This project will encourage users to unravel Broadway’s stories in an evocative, affective, interactive experience that will question the stakes and investments in the processes of preservation, and the construction of archives. The piece aims to move beyond providing a counter-archive of the histories and narratives obscured in myths about Downtown Los Angeles, and instead moves toward forging a different type of interactive experience, one modeled on the logics, networks, and systems that I anticipate developing out in my research on Broadway. This research will entail interviewing merchants, retailers, and consumers about the workings of the entertainment business as it now functions on Broadway. I will also conduct interviews with Los Angeles conservationists, city politicians and officers, along with downtown boosters and historians, but I will primarily be developing the project’s interactive/ database system out of research based on the cultural economies that have preserved Broadway for the latter part of the twentieth century.

In the process of developing this project, I learned that I had a great deal to learn about the media histories and cultural studies approaches I intended to explore. I decided to focus on the cultural histories of this rich archives of South Broadway. The following photos represent documentation of this shift in focus. From considering the movie theaters as important monuments for thinking through the post-cinema moment to focusing on how mediation is diversely engaged in the cultural memory of workers and designers of vernacular space on South Broadway.