Ashley

Cityscaping

Assignment: Create an immersive city/street-scape that represents or communicates an impression of downtown Los Angeles.

It is most always the case that any assignment I take on becomes one focusing more on the cultural and political significance of an area or topic rather than an exploration in the possibilities of the technology creating it.

With a relatively abstract idea about the end product in this assignment, I chose to explore various areas of Los Angeles: MacArthur Park, Skid Row and downtown. At all three locations, I, along with Brian Bell, a wonderful photographer and friend of mine, hit the streets of downtown and began photographing the streets, passersby and people.

While it isn’t difficult to imagine that the locations looked as if they always do in traditional Hollywood films, it was intriguing to me to consider the possibilities about how many visual variations there are for each given space. Furthermore, I began thinking about how the visual design could affect the user's experience in terms of the political, social and cultural meaning he or she would take away.

The photos that I chose to develop for presentation purposes were those of the downtown streets and skylines. I have always considered downtown areas to be somewhat lame — a collection of buildings for banks, insurance companies, and basically everyone that we pay our monthly incomes to.

But when I got in the environment and started thinking about it in a different way, I was thinking about how great it would be if I could run up and down the buildings. What if I could drive my car up the side of a building or take the buildings and streets apart, piece by piece?

Inevitably, there are many great and imaginative things that can result from having a map of all the streets in the world — from allowing individuals who would not ordinarily explore these spaces the opportunity to do so and/or contributing to a more efficient 911 system.

The possibilities are truly endless for any area, whether it be considered a concrete jungle, like downtown; dangerous, like MacArthur Park; or hopelessly indescribable, like Skid Row. My perception proved positive considering that this being my first journey to MacArthur Park, I walked away and would now label it a relaxing place to go on a Sunday afternoon.

My perception of MacArthur Park is much different than that of those who have created scene after scene in books, film and music. Based on what those folks have written and photographed, I would have thought that I wouldn’t have come out of there alive.

Negative representations of communities like MacArthur illustrate the problematic nature of having these areas mapped by one single individual. While I truly believe that no matter how many renditions can be done of one area, the vision will inevitably be limited in that it could never possibly represent the experience of our world wide audience.