L.A.T.B.D.

Exhibition
October 15, 2015 - January 31, 2016
DML - Treasure Room

For the 2015 USC Libraries Discovery Fellowship, architecture and design writer Geoff Manaugh will develop L.A.T.B.D., an installation exploring diverse narrative futures for the city of Los Angeles. Incorporating elements of speculative fiction, game design, and detailed architectural modeling, L.A.T.B.D. will allow exhibition visitors to generate their own unique visions of a Los Angeles yet to be determined.

The project’s ultimate goal is to reveal some of the key forces that helped to shape Los Angeles, from its coastal ecologies to the rise (and future fate) of the city’s freeway system, from the region’s outsized role in the history of global astronomy to L.A.’s complex array of alternative religions. Drawing on archival materials found in the USC Libraries, and incorporating game-design insight from faculty and students in the University’s media and cinematic arts departments, L.A.T.B.D. will also include a series of 3D urban models designed in collaboration with architects Mark Smout and Laura Allen, depicting hypothetical future moments in this unrealized Los Angeles to come.

During a public exhibition opening in October 2015 in the University of Southern California’s Doheny Memorial Library Treasure Room, visitors will be able to look years, decades, even centuries into the future of Los Angeles with a different narrative outcome for each visitor. 

Photos of the L.A.T.B.D. installation by Stonehouse Photographic.