Hyphen City – A Counter Master Plan for Los Angeles River (OSLO)

In the project, hyphen represents the abstract method in order to achieve a speculative understanding of tangible, and intangible, spaces in the Los Angeles River. Due to its own dimension, and the huge size of the concrete realm, it can be seen as another type of freeway, another ‘endless plain’ in Los Angeles. Its spatial quality and monumentality lie on a siteless ‘field’ for speculative attempts and becomes an infinite grid. For the Los Angeles River, concrete has become a new landscape condition, a playground for film production, and used to explore a psychogeographical reality. Virtual images of

selected films have become the surreal substitutes of the ‘natural’. The channel created has altered spaces and fragmented images related to speed, scale, materiality, and perspective. Its projection and documentation, in a variety of cinematic fictions, have enabled it to be a self-referential and authentic object, contributing to its totality as a liminal space.

The narrative for the diploma is developed through the vivid capture of the landscape and architecture along the river through specific framing or analysis. These are the initial concepts of the eight films under study, which further explore the river’s site-less qualities, depending on their level of fiction, speed, and psychogeography. Given that its visual history is experienced at certain speeds and environments; the Los Angeles River space has been plot- mapped and observed through hyphen speculations, varied from real to fictional scenarios of fragments.