Close
About
FAQ
Home
Collections
Login
USC Login
Register
0
Selected
Invert selection
Deselect all
Deselect all
Click here to refresh results
Click here to refresh results
USC
/
Digital Library
/
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
/
Syncretic learning in augmented reality public monuments: a study of Judith F. Baca’s The river once ran
(USC Thesis Other)
Syncretic learning in augmented reality public monuments: a study of Judith F. Baca’s The river once ran
PDF
Download
Share
Open document
Flip pages
Contact Us
Contact Us
Copy asset link
Request this asset
Transcript (if available)
Content
Syncretic Learning in Augmented Reality Public Monuments:
A Study of Judith F. Baca’s The River Once Ran
by
Bryce H. Zeffert
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
CURATORIAL PRACTICES AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
MAY 2023
ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures……………………………………….……………….…..…...….iii
Abstract……………………………………………………..…………….………iv
Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………….…...…….1
Chapter 2 Syncretic Learning and Synaesthesia…………………………..…..9
Chapter 3: LACMA + Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives……………….….19
Chapter 4: Judy Baca: The River Once Ran and The Great Wall of
Los Angeles………………………………………………………………………21
Chapter 5: Summary and Conclusions…….….………………..……………..29
Bibliography…………………………………………………………….….…....32
iii
List of Figures
Figure 1 Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man………………………………………………….11
Figure 2 Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone……………………………………..14
Figure 3 Diana Thater, Knots + Surfaces……………………………………………..….16
Figure 4 Judith F. Baca: The River Once Ran……………………………………………19
Figure 5 Ulysses Jenkins: 1848 Bandaide from The Great Wall of Los Angeles………..23
Figure 6 Judith F. Baca: A New Perspective on Edison from The Great Wall of Los
Angeles………………………………………………………………………..….25
iv
Abstract
As developments in information technology have transformed the contemporary
intermedia environment, this has also, crucially, precipitated changes to how we receive
and assimilate information. No longer are we limited to printed mediums or broadcast
television for the majority of our information; today, our multidimensional network of
information sources has democratised many aspects of human communication through
reduced barriers to entry, and thereby expanded the breadth of information available to
each person. These changes present both the imperative that we update our public
monuments to match the requirements of an evolved audience, as well as the
opportunity to do so in more innovative and effective ways.
This paper examines how the use of augmented reality in Judy Baca’s
contribution to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Monumental Perspectives (2021-
ongoing) project enhances the experience of the monument both in terms of how we
interact with and receive our public histories and in activist artists’ ability to achieve
their political objectives. In reconceptualising the monument as a dynamic multisensory
experience in which syncretic learning is made possible through synaesthesia, these
augmented reality monuments provide the opportunity to create richer learning
experiences that are more synergistic with the means with which we have grown
accustomed to receiving our information in an age of hyperawareness.
1
Chapter 1: Introduction
Judith F. Baca (b.1946) is a renowned Chicana artist, educator, and scholar whose
public artworks reflect the lives and concerns of populations who have been historically
disenfranchised and overlooked by aspects of public history. As a part of Baca’s recent
collaboration with Snapchat and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for
Monumental Perspectives (2021-ongoing), The River Once Ran (2022) is a public monument
that incorporates her iconic mural The Great Wall of Los Angeles (1976) in an augmented
reality lens of a tributary of the Los Angeles River as it might have appeared before the
construction of the Tujunga Wash drainage canal.
By adapting Snapchat’s augmented reality software to her long-standing mural
practice, Baca has created an updated monument that more effectively communicates
the shared cultural history of Los Angeles depicted in her murals to a broader audience.
This thesis aims to explore how the use of augmented reality in Baca’s The River Once
Ran facilitates syncretic learning, a process by which it is believed that an individual is
able to glean insight into the truer, more comprehensive structure of reality. In the case
of Baca’s monument, providing the viewer with a more profound understanding of the
sense of shared cultural consciousness expressed in Baca’s multimedia depiction of the
Los Angeles River as a collective memory of shared space and time.
The concept of shared history that Baca conveys stands in stark contrast to the
cinematic legacy of Los Angeles that has historically perpetuated stories told by people
from other places, narrowly reflective of their own cultural perspectives and histories.
2
The River Once Ran is a new media experience pioneered by an artist of chicana ancestry,
which reveals and reconciles the extensive history of the indigenous people that has
followed the river for centuries. Before examining The River Once Ran, it is necessary to
briefly discuss the history of immersive media as well as some of the theories that
explain their unique psychosocial effects. For the latter, this thesis draws primarily on
Gene Youngblood’s 1970 influential survey of experimental film and early video art
Expanded Cinema.
1
Baca’s pioneering use of augmented reality in public monuments can trace its
origins to the ideas propounded by Youngblood in Expanded Cinema, who presciently
predicted many of the key technological developments that have made it possible for
activist artists from marginalised and less economically advantaged groups, like Baca,
to realise their aesthetic and political objectives. In this way, Snapchat’s augmented
reality software can be thought of as analogous to other transformative products that
brought previously exclusive technologies into the hands of ordinary people.
The transformative developments in information technology that have created
our contemporary intermedia environment have precipitated changes to how we
crucially receive and assimilate information.
2
The first among these transformative
technological developments was the Sony Portapak (1967) that marked the advent of
1
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970).
2
Youngblood has described intermedia as a global network of multimedia responsible
for expanding consciousness in which humanity is conditioned by their environment
and that environment for the contemporary person is the intermedia network.
3
the first highly portable and relatively inexpensive commercially available video
camera. With the Portapak, the ability to record a digital video image was suddenly no
longer able to be monopolised by broadcast television studios, which had exclusive
government licences to utilise broadcast frequencies and the financial capabilities
necessary to pay for the significant associated production costs previously associated
with the medium. With the Portapak, for approximately $1500, artists and enthusiasts
could now also create their own monochrome recordings in almost any location.
Through dramatically lowering the financial barriers to entry, not only did the Portapak
make video production more accessible to a broader range of people outside of the
broadcast television industry but, in doing so it also importantly proliferated the
breadth and types of content that were being recorded at the time.
