Client: Bronston Studios/ Hudson Pacific Properties

Overview

For the Netflix headquarter building on Sunset Blvd in Los Angeles artist Kyungmi Shin created “That Child of Fleeting Time”, a video based sculpture that commemorates the site’s historic landmark location as Warner Brothers’ original LA Location. The stainless steel sculpture gives the appearance of four curved film strips with media screens on the front skin that play thousands of clips lasting 6 seconds in duration each, shuffled randomly, resulting in a work of art that is always in motion and is never the same. These clips were created from early technology test films including animation of the sound technology used for the Jazz Singer, the first talkie created at the site, color tests done by Thomas Edison and Kodak, and movement studies by Muybridge, among others. Analog noises were added by distorting the original footages to create colorful abstract sequences that refer to the digital future while looking back at the history of the film industry’s technological evolution. The video screen consists of 50,000 LED bulbs and the final work measures 30’ x 6’ x 15’.

Goals

This free-standing, video based sculpture adds visual interest to the site which is designated as Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument #180 as the "Site of the Filming of the First Talking Feature Film", connecting the past to the present and future. Located on the south side of Sunset Blvd, this work is perfectly scaled for pedestrians passing by to enjoy as well as passing vehicular traffic.

Process

Public Art Services worked with artist Kyungmi Shin to provide project management services for this project.