SUBSTRATE
2024/2025
LACMA / Los Angeles Central Library / Long Beach City College
A monumental interactive AR experience, Substrate invites the viewer to consider connections between knowledge-making organizations by contributing their own descriptions of culturally significant artifacts. Borrowing imagery and examples from networks in nature, Baker Cahill depicts LACMA, the Los Angeles Public Library’s Central Library, and California’s system of community colleges as abstracted, interlocking trees with root systems and mycelial networks that produce essential nutrients for human health and well-being. The work is based on the artist’s earlier project of the same name, supported by LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab, which used futuristic civics and systems thinking to demonstrate the potential of collaborations between local civic hubs. LACMA — Unframed Article
Substrate is a participatory, evolving augmented reality and community-led systems project supported by the LACMA Art + Tech Lab. Tree root systems and mycelial networks serve as its biomimetic models for protecting and distributing cultural knowledge. The work builds on the entanglement between natural and technical processes, suggesting each already operates through the other’s logic.
The project required coordinating three institutions—a museum, library, and school—to support curatorial students at Long Beach Community College. The students identified artifacts warranting preservation, drew on LACMA's public archive, and mounted the resulting video exhibition on the LA Public Library's large-scale atrium LED. Blockchain was invoked for its smart contracts, used to formalize institutional exchange and encode the project's potential travel to other networked public libraries.
As an AR experience, Substrate invites viewers to contribute culturally significant artifacts to a techno-mycelial, knowledge-fortifying network. Imagining LACMA, the LAPL, and California's community colleges as “mother trees,” Substrate enacts cooperative, resilient knowledge-sharing. The mycelial systems provide the work’s organizational logic: the distribution of decisions, the flow of knowledge, and the proposal of a more equitable model. Individual contributions to the AR network create culturally nourishing systems that are regenerative, distributive, and non-hierarchical, modeled on the moral economies of fungal networks.
The AR experience serves as a public invitation into a living archive by and for the public, preserved and amplified in the face of federal erasure and censorship. It functions as an emergent system rather than a fixed object.
Interdisciplinary collaboration has been as key to this project as facilitating rich biodiversity is to mycelial networks. Substrate summons the “mother tree” civic hubs and overlapping networks of an art museum (LACMA), a central library (LACPL), and Long Beach City College. This institutional interlocking provides the ground to forge a new model of cultural engagement, access, and provenance using industry leader Protocol Labs’ data storage network, Filecoin, particularly through the launch of the Filecoin Virtual Machine. Southern California community college curatorial students, led by Curator Karla Aguiñiga, have rigorously researched the “nutrients” (or metadata, histories, properties) of cultural artifacts they value from LACMA’s collection (in direct service of its goal to be a “distributed museum”), to share, protect, honor and distribute through a flagship digital (and possibly hybrid) exhibition in LA’s Central Public Library, itself a nourishing hub for larger communities. The student group, including Casper Torres, Shereen Moustafa, Mark Sosa, and Miguel Zavala, will share their perspectives as part of a live panel discussion at LACPL in Summer 2024. The LED-screen standard-bearer StandardVision will host the digital components, as it is already installed in the LACPL atrium for the purpose of making digital art public.
This initial community-determined exhibition, minted, encrypted and time-stamped on the blockchain, will be shareable, traceable and adaptable through the vast network of libraries in California and throughout the United States. This model is designed to be adapted and further developed for additional contexts and community needs/interests. The project is thus forming a substrate – an ever-expanding, accessible foundation of experimental exhibitions and new (and hopefully unexpected) forms of cultural engagement from which interested communities might be equitably and creatively sustained.
Click here to read the full whitepaper
UNIVERSUM
A Substrate Project
by Shereen Moustafa, Mark Sosa, Casper Torres, Miguel Zavala
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