The Outcast of the Universe is a multi channel video and photographic installation that explores identity, disappearance, and reinvention through the lens of both human presence and artificial intelligence. The project takes inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Wakefield (1835), in which a man leaves his life and lingers unseen in the same city for twenty years. Los Angeles, a city shaped by invention, reinvention, and the film industry, provides the setting for this contemporary reframing.

The work began with twelve GPS coordinates generated at random by AI across Los Angeles County, introducing chance and outside agency into the process. I photographed each site on 6×7 analog film, working as the human counterpart to the algorithm and translating digital prompts into physical encounters with the city. Alongside the photographs, I developed twelve script pages, each one introducing a different Wakefield-like character. These figures are imagined as people who have disappeared, reemerged, or live at the margins of the city. The texts were written in dialogue with AI and sometimes use paper gathered at the sites, underscoring the interplay of material encounter and digital influence.

Each diptych pairs a photograph with a script fragment, combining image and text into a portrait of Los Angeles shaped by estrangement and reinvention. From these works emerge twelve short trailers for films that do not exist. The trailer form was chosen for its ties to Los Angeles cinema and its ability to convey anticipation without resolution. Trailers condense tone and narrative into glimpses, making them an ideal way to present these fragments of imagined stories while echoing Wakefield’s central act of disappearance refracted into endless variations.

The trailers, still in progress, combine filmed material with AI generated sequences. The first, Outcast of the Universe (Wakefield 01), is set at Dockweiler Beach beneath the flight paths of LAX, its pacing borrowing from the trailer for Magnolia. Through unfamiliar sites and recurring fictional figures, the project constructs a counter portrait of Los Angeles, one shaped not by familiar images of palm trees or freeways but by overlooked locations where identity, absence, and reinvention continually unfold.