This democratisation of information technology had important socio-political
consequences on society in general and the world of art specifically. Influential
American media theorist Gene Youngblood has written: “Commercial entertainment
works against art, exploits the alienation and boredom of the public by perpetuating a
system of conditioned response to formulas. Commercial entertainment not only isn’t
creative, it actually destroys the audience’s ability to appreciate and participate in the
creative process.”
3
According to this view of commercial entertainment as antithetical to
art and creativity— as a system in which the person is conditioned by, and reacts to,
certain stimuli within a human-made system focused on “temporarily gratifying
3
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 59.
4
without really fulfilling the experiential needs of an aesthetically impoverished
culture”— Youngblood puts the impact of the Portapak in context in that it
decentralised communication by allowing users to record novel subjects that otherwise
conflicted with the formulaic drama of broadcast television.
4
As an alternative to mass media, which, according to Youngblood, was designed
to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator and the “indiscriminate passivity” of
hundreds of millions of viewers, the new media of the Portapak emphasised the
significance of subjectivity in experience, and expanded observable realities.
5
Artists
swiftly adopted the Sony Portapak as a means by which to subvert broadcast
television’s monopoly on content creation and the medium’s inherent properties in
articulating illusion and reality. John Hanhard, the influential American author and
media arts historian, has identified the introduction of the Portapak as a key event in
video art history, “placing the tools of the medium in the hands of the artist.”
6
Thus, the
democratising force of the Portapak as the first modestly priced handheld video
recorder was of particular importance to activist artists like Baca in that it provided the
tools necessary to create the individualised content required to realise their aesthetic
and political ends.
4
Ibid., 42.
5
Ibid., 128.
6
John Hanhardt, ‘De-collage/Collage: Notes Toward a Re-examination of the Origins of
Video Art’ in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, Doug Hall and Sally Jo
Fifer (eds), Aperture, 1990.
5
While the Portapak served to partially democratise content creation, distribution
still remained largely under the control of the large media corporations. It was the
expansion of the Internet into the public domain starting in the early 1990s that
catalysed the democratisation of digital content by opening up new channels of
distribution, with particular emphasis on the individualised works recorded by small
scale producers. Since the public introduction of the Internet in the early 1990s, much of
humanity’s recorded information has progressively been digitised and assimilated into
the world wide web. Even the art works and films produced through most traditional
media have now been digitised and uploaded onto the Internet; their digital versions, in
many cases, gradually rendering their traditional print and broadcast modes of
distribution obsolete.
In recent years, the Internet has reached a point of hyper saturation in which the
intermedia environment has become, in the words through which Youngblood has
described earlier media transformation, “metabolically and homeostatically interfaced
with each human being.”
7
Not only has the Internet expanded and interconnected
humanity’s communication channels, it has also facilitated each person’s ability to
curate the content they consume to varying degrees. Strictly speaking, while individuals
do indeed have the ability to curate the content they consume, this freedom in choice in
actuality is significantly compromised by algorithms designed to optimise commercial
outcomes. Despite this opaque perversion of the contemporary media environment by
7
Ibid., 128.
6
commercial interests, it would be remiss to deny the significant expansion in freedom of
choice by the Internet and its profound effect on human consciousness. Importantly,
when people express freedom of choice in the content they consume, they are able to
resist the enculturating effects of uniform mass education inherent in public
communication networks.
Although Youngblood likely had only a limited idea of what future advances in
technology might look like, his notion of developments in information technology as
powerful extensions of humanity’s central nervous system has proven prescient. For
example, he has written:
I have found the term “videosphere” valuable as a
conceptual tool to indicate the vast scope and influence of
television on a global scale in many simultaneous fields of
sense-extension. Like the computer, television is a powerful
extension of man’s central nervous system. Just as the
human nervous system is the analogue of the brain,
television in symbiosis with the computer becomes the
analogue of the total brain of world man…. It allows us to
see ourselves and, through fibre optics, to see inside
ourselves.
8
8
Youngblood, 260.
7
Here, Youngblood’s concept of the videosphere as an extension of humanity’s central
nervous system was limited by the state of technology of his time. Since the time that
Expanded Cinema was written, the widespread adoption of the smartphone has taken
Youngblood’s “total brain of world man” and expanded it exponentially vis-a-vis the
invention of a pocket sized, multifunctional device that we depend on for most of our
daily needs. Thus, the smartphone has transformed Youngblood’s notion of technology
as extensions of our central nervous system, and expanded it across the globe.
The democratisation of content production and distribution, beginning with the
portapak and exponentially expanded by the Internet and the smartphone has resulted
in a world in which the manufactured realities of commercial entertainment have
become gradually superseded by real events as seen by the individual. An early and
important example of this shift in perspective has been the recording of acts of police
brutality, a wide spread and rarely seen reality that disproportionately affected
communities of colour.
The beating of Rodney King in 1991 by four members of the Los Angeles Police
Department, and the riots that ensued, were seminal moments in the early use of
personal video recorders. After a freeway chase for suspected intoxication, King was
pulled over and violently beaten by four members of the Los Angeles police despite his
apparent lack of resistance. Initial charges of felony evasion against King were
subsequently dropped and three of the four officers involved were acquitted of all
charges. What made this incident important was that the entire interaction with police
8
was captured on a bystander’s video camera and widely shown on television. The
policemans’ actions shocked audiences nationwide. Aside from people of colour, all too
aware of such brutalities, many Americans had been unaware of these commonplace,
violent occurrences perpetuated by white police officers.
The fact that these types of interactions are now widely recorded and viewed has
resulted in a world interconnected by the intermedia network in what Teilhard de
Chardin has referred to as the noosphere—a network of organised human intelligence
that encapsulates the globe.
9
As John Mchale has also suggested, this has resulted in the
contemporary person enjoying greater psychic freedom than his ancestors in a world
where formerly isolated cultures are now in close contact ”providing commonly-shared
cultural experience in a manner unparalleled in human history.”
