The Outcast of the Universe (Signal)

Signal is a cinematic trailer for a film that does not exist. It is part of The Outcast of the  Universe, an ongoing project that uses Los Angeles as a psychological and geographic  landscape for exploring disappearance, reinvention, belief, and perception, drawing loosely  from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield. 

The project began with twelve GPS coordinates randomly generated across Los Angeles  County. Each location was photographed on analog film and paired with a single script page  written as an excerpt from an imagined feature film. Using artificial intelligence as both a  generative and interpretive tool, these fragments are expanded into speculative narratives  and trailers for films that were never made. For Signal, the pacing and editorial structure of  Michael Mann’s Collateral functions as a formal framework through which fictional identities,  memories, and narrative structures emerge from real locations within the city. 

In this chapter, Signal is anchored to the Pleiades star cluster, which functions as both a  distant point of reference and a metaphor for delayed meaning. The work considers how  signals travel across time, how they are interpreted, misread, or projected onto the  unknown, and how both cities and celestial systems become surfaces for human belief. 

The trailer originates from a photograph taken in Altadena after the wildfire, where a man  returns to the remains of a place that no longer fully belongs to him. Moving through burnt  neighborhoods, abandoned scientific infrastructures, and fragmented memories, the work  unfolds as a cinematic reconstruction of a story suspended between disappearance,  paranoia, and failed communication.