UCLA

This Master’s thesis is based on a web-based multimedia project titled, “Soundscapes of Pandemia,” created during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic and global Black Lives Matter uprisings. A question guiding the design of this multimedia project that this Master’s thesis considers is, “How can art and collaborative research design critically engage, with current historic moments?” By critical engagement, I mean how can people actively and carefully consider stimuli such as sounds as a means of producing knowledge about current moments and their relationship to possible futures in the urban environment. As an artist, activist, and researcher, I curate visual illustrations and collage the soundscapes in web-space guided by a decolonial practice of counter- mapping and emergent strategy. A collective of submissions qualified a synesthetic multimedia project expressing counter-hegemonic ontologies in transnational urban contexts of Sao Paulo, Leipzig, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, ranging from audio files to audio & video files of varying formats and lengths from nine people. A total of 41 files were submitted by the people in the network and were transmitted from smartphone devices and a GoPro camera utilizing broadband fiber connections. I assert that by engaging with actual and virtual media through magical realism is to engage in imagining future possibilities outside of hegemonic hierarchical and temporal orders.