10
These transformative changes in the contemporary media environment and their
impact on the way we process and assimilate information emphasise the need for a
model that explains how immersive media can facilitate opportunities for enriched
learning in our public monuments, and why this entails greater psychic freedom in the
viewer. Youngblood’s theories of syncretic learning vis-a-vis synaesthesia provide insight
into production of these psychosocial effects experienced in immersive media, and the
incentive to update our public monuments in such a way as to take advantage of these
technological developments.
9
Youngblood, 57.
10
McHale, John. "The Plastic Parthenon." The Futurists 1972.
9
Chapter 2: Syncretic Learning and Synaesthesia
Syncretism, from Greek synkrētismos, refers to the synthesis of different beliefs,
cultures and schools of thought in an attempt to unite and harmonise them, and thereby
creating a basis for greater understanding from the amalgam. Synaesthesia, from the
Greek root syn, for together, and aisthêsis, for perception, is defined as the neurological
phenomenon in which the stimulation of a sense, or part of the body, results in the
subconscious experience of a secondary, concurrent sense impression. According to
Youngblood synaesthesis is “the harmony of different or opposing impulses produced
by a work of art.”
11
Hence, synaesthesia is a phenomenon whereby syncretic learning is
achieved by exposure to a seemingly unrelated collage of information, which can then
be subconsciously assimilated in a way that results in a more profound, holistic
understanding.
Youngblood has defined synaesthesis as the “harmony of different or opposing
impulses produced by a work of art.”
12
Just as any dualism is composed of harmonic
opposites—light/dark, up/down, love/hate, good/bad—the simultaneous perception
of harmonic opposites in synaesthetic art helps us realise that these are not discrete
realities, but in fact points along the same underlying spectrum inextricably connected
to the larger whole. The principle of the unity of duality as a necessary foundation for
an understanding of the underlying nature of reality is profoundly illustrated in the
11
Youngblood, 81.
12
Youngblood, 85.
10
world of physics where white and black are understood as parts of the spectrum of
light, and light itself forms a part of the larger spectrum of the manifestations of energy.
Hence, the specialised view of colours as distinct fails to recognize their unified
underlying reality or what Sigmund Freud referred to as oceanic consciousness, a
phenomenon Youngblood described as, wherein “we feel our individual existence lost
in mystic union with the universe.”
13
This concept of expanded consciousness can be broadly thought of as analogous
to humanity's search for meaning and connection, a fundamental human need that is
the common objective of a variety of essential spiritual and intellectual pursuits. For
example, under the influence of mind-manifesting psychedelics, such as LSD and
psilocybin, one is said to experience intense synaesthesia in which sensory inputs are
melded in an extra-egoic perspective. This experience, frequently undertaken to
promote mental healing or a greater sense of psychic harmony, is perhaps not so
different from what Sigmund Freud spoke of as oceanic consciousness.
14
While both
synaesthetic media and psychedelic substances, such as psilocybin and LSD, are thought
to produce similar multisensory perceptions and extra egoic experiences, important
distinctions exist in terms of the subject’s intent and the long term effects.
The importance in this analogy is that both psychedelics and immersive media
serve as vehicles through which syncretic learning can take place through synesthesia, a
13
Youngblood, 85.
14
Civilization and It’s Discontents, Sigmund Freud, 1929
11
process by which an individual can recognize themselves as part of something greater.
In the case of immersive media, natural neural stimulation is used in order to restore a
state of perception that scholars have suggested to be equivalent to that experienced
during the pre-adult state in human development. Anton Ehrenzweig has characterised
this ability as: “The child’s capacity to comprehend a total structure rather than
analysing single elements… he does not differentiate the identity of a shape by
watching its details one by one, but goes straight for the whole.”
15
Youngblood has attributed the atrophy of our natural syncretic capabilities to
overexposure to formulaic drama in commercial entertainment, and as a result of our
technological society’s tendency towards specialisation. This has come, he argues, at the
cost of our ability to accurately comprehend the more complex and diffuse visual field
of living reality.
16
This is not to suggest that specialised vision is entirely misguided or
unnecessary, but to emphasise the need for a more nuanced approach that includes
both specialised and syncretic methods of learning.
To derive meaning from syncretic content, according to Youngblood, requires
the suspension of the modes of specialised vision where time is treated as a linear
modality. To illustrate this point, Youngblood analyses Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man
(1959-64) (fig. 1), a silent four-part experimental film epic, divided into Prelude and Parts
One through Four that illustrates the odyssey of a bearded woodsman and his dog
15
Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley, California; University of
California Press, 1967), 9.
16
Youngblood, 84
12
climbing through a snow-covered mountain to chop down a tree during which he
witnesses various mystical visions. Youngblood emphasises how, in the film, time and
space are subsumed in the totality of the experience. For example, in his description of
Prelude, he explains:
Prelude is an extremely fast collage of multiple-level
superimpositions and compounded images that emerge from a
blurry diaphanous haze and slowly take form, only to be obscured
by other images and countermotions. We begin to discern specific
objects, patterns, and finally a motif or theme: the elements of
Earth, Air, Fire, and Water; a childbirth; a man climbing a
mountain with his dog; the moon; the sun throwing off huge solar
prominences; lovemaking; photomicrography of blood vessels; a
beating heart; a forest; clouds; the faces of a man and a woman;
and literally thousands of other images to appear in the rest of the
film.
17
French film theorist André Bazin adds to the understanding of the Brakhage film
by observing that, whereas montage is the dramatic analysis of action and an
abstraction of objective reality, collage is used in Dog Star Man to convey time in a non-
linear modality.
18
Youngblood remarks that these “images exist essentially
17
Ibid., 87.
18
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Los Angeles, California; University of
California Press, 1967), 39.
13
autonomously and are superimposed or compounded not for ‘dramatic’ effect, but
rather as a kind of psychic exercise on the part of the viewers.” Thus, rather than
fragment objective reality in terms of its own structure, an effect Bazin attributed to
montage, collage “subsumes the conventional sense of time by interconnecting and
interpenetrating the temporal dimension with images that exist outside of time.”
