Central Library Video Wall

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Katherine Helen Fisher is a director and interdisciplinary
artist whose work explores the relationship between
bodies, landscapes, and systems of connection. In DYAD,
Fisher turns her lens toward California’s Mojave Desert,
where two female dancers navigate shifting states of
intimacy and interdependence amid the region’s stark
beauty. Through evocative choreography and cinematic
minimalism, the film transforms the desert landscape into
an active participant, reflecting on resilience,
vulnerability, and the fragile relationship between humans
and the environments they inhabit. DYAD offers a poetic
meditation on connection and coexistence within one of
Southern California’s most iconic landscapes.

Jaime Yao is a Los Angeles–based digital artist whose
work uses 3D technologies and emerging media to create
immersive, narrative-driven worlds. In I know a place the
light returns to, Yao reimagines the Los Angeles Central
Library as the source of a luminous, mythic cityscape.
Inspired by the library’s role as a beacon of knowledge
and stories, the work transforms familiar Los Angeles
landmarks into contemplative landscapes that celebrate
imagination, memory, and place.