2026-07-10 –, Creativity Dome
Many artists who have experienced structural abuse and processes of recovery carry unique insights about creativity and the way solidarity networks are to be built. This talk shares findings from a co-creation workshop that uses counter-factual science fiction as a prompt for discussing racial histories and politics of data extraction in downtown Los Angeles.
Trauma-informed facilitation in the expressive arts offers a way to understand priorities in design that otherwise may go unnoticed or undervalued. This lightning talk presents some recent engagements I’ve had with a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused performance artists from my neighborhood theatre group. Each member was given a character sheet, from which we imagined factions and roles in a counter-factual mid-century Los Angeles ruled by Japanese imperialists affected by a “blue fog” that provoked hauntings for those who neglected their ancestral histories. This prompt was intended as a site-specific bridge between Skid Row, the largest enclosure of unhoused people in the U.S., and Little Tokyo, a neighboring area with a significant Asian-American presence under similar pressures of gentrification. While this co-creation workshop was an exercise in bridging imaginaries through fiction, it also opened up discussions about extraction, technology, AI and race.
This lightning talk is a mode to introduce my community of practice through story and invite further discussion on topics of reparative and restorative art-making, solidarity infrastructures, structural racism, and abuse recovery. My talk is a gesture to bridge my documentary film-making and relational knowledge with protocol design and engineering.
My name is Andrea (newswimming) and I'm a documentary filmmaker and cultural worker from Los Angeles experimenting with media arts research at our Cinema school. My background is in arts and academia, but I had always pushed the boundaries of what that includes, such as anti-disciplinary methods that foreground relational intimacies. Currently I'm writing a dissertation on reparative arts methods emerging from 1970's Korean avant-garde theatre, Indigenous mask dance, and grassroots media art innovation. I have a passion for seaweed-based diets and designing rituals around food. Previous affiliations include the U.S. Fulbright Program, MIT Open Documentary Lab, Duke Literature Program, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, amongst other arts research and civic spaces. My feature film INVISIBLE ORGAN (2021) introduced me to topics of feminist biomedical innovation and inner reproductive health, which brought me closer to my artistic and design research practice.