, bearing new luminous and vibrating architecture.
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.
The Alluvials: Chapter 1 by Alice Bucknell
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in London and Los Angeles. Working primarily through game engines and speculative fiction, she explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and non-human and machine intelligence. They are the organizer of New Mystics, a platform exploring magic, mysticism, ritual, and technology.
Love Letters (Summer) by Yuge Zhou
A Chinese-born Chicago-based interdisciplinary video artist, Yuge Zhou creates video collages and sculptural video installations that portray 'urban dispositions' and explore the complex interactions between humans and their environment. In addition to her art practice, she also directs and curates the 3300-square foot 150 Media Stream, a uniquely-structured public digital art installation in Chicago. In this capacity, she has worked with over fifty media artists and cultural institutions to create innovative programming each month that engages a cross section of diverse communities.
Past Artists
The following artists have previously exhibited work on the video wall.
- Sean Capone
- Tom Carroll
- Dan Chen
- Andreas Fischer
- Leo Isikdogan
- Dirk Koy
- LIA
- Lifeforms.io
- Johnathan McCabe
- Andrew Bryce Myers
- Danielle Parsons
- Sabrina Ratté
- Casey Reas
- Christy Lee Rogers
- Robert Seidel
- Pascual Sisto
- Teun van der Zalm