19
In
this argument, collage enables viewers to make their own associations, free of pre-
established narratives and lineal time. In this way, the message is received in the
viewer’s subconscious mind, and thereby potentially absorbed into their oceanic
consciousness.
Thus, the realisation of syncretic vision requires a shift in perspective from the
conventional linear sense of time to one in which time is treated as what Youngblood
calls a “total field of non-focused multiplicity.”
20
Youngbood’s non-linear expression of
time is similar to the concept of time embraced by the Navajos who speak of the past
and future in terms of the present. As Youngblood suggests, synaesthetic syncretism is
the “only mode in which the manifestations of one's consciousness can be approximated
without distortion.”
21
Furthermore, because we are dealing with our own emotions and
personal associations, our own mental architecture, what we derive from the experience
will be, in Youngblood’s argument, more genuinely meaningful than the superficial
19
Youngblood, 85
20
Youngblood, 85.
21
Youngblood, 86.
14
gratification of the conditioned responses that we receive from commercial
entertainment.
Whereas Brakhage utilises a rapid barrage of multiple overlays in Prelude to
forcefully expose the viewer to their own enculturation and specialised vision, today’s
evolved audience is already accustomed to such visual presentations as a part of their
daily life, and therefore are inherently more receptive to such media. Because we have
learned to assimilate information through a synaesthetic syncretic mode, it is imperative
that our public monuments adopt this new language as well.
Youngblood’s theories of expanded cinema, which emphasised perceptual shifts
through the nonlinear representation of time, was embraced by a number of avant-
garde artists working in experimental film in New York in the 1970s. Prominent
amongst this group was New York based British artist McCall whose influential series
of solid light installations reimagined cinema as interactive, sculptural and
performative experiences.
Line Describing a Cone (1973) (fig. 2), the first work in McCall’s solid light series,
begins with a beam of light emitted from a projector that traverses a darkened gallery
enshrouded in a diaphanous haze. Over the course of the thirty-minute film, this beam
of light is periodically disrupted by a film of a thin arcing line that causes the projection
on the far wall to gradually trace the circumference of a circle. As the complete circle is
formed, the mist generated by the smoke machines causes the beam of light to take on
15
an ephemeral quality as it manifests as a translucent, three-dimensional cone that fills
the space.
McCall has discussed how the work’s cinematic and multi-dimensional elements
combine in such a way that encourages interaction from the viewer:
The proportions of this projection vary, but the scale is large. The
base of the cone, an emerging circle of light projected onto the
wall, is tall enough, at between eight and eleven feet, to fully
incorporate several spectators, and the length of the beam may be
anything from thirty to sixty feet. This three-dimensional object,
like sculpture, calls for a mobile, participating spectator, and, like
film, it takes time. To fully see the emerging form it is necessary to
move around and through it, to look at it from the inside and from
the outside.
22
Through inviting viewers to freely interact with the installation, McCall “challenges the
passive, motionless viewing experience of conventional cinema, [and] the contingency
of movement in the gallery space [that] contrasts with the predetermined geometry of
the line of light.”
23
Line Describing a Cone emphasises the relativity of time and space in
the conditions of the viewing experience. This is corroborated by McCall who remarked
in 1974 that “the film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to
22
Anthony McCall, ‘1000 Words’, Artforum, Summer 2004, p.219.
23
Tate. “'Line Describing a Cone', Anthony McCall, 1973.” Tate, January 1, 1973.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mccall-line-describing-a-cone-t12031.
16
nothing beyond this real time ... the space is real, not referential; the time is real, not
referential.”
24
McCall’s experimentation with the properties of light causes viewers to suspend
their assumptions about the nature of time and space as they become implicated in the
viewing experience. Therefore, the suspension of reality in Line Describing a Cone can be
thought of as the type of synaesthetic experience that Youngblood theorised in Expanded
Cinema as the means by which a greater comprehension of the truer nature of reality can
be achieved through syncretic modes of learning.
Another pioneer of expanded cinema whose experimental installations challenge
conventional notions of time and space to a similar effect, American artist Diana Thater
explores the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and
thereby emphasising their connections to the broader nature of consciousness. Thater’s
works, which take on at once seemingly surreal and abstract qualities, draw from a
variety of sources from literature to mathematics, architecture and animal behaviour,
chaotically playing on the intricate relationship between time and space.
Knots + Surface (2001) (fig. 3) is a large-scale multi-projection video installation
motivated by a mathematical hypothesis that correlates a six-dimensional spatial model
to the map of a honeybee’s dance.
25
The charged environment of layered projections
24
Anthony McCall, ‘Two Statements’ (1974), in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-Garde
Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York 1978, p.250.
25
Thater, Diana. “Diana Thater.” Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination. Accessed
January 29, 2023. http://dianathater.delmonicobooks.com/work-detail.php?id=knots-
surfaces.
17
and clustered monitors featuring honeybees and a hive made of multicoloured
hexagons is melded with the open architectural space of the gallery. Viewers interact
with the installation and become a part of the performance by penetrating the various
projections and sightlines such that the initial image of the hive is transformed into a
state of chaos representing the dance of the bees, thereby including the viewer as a part
of the dance. The various projections further serve as a vehicle for the metaphorical
exploration of multidimensional space with the bent video screen representing a flower
in which the audience, like honeybees, are drawn to the flower as the centrepiece of the
installation.
Like in McCall’s Line Describing a Cone, Thater’s Knots + Surfaces employs the
visual strategies of immersive media outlined by Youngblood in order to suspend the
viewer’s conventional sense of time and space. In effect, these strategies possess the
potential to produce a sense of synaesthesia in the viewer whereby their enculturated
modes of cognition are supplanted by the subconscious associations necessary for
syncretic learning. While both McCall and Thater use immersive media to intentionally
suspend their audience’s normal modes of cognition, Thater goes beyond McCall in
implicitly calling out the sense impression of oceanic consciousness inherent in nature as
one of her primary objectives.
