ENCODING FUTURES 

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This summer, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation and in editorial partnership with Philadelphia-based Monument Lab’s Bulletin, Oxy Arts launched Encoding Futures: Speculative Monuments for L.A., a remote summer residency program. Over a 3-month period, artists Nancy Baker-Cahill, Audrey Chan, Joel Garcia with Meztli Projects and Patrick Martinez researched and developed original virtual monuments to be geo-located at sites across Los Angeles. The monuments are accessible for the public to view through the 4th Wall app. 

The prompt for the residency was to conceive a blueprint for a site-specific imagined future, and consider technologically enabled transformations that might shape the future of the site. The artists considered past and present social, economic, and cultural inequities, power imbalances, and other forms of subjection, with the hope of foregrounding a radically equitable future sited in an emergent present; and in the process contemplate if and how new forms of monuments can reckon with the way monuments have functioned as agents of oppression. 

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Project page available here.  Text from OxyArts.

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