The artist’s intention was to create a sculpture that has an iconic physical presence at this important historic location connecting Hollywood’s past to the Hollywood’s digital present and future in harmonious dialogue with the architecture of the new ICON building housing the Netflix Headquarters.

The project site is designated as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #180 as the “Site of the Filming of the First Talking Feature Film”, The Jazz Singer. “The Jazz Singer” is a classic tale of the struggle between the two generations; tradition vs. innovation. It is an apt metaphor for the Hollywood film industry at the forefront of innovation in almost every generation.  Netflix’s move into the ICON building made a great juxtaposition to the site — the original studio location of Warner Brother’s Pictures.  The new is built atop of the old.

The old-fashioned film strip served as a motif for the sculpture.  The film strips were cut into removing pixels as if the old film is pixelating and transforming into the present and future.  The sculptures’ surface is lined with programmed LED bulbs turning the sculpture into a live movie screen that plays thousands of clips lasting 6 seconds in duration each, shuffled randomly, resulting in an artwork that is always in motion and is never the same.

The clips were created from early technology test films including an animation of the sound technology used for the Jazz Singer, color tests done by Thomas Edison & Kodak, movement studies by Muybridge, among many others.  Analog noise was added by distorting the original footage to create colorful abstract sequences that refer to the digital future while looking back at the history of the film industry’s technological evolution.