Although Youngblood’s model of expanded cinema was developed before the
introduction of more recent transformative technologies including the Internet and
smartphone, his theories are nonetheless valuable as a framework to understand how
18
these even newer immersive media' work in relation to perception and experience. To
that end, the following sections will explore a recent immersive media project that
makes use of augmented reality technology to immerse its viewers in a space that
embodies both the past and present.
19
Chapter 3: LACMA + Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives
Monumental Perspectives (2021-ongoing) is a collaborative exhibition project
between Snapchat and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) that brings
together local artists and programmers to create augmented reality monuments, which
explore monuments and murals, representation, and the public histories of Los Angeles
in an effort to highlight perspectives from across the region.
26
The first cohort of artists—Mercedes Dorame, I.R. Bach, Glenn Kaino, Ruben
Ochoa, and Ada Pinkstone—examine key moments, figures, and monumentality in the
region's past and present; the second cohort of artists—Judy Baca, Sandra de la Lolz,
and Kang Seung Lee—examine changing landscapes and memory as a way to connect
the past and the present. The augmented reality monuments can be viewed at the site-
specific locations across Los Angeles including LACMA’s Wilshire Boulevard Campus,
Macarthur Park, Earvin “Magic” Johnson Park, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum,
Algin Sutton Recreation Center, and The Great Wall of Los Angeles. Viewers can access
the various lenses through which to experience the works on their smartphones
through the Snapchat application; alternatively, digital versions of the works can be
viewed at any time or location through their respective QR codes. This thesis will
exclusively focus on the site-specific versions of the work.
26
“LACMA x Snapchat: Monumental Perspectives.” Lacma.org , April 2021. LACMA.
https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/lacma-snapchat-monumental-perspectives.
20
As part of Snapchat’s greater venture into augmented reality-related commerce,
in which the company has partnered with major clothing brands including Puma and
Dior, they create custom lenses that allow consumers to experience by trying on the
products through augmented reality. Lens Studio is an application specifically designed
for artists and developers to build augmented reality experiences without the need to
know how to write code, or use JavaScript. The application allows users to design an
augmented reality lens from scratch, or directly import their designs from most 2D and
3D software into a visual scripting template that simplifies the logic in coding and
provides an extensive library of built-in scripts that can be used in order to designate
particular actions and events.
In this way, Baca has adapted Snapchat’s proprietary technology designed for
commercial interests to her long-standing mural practice, and utilised it to realise her
distinct approach to working with the public. In the following section, I examine Baca’s
The River Once Ran and evaluate the various ways in which Baca has adapted the
technology in order to realise her political and aesthetic objectives.
21
Chapter 4: Judy Baca, The River Once Ran and The Great Wall of Los
Angeles
The River Once Ran (2022) (fig. 4) is an augmented reality lens that transforms the
concrete basin of the Tujunga Wash tributary into a natural riverbed teeming with plant
and animal life as it might have existed prior to the development of contemporary Los
Angeles.
27
While the augmented reality lens can be viewed at any time from any
location, the monument’s full syncretic potential is only realised when used at the
location of the mural where it can be viewed in juxtaposition to the half-mile long
concrete stretch of Tujunga Wash tributary as it currently exists.
In The Great Wall of Los Angeles mural, Baca employed over 400 at-risk youth and
their families together with artists, ethnologists, and scholars to create a multicultural
mural of California from its prehistory through the 1960’s. Conceptualised as a tattoo on
the scar where the river once ran, The Great Wall of Los Angeles is “tattooed” along the
walls of the Tujunga wash flood control channel in the San Fernando Valley.
Baca begins from the awareness that the land carries memory that she refers to as
the “spirit of place”; the memories of the people, history, and place. Together with local
27
Baca is the founder and artistic director of the first City of Los Angeles mural
program (1974), which has produced more than 400 murals in the city of Los Angeles,
employed thousands of at-risk youth, and developed into an arts organisation—the
Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). SPARC, now a part of the University of
California, Los Angeles and the Cesar Chavez Digital Mural Lab, facilitates campus-
community collaborations that utilise the most up-to-date technology to explore new
creative avenues for public intervention, including the digital restoration of murals that
have been vandalised.
22
volunteers, Baca co-creates sites of public memory that “reveal and reconcile diverse
peoples’ struggles for their rights and affirms the connection of each community to the
land.”
28
Her art, she has written, is shaped by an “interactive relationship among
history, people, and place that marks the dignity of hidden historical precedents,
restores connections, and stimulates new relationships into the future.”
29
In the augmented reality lens, we see a section of the Los Angeles river tributary
as it may have appeared before the construction of the Tujunga Wash: flowing water,
natural stone formations rising from the concrete, a flurry of stork’s bill twirling in the
air, as well as hummingbirds, butterflies, and a coyote drinking from the stream, all
signifying the recovery of the ecosystem and the restoration of the land.
30
We also hear
the howl of a coyote, the sound of flowing water, and faint voices from the past in the
background. Baca attempts to convey to the viewer how just as miraculously as the Los
Angeles River is restored in augmented reality, and brought into stark contrast with the
current state of the river when the lens is deactivated, perhaps so too are the histories of
people able to be disappeared and lost, and in that fact also exists the potential for their
recovery. Hence, also embodied in Baca’s representation of the Los Angeles River is a
message of hope for the recovery of the stories of the people and history of the land.
28
Baca, Judith F. Artist Statement. http://www.judybaca.com/artist/page/artist-
statement/
29
Ibid.
30
Many parts of the Los Angeles River and its tributaries have either been rewilded, or
are planned to be, as a part of a broader redevelopment plan for one of the most
significant infrastructure elements in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.
23
Baca has written: “The memory of this land begins with the river, as it does with
many great cities around the world. Flowing through the heart of the original Pueblo,
the river was the lifeblood for the people. People have lived, worked, and followed their
dreams along the river. The river continues to connect us to this history. The Los
Angeles River serves as a collective memory of shared space and time.”
31
The spirit of
place Baca speaks of can be regarded as analogous to the sense of oneness or
connectedness of Freud’s oceanic consciousness that Youngblood references. Each
viewer’s experience relates to the larger collective memories of life along the river, the
shared cultural consciousness from which her monument draws.
