The Outcast of the Universe is a multi-channel video and photographic installation that explores disappearance, identity, and reinvention through the intertwined logics of cinema, artificial intelligence, and the landscape of Los Angeles. The project takes inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Wakefield (1835), in which a man abandons his life yet remains hidden within the same city for twenty years. In this contemporary reframing, Los Angeles becomes a psychological and cinematic terrain populated by figures who have stepped outside their previous identities and quietly constructed new ones.

The work began with twelve GPS coordinates generated randomly by AI across Los Angeles County, introducing chance and nonhuman agency into the foundation of the project. I traveled to each location and photographed the sites on 6×7 analog film, acting as a human counterpart to the algorithm by translating digital instruction into physical encounter. From these locations emerged twelve fictional characters, each tied to a single site and written as fragments from imagined feature films. The texts were developed in dialogue with AI, using the system both as collaborator and narrative destabilizer, allowing invented histories, motives, and identities to accumulate around otherwise ordinary places.

Each photographic work pairs a large-scale analog image with a script fragment, forming diptychs that function simultaneously as portraits, film stills, and incomplete narratives. These fragments expand outward into a series of cinematic trailers for films that do not exist. Each trailer adopts the tonal structure, pacing, and cinematic language of a different film associated with Los Angeles, using AI-generated imagery alongside filmed material to construct hybrid works suspended between cinema, memory, and simulation.

Completed chapters include Wakefield 01, set beneath the flight paths of LAX and structured around the emotional cadence of the Magnolia trailer; Signal, a nocturnal psychological mystery shaped through the pacing and atmosphere of Collateral; The Nova Method, which draws from the fractured identity structures and psychological instability of Mulholland Drive; The One, a desert-set narrative shaped through the investigative paranoia and editorial rhythm of Chinatown; and The Misfit Kingdom, which shifts the project toward a more mythic and collective portrait of Los Angeles, assembling disconnected figures, locations, and invented histories into a fragmented social landscape suspended between reality and fiction. Together, the trailers function as speculative fragments from a larger fictional universe in which disappearance becomes both a psychological condition and a strategy for reinvention.

Across the project, Los Angeles appears not as a coherent city but as a fragmented psychological landscape composed of overlooked locations, buried narratives, failed reinventions, and people who exist just outside recognition. Rather than documenting the city directly, The Outcast of the Universe uses AI and cinematic fiction to construct an alternate portrait of Los Angeles where disappearance itself becomes a method of self-invention.

• The Archive of the Stars, Gebäude 59 + Halo Studio, Berlin, June 19-21, 2026

• The Luminary - AI & Creative Ethics winter residency, St. Louis, MO - February 18- March 4th, 2026

• Transient Info, The Wrong Biennale, November 1, 2025- March 31, 2026

• ARTificial, Maryland Art Place (MAP), January 22, 2026 - March 14, 2026

• The Susan N. McCollough Fine Arts UA Biennial, Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center, Tuscaloosa, AL October 3, 2025- December 5, 2025