This experiment emerged from the second phase of my yearlong art residency at UCLA Film and Television Archive in 2024, where I was invited as the inaugural artist into the archive to learn about their rich work preserving moving image histories. I found myself immersed in a world of librarians, archivists, and preservation experts who have devoted their lives to preserving history. There was something deeply striking about encountering recorded histories of Los Angeles life on physical film — a format I have grown increasingly distant from in a totally digital world.

I was drawn most to the KTLA Newsfilm Collection featuring unaired footage from LA news coverage in the 70s-90s. In this footage, I was struck by the inclusion of different types of stories in the narrative fabric of Los Angeles. I was drawn to the way communities of color, working class communities, immigrants, and queer people were depicted on screen, the encounters they had with reporters, the way they were silenced, or not included at all. I used this material to create an interactive video installation that invites visitors into the guts of the television to see what is happening deep under the surface of the screen. I used noise systems, computer vision, and algorithmic processing to convert the archival images into a searchable database of vector embeddings—an ambivalent numeration that I suspected might unearth unseen connections across the nodes of the archive, uniting stories by the gesture of a subject, the tone of their voice, the words they use.