In The River Once Ran, Baca conceives of the “spirit of place” as a universal truth
that we all embody, and while this shared cultural consciousness is collective, what the
spirit of place means to an individual will inevitably be understood in the context of
one’s own personal associations and experiences. In this sense, the viewer is free to infer
what the river means to them, and the spirit of the Los Angeles River will inevitably
include elements that are at once culturally shared and personal to the viewer. When
we see the augmented reality depiction of the coyote rendered in Baca’s recognisable
mural style superimposed over the Tujunga Wash, we are not only invited to interpret
the specific sociopolitical issues contained in the murals such as what have been the
lasting consequences of the coyote’s disappearance, or the anti-historicization of our
31
Judy Baca, La Memoria de Nuestra Tierra: Sites of Public Memory, Foreseeable Futures #8
Position Papers from Imagining America, 4.
24
urban landscapes, but also the viewer’s personal associations that define their unique
sense of shared belonging to the land.
The monument’s addition of augmented reality elements to the mural enhances
the effect of collage already inherent in the mural by further encouraging viewers to
make their own subconscious associations. This more organic process of syncretic
learning facilitates the potential for the viewer to realise a deeper, more comprehensive
and profound understanding of Baca’s notion of the spirit of the land by speaking
directly to each viewer’s shared consciousness of the land.
The juxtaposition of imagery from different timelines in augmented reality is the
primary means through which syncretic vision is evoked in The River Once Ran. One
could argue that Baca has intentionally utilised augmented reality to suspend the
viewer in a state that embodies both present and past to facilitate the understanding
that they are in fact part of both realities. It is through the interconnection of non-linear
time that the true nature and totality of our common human experience is embodied in
Baca’s monument. Thus, through the use of augmented reality, Baca has helped us to
understand that the past constitutes a fluid and indivisible part of the present, that we
are each connected to, irrespective of our ancestry.
The psychic exercise of subconscious association inherent in syncretic vision is
primarily realised in the nonlinear representation of time as collage. Through the
superimposition of images from different timelines, specialised vision is apprehended
in mosaic simultaneity wherein seemingly discrete elements become a continuous
25
perceptual experience. This technique forcefully exposes the viewer to a non-specialised
perspective whereby synaesthesia gives way to syncretic learning from the continual
metamorphosis of imagery outside the linear perception of time. While the Great Wall of
Los Angeles is arranged chronologically to convey the evolution of the land and culture
over time, when viewed in the augmented reality lens of The River Once Ran, the various
murals in The Great Wall of Los Angeles blend in such a way that they take on wholly
new syntactic meanings. These new syntactic meanings can be effectively illustrated
through an examination of individual sections of Baca’s mural.
The section of The Great Wall entitled 1848 Bandaide (fig. 5), designed by Ulysses
Jenkins, illustrates the discovery of gold at Sutter’s mill and the migration of Black,
Mexican and Indian workers by ship to California. Above the bay are the portraits of
Mifflin W. Gibbs, publisher of the first Black newspaper in California and Mary Ellen
Pleasant, a civil rights activist who helped defend Blacks persecuted under the fugitive
slave laws. Next to the globe, which represents the global race for riches, is an image of
William A. Leidesdorf, the pilot of the first steamboat to arrive in the San Francisco
Bay.
32
In the original context of the Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1848 Bandaide can be
understood as conveying the lesser-known experiences of people of colour during the
gold rush period. However, when viewed collectively within the augmented reality
32
Baca, Judy. “The Great Wall – History and Description.” The Great Wall of Los
Angeles. http://www.judybaca.com/artist/the-great-wall-history-and-description/.
26
lens, these seemingly disparate images from California’s gold rush period tell a broader
story of California’s multicultural history. With the addition of augmented reality, the
viewer is able to syncretically perceive Baca’s spirit of the land with a more profound
connection to the stories told in the murals. This point is corroborated by Youngblood
who suggests “when the content of the message is the relationship between its parts,
and when structure and content are synonymous, all elements are equally significant.”
33
Thus, as we experience the mural through the lens, when we see the augmented
reality depictions of natural stone formations rise from and penetrate the concrete basin
of the Tujunga Wash in a way that defies the laws of nature and our preconceptions of
reality, we become disoriented and our perception of that time and place is brought into
question. The effect of collage and juxtaposition of imagery outside of linear time causes
the individual to default to their subconscious associations in order to translate that
multidimensional information. In this way, multiple and more profound levels of
meaning are made available to the viewer. What the viewer derives from 1848 Bandaide
will therefore include all the discrete elements of the story, as well as a unique synthesis
of the individual viewer’s subconscious associations in the constitution of the totality of
the experience.
Another example of the use of collage to evoke syncretic learning in the murals
from The Great Wall of Los Angeles is A New Perspective on Edison (fig.6), which tells an
alternative history of Thomas Alva Edison in which he was born to parents of Mexican
33
Youngblood, 85
27
ancestry in Zacatecas, Mexico, and adopted in the United States. While Edison’s true
origins are still a matter of debate among scholars, the theory serves as a pillar of
inspiration to Los Angeles’ Chicanx communities by further reinforcing the central role
they have played in the history of the region.
In A New Perspective on Edison, his purported Mexican-American heritage is
symbolised by the spirit of the Chichimeca corn goddess, who is depicted as emerging
from an ancient Mayan temple whispering the secret knowledge of the ancient builders
and inventors in his ear. In one of his hands, Edison holds a light bulb, and with the
other, he gestures towards an antique movie projector, further symbolising his
foundational contributions to the development of the modern communication and
entertainment industries for which Los Angeles has become widely famous.
