12/12/2024 from b2o: an online journal Special Issue “The Gordian Knot of Finance”
...In downtown Los Angeles, about a year ago, base jumpers and graffiti artists claimed an abandoned development as their own by filming viral videos from inside the empty towers. On Instagram, one video is captioned “the calm before the storm.” It opens with a wide shot, drone footage set to hip hop.
Two young men stand at the top of an unfinished building. On iron girders high above the city, they swim in golden sunset light. As they move catlike across the bare beams, they look deliberate but impossibly relaxed. They control the swoop of their cameras with their thumbs.
In the next beat, they base jump. A series of five narrow rectangular parachutes glides down, flashes popping off all around. But if the silks spiraling between the graffitied towers were the main attraction, the preamble at sunset best captures the lonely dangerous beauty of the act.
Every floor of these unfinished high-rises–on every level, in every window–was tagged by a graffiti crew. Leaving a mark on the buildings became, through online subcultures, a sine qua non of street self-branding. The aesthetic additions to the abandoned towers, at the heart of the city, brought press attention and sparked global interest. The police stationed themselves around the perimeter, parked at every corner of the lot, to shut it all down.[3]
Most of the public discussion at the time centered on whether or not the graffiti was art. Should taxpayers should be responsible for the clean-up and police patrols? But in February, the Los Angeles Times’ last article about the empty buildings called them a “Capital Fail”(Miranda 2024). Of the many journalistic articles about the towers, this one, in the Arts and Culture section, came the closest to articulating what the ghost towers in eye of the storm truly represented: The fact that land use in global cities, including in the heart of urban America, is being driven by the opaque needs of international capital....
[still from the videos that street artists and base jumpers made about the Oceanwide towers]
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