Like in Bandaide 1848, when the discrete elements of A New Perspective on Edison
are viewed collectively in juxtaposition to the augmented reality environment of The
River Once Ran, the seemingly disparate images combine syncretically in a way that their
amalgam becomes greater than the sum of their parts. The addition of the augmented
reality lens adds both a greater range of seemingly disjointed visual stimuli as well
auditory information for the audience to assimilate. Thus, providing the multi-sensory
input necessary for synesthesia and further enhancing the sense of disorientation
necessary to induce synaesthesia and through it, syncretic learning. Through the
combination of visual elements found in the mural and augmented reality depictions of
28
the restored stream, the viewer may be better able to perceive a greater meaning in the
interconnection of these images than in their discrete sense.
Through its augmented reality lens, The River Once Ran is able to more
profoundly facilitate understanding of the shared cultural mythology of the Los
Angeles region as expressed through its peoples’ complex historical relationship with
the river. While the personal associations and meanings an individual viewer might
take away from their experience of The River Once Ran encompasses a wide range of
possibilities, what’s important is that all its audiences will take away some greater sense
of shared cultural consciousness or, in Baca’s words, spirit of place through which a
more accurate shared history can be revitalised.
29
Chapter 5: Summary and Conclusions
This thesis has attempted to explore how certain key advances in information
technology have transformed the intermedia environment, and why this compels us to
update and enhance the effectiveness of our public monuments by utilising these
innovations. One of the first, and most prominent individuals to identify the profound
implications of these key advances in the evolution of human communication was Gene
Youngblood, who in his 1970 book Expanded Cinema posited how the limitations of
traditional media were primarily a function of commercially incentivised content
designed to appeal to the viewer’s desire for routine and immediate gratification. This
emphasis on commercial motives has also included the exploitation of the mass
audience’s predisposition towards the passive consumption of information which has
resulted in the perpetuation of a closed entropic system of conditioned response to
formulaic drama.
Most presciently, Youngblood identified how the state of technology at the time
fostered the entertainment industry’s exploitation of specialised conceptualisation of
information which, in his opinion, misrepresented the truer and more interconnected
nature of reality. To this end, Youngblood proposes that humanity’s intellectual and
cultural cultivation could be better served by expanded forms of cinema.
To trace the key developments in information technology that characterise the
transformation of the intermedia environment, we started with a discussion of the
Portapak as a breakthrough in the democratisation of content production, which for the
30
first time made the tools for individual expression available to enthusiasts and artists.
We then discussed the subsequent widespread adoption of the Internet, including its
assimilation of traditional media, as extending the democratisation of information to the
means of distribution. Lastly, we considered the introduction of the smartphone as the
latest extension of the central nervous system, exponentially magnifying the intensity of
the effects of the intermedia network to the greater public in which each individual has
become perpetually connected to multiple, concurrent streams of digital information.
These key developments in information technology have precipitated changes in
how we receive and assimilate information in order to better match the language of the
intermedia network. The effect of these changes has been the transformation of both the
perceptual means by which we receive information, and consequently the essence and
structure of the message itself. Taken together, these changes compel us to re-evaluate
public monuments as static objects representative of individuals or single moments in
time, but as dynamic experiences reflective of the contemporary human condition.
Through examining Judith Baca’s The River Once Ran, we observed how the use
of augmented reality in the monument transforms the experience to be more reflective
of the means with which we have grown accustomed to receiving our information in
the age of hyperawareness. In our analysis of the different sections from The Great Wall
of Los Angeles mural, we identified how a shared sense of cultural consciousness is made
available to the viewer through the technique of superimposition in which the layering
of diffuse visual fields between the mural and augmented reality depictions of the river
31
creates an effect of collage that has the potential to facilitate syncretic learning through a
viewer’s subconscious associations. Through syncretic learning, the viewer is able to
more effectively engage with the public histories of the Los Angeles River in a way that
is more personally profound.
Thus, what The River Once Ran and the spirit of the Los Angeles River might
mean to individual viewers will be different; what is important is the shared sense of
cultural consciousness and sense of belonging that all viewers should take away from
the experience. While different interpretations are to be expected, they will occur in the
context of a sense of the collectively experienced history of the particular site.
As augmented reality technology inevitably grows more prevalent as a tool for
public communication, it behoves us to consider theories of immersive media as crucial
psychic aspects of the updated overall design of our public monuments. It should be
noted that although Youngblood’s theories of synaesthesia and syncretic learning may
have important implications in human communication, they currently lack conclusive
scientific proof, and therefore remain as just theories. Despite the theoretical nature of
syncretic learning, the model has the potential to empower activist artists like Baca by
allowing them to tap into the very media systems that have historically oppressed them.
32
Bibliography
Meigh-Andrews, Chris. A History of Video Art. New york: Bloomsbury Academic,
2006.
Marita Sturken, ‘Paradox in the Evolution of an Art Form’, in Illuminating Video:
An Essential Guide to Video Art, Dough Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (eds),
Aperture, 1990.
David Hall, ‘British Video Art: Towards an Autonomous Practice’, Studio
International (May-June, 1976).
David Hall, ‘Video Art - the Significance of an Educational Environment’, Video
Positive Catalogue, Lisa Haskel (ed), Liverpool, 1989.
John Wyver, ‘The Necessity of Doing Away With Video Art’, London Video Access
Catalogue, London, 1991.
John Hanhardt, ‘De-collage/Collage: Notes Toward a Re-examination of the
Origins of Video Art’ in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art,
Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (eds), Aperture, 1990.
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organisation of Experience,
Harper and Row, New York, 1974.
Broadcast, 24 August 1967 and 17 October 1968, Fersehgalerie Gerry Schum: Ready
to Shoot, Snoeck, Dusseldorf, 2005.
Sue Hall and John Hopkins, ‘The Metasoftware of Video’, Studio International
May/June, 1976.
33
Anton Ehrenzweig, The Hidden Order of Art (Berkeley, California; University of
California Press, 1967), 9.
Mick Hartney, ‘InT/Ventions: Some Instances of Confrontation with British
Broadcasting’, Diverse Practices, Julia Knight (ed.), John Libbey
Media/Arts Council of England, Luton, 1996.
John Byrne, ‘Modernism and Meaning: Reading the Intervention of British Video
Art into the Gallery Space’, in Diverse Practices, Julia Knight (ed.).
Sean Cubitt, Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture, Macmillan Education
Ltd, London, 1993.
Tony Godfrey, Conceptual Art, Phaidon Press, London and New York, 1998.
Debord, Guy. 1992. Society of the Spectacle. London, England: Rebel Press,
London.
Frank Gillette, ‘Masque in Real Time’, Video Art, an Anthology, Ira Schneider and
Beryl Korot (eds), Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, New York and London,
1976.
Gill, Johanna. Video: State of the Art. New York NY: The Rockefeller foundation,
1976.
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud, 1929
P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde: 1943-1978, Oxford
University Press, 1979.
Stan Brakhage, ‘Metaphors on Vision’, Film Culture, 1963, unpaginated.
34
Jorg Zutter, ‘Interview with Bill Viola’, Unseen Images, Whitechapel Art Gallery,
London, 1994.
Walter Benjamin, The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.
Douglas David, ‘Prophecy: The Art of the Future’, Art and the Future, Thames
and Hudson, London, 1973.
Marshall Mcluhan, Understanding Media, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, London,
1964.
Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, Studio Vista, London, 1970.
McHale, John. "The Plastic Parthenon." The Futurists 1972.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press, 2001.
Peter Donebauer, ‘Video Art and Technical Innovation’, Educational Broadcasting
International, September 1980.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2. Cluj-Napoca, Romania: Tact, 2013.
Gene Youngblood, ‘Cinema and the Code’, Leonardo, ‘Computer Art in Context’,
Supplemental Issue, 1989.
35
Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Los Angeles, California;
University of California Press, 1967)
Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (New York: Schocken Books, 1965).
Anthony McCall, ‘1000 Words’, Artforum, Summer 2004.
Tate. “'Line Describing a Cone', Anthony McCall, 1973.” Tate, January 1, 1973.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/mccall-line-describing-a-cone-
t12031.
Anthony McCall, ‘Two Statements’ (1974), in P. Adams Sitney (ed.), The Avant-
Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, New York 1978, p.250.
Anthony McCall: Film Installations, exhibition catalogue, Mead Gallery, Warwick
Arts Centre, Coventry 2004, reproduced pp.4, 6–7, 32.
Thater, Diana. “Diana Thater.” Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination.
Accessed January 29, 2023.
http://dianathater.delmonicobooks.com/work-detail.php?id=knots-
surfaces.
36
Stan Brakhage: Dog Star Man, 1959- 64.
16 mm. Colour, black and white, 78 min.
(fig. 1)
37
Judith F. Baca, The River Once Ran, 2022.
Screenshots from Snapchat.
(fig. 2)
38
Ulysses Jenkins and Judith
F. Baca; 1848 Bandaide in
The Great Wall of Los
Angeles, 1976
(fig. 3)
39
A New Perspective on Edison in The Great Wall of Los Angeles, 1979
Judith F. Baca
(fig. 4)
40
Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone, 1973
Film, 16 mm, projection. Duration: 30 min
(fig. 5)
41
Diana Thater, Knots + Surfaces, 2001.
Multi Projection installation
© Diana Thater. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen
(fig. 6)
Abstract (if available)
Linked assets
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
Conceptually similar
PDF
the experience of art and the art of experience: museums, theme parks, and van gogh in the 21st century
PDF
The myth of memory: interpretations of site, memory, and erasure in Los Angeles.
PDF
Orientalism and Chinoiserie: Chinese culture in the western fashion industry
PDF
Ableism in the U.S. art context: curators, art museums, and the non-normative body
PDF
SpaceTime travelers: on riding a bike in the city
PDF
Transcendent hybridities: Lu Yang's interrogation of gender, technology, and "Chineseness" in contemporary
PDF
(Mis)representations of Chinese culture and filmic influences
PDF
What’s the wig deal?: Exploring the use of wigs and head accessories in queer performance
PDF
Collecting power: Eli Broad and the re-making of art in Los Angeles
PDF
Art collaborations in fashion brand spaces
PDF
Past imagination, present creation and the reality of tomorrow: explore the impact of Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), and Mixed Reality (MR) design
PDF
Cao Fei: rethinking spatial dynamics discourse
PDF
Sites of oppositional consciousness: the construction of an alternative cyborg in Trinh T. Minh‐ha’s Night Passage
PDF
Stolen culture: a discussion on decolonization and repatriation of Indigenous artifacts
PDF
Quilting bodies: the Gee's Bend Quilters, Sanford Biggers, and Jonathan VanDyke
PDF
Blackness and belonging: the impact of Brockman Gallery and the Underground Museum on Los Angeles Art and Culture
PDF
Porous bodies: contemporary art's use of the osmotic as a means of reconfiguring subjectivity
PDF
The globalization of contemporary Chinese art: biennales, large-scale exhibitions, and the transnational work of Cai Guo-Qiang
PDF
The extension of our reality
PDF
Silent sparrows: exploration into augmented reality narrative frameworks
Asset Metadata
Creator
Zeffert, Bryce
(author)
Core Title
Syncretic learning in augmented reality public monuments: a study of Judith F. Baca’s The river once ran
School
Roski School of Art and Design
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere
Degree Conferral Date
2023-05
Publication Date
04/07/2023
Defense Date
12/06/2022
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
augmented reality,Judith F. Baca,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,public monuments,syncretic learning,The Great Wall of Los Angeles
Format
theses
(aat)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Jones, Amelia (
committee chair
), Lin, Jenny (
committee member
), (
Moore, Madison
)
Creator Email
bzeffert@ucla.edu,zeffert@usc.edu
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC112956345
Unique identifier
UC112956345
Identifier
etd-ZeffertBry-11582.pdf (filename)
Legacy Identifier
etd-ZeffertBry-11582
Document Type
Thesis
Format
theses (aat)
Rights
Zeffert, Bryce
Internet Media Type
application/pdf
Type
texts
Source
20230410-usctheses-batch-1018
(batch),
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
augmented reality
Judith F. Baca
public monuments
syncretic learning
The Great Wall of Los Angeles