OnRamp Arts is a digital arts organization based in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. Since 1997, OnRamp has worked with artists, educational institutions, historians, community members and youth to create digital art projects that investigate the different identities and experiences that make up Central LA.
A list of OnRamp’s recent projects include: “Turning from the Millennium,” a multimedia investigation of LA’s historical trajectory through the eyes of area youth (1999-2000); “Inter:ReActive Space,” an interactive collection of personal and social narratives of urban experience (2001); “Tropical America,” an online game about the histories of the Americas (2001-02); “The Digital Migrant,” a video documentary about Latino immigration and labor in LA (2002-03).

“Cross-Secting LA,” OnRamp’s most current project, uses GIS technology and local knowledge to create an interactive map that can more adequately express the social, personal and economic complexities that make up LA. Cross-Secting LA is a two-year partnership project, involving Los Angeles Trade Technical College, UCLA, community organizations and their respective members. Distribution of Cross-Secting LA will be carried out locally, nationally and internationally, serving to empower local Los Angeles communities, as well as establish Cross-Secting LA as a model for other communities in their search for direction within the 21st century city.

OnRamp Arts can be found online at: www.onramparts.org

Tandem Surfing the Third Wave 4: OnRamp Arts

This is an edited transcript of a phone conversation between Ryan Griffis and OnRamp Arts co-founder Jessica Irish on OnRamp’s past, present and future, the relationship between technology and education, and her move from LA to Boston. Recorded on June 4, 2003.

RG: What’s currently going on with OnRamp and its operations?

JI: We’re in a situation where we’ve had to rethink how we’re running OnRamp, because with the funding situation, we just couldn’t continue staffing the center. So, we’ve got another organization, actually one that we’ve been partnering with, to keep the lab open, and run it out of their program. And we’re sort of shifting into a more nomadic collaborative, more project-based. We were always
project-based, but we’re going to have to continue to become more so, now that we don’t have a lab. See, that was part of the genesis of OnRamp when it first started, was that it was also a center. And at that time, in 1997, it made sense. There wasn’t a lot of interactivity here in LA, in the neighborhood.

RG: The funding situation is something that I was very interested in asking about, as everyone knows how hard non-profits “especially arts and education focused” have been hit during the last few years.

JI: Tiny orgs like us; I mean, it was always pretty hard for us, even during “the bubble.” We’re like, “Wow. Those were the good times?” But we started really, really small with OnRamp in a small storage space. Echo Park is adjacent to downtown LA. It’s a big neighborhood, fairly low income. We had a few donated computers and ten thousand bucks. Over time, we added a lot more physical capacity and started producing projects. The emphasis for me, at least, and my husband, was the projects and not just the space itself. And bringing in different artists to do projects based on a theme, and choosing themes that addressed some locally relevant issue. The projects, in the beginning…we did get some funding for projects. You know, that’s kind of what people want to fund anyway. No body wants to fund a lab, no one wants to fund galleries. They wanted to fund projects, so why not just stick with that? We did get some funding for a project called “Crossecting LA,” which is a mapping project looking at central Los Angeles, using GIS mapping as a way of empowering communities. And we didn’t really know what we wanted to do with it, because we had originally thought that this was going to be a really huge project, and had a big budget. But we only got a fraction of that funded. But this whole idea of letting go and refocusing what we really wanted to work on, I think it’s been good. Now we’re partnering with another institution, and they already have all the facilities. So, that’s great, because it allows us to focus more on projects. But it will be interesting to see how things change, once I move. OnRamp has always had a certain local subject matter, even though once the projects were made, we have gotten a lot of international attention, based on the interest of people abroad for that content. But it’s a little strange. I think it’s better that more people from LA get involved and take it in new directions rather than try to take it to Boston.

RG: So, it sounds like the projects will remain focused on the cultural and geographic locality of central Los Angeles despite your move.

JI: Steven (Metts OnRamp co-founder) and I, we wrote the “Crossecting LA” project looking at central Los Angeles, and that will shift, because we’re not the ones implementing it. So, it’s going to have a different aesthetic, or different conceptual focus. Which is fine with us. And that is going very much to be about Los Angeles. And I think we want to stay on the board and help the organization transition, and also help with the projects because we know so many people whohave done research in LA, to help with that dialogue. After that, I’m not sure that it makes sense to…I could stay on to advise, but OnRamp does have a certain locality specific to that neighborhood really responding to what’s needed and, you know, what isn’t. It’s not a national organization. The work I’m hoping to do in Boston, partnering other institutions and existing non-profits there–it’s a lot of the lessons that we’ve learned and interesting collaborative skills that we’ve learned from OnRamp and developed. I want to implement these in a more organic way, instead of coming in and imposing that business on the neighborhood, getting a better idea of what that need is. I live in Echo Park and I’ve been here since I moved to LA, so it makes sense that it didn’t just come from outer space. It came out of a very specific experience. When we started, I was up at UC Santa Barbara, and felt this huge disconnect. All the dialogue around digital media being so disconnected from, literally, where I lived. And coming back, especially from Santa Barbara, it was pretty dramatic. And Steven, who was teaching art in South Central LA, had the exact opposite experience; you know, so many hostilities, so few resources to actually do anything. So, it just made the most sense for both of us, at that point in time, based on the neighborhood. You know, with my interviews in Boston, people were like, “Are you going to come and bring OnRamp here and do the same thing?” But I think that you have to be responsive in a more integral way to your experience.

RG: So, this is a big shift for you and Steven to be changing your roles in OnRamp.

JI: I think it’s good. There’s a tendency in non-profits to just do it, to do that work until they die. They give up everything to make it happen. It’s kind of a stereotype that’s really true. And having done it, I understand the mentality of it. There’s not a lot of support structures help you not do that. Basically, it’s a way of surviving with a small non-profit. You have to be one of those people who decides to do that or not. The alternative is to be flexible, to say, ” Well, we’re gonna do it the way we think is best.” And we did it for five years: got stuff done, made a certain mark, developed a name, developed the trust of funders. Which is very hard to do when starting out fresh and nobody knows you, and you have all of these kooky ideas. I’m hoping that the people that want to get involved and take it in new directions can build on that in a way that’s interesting. But it’s kind of futile to always want to do the same thing, and antithetical to that idea of trying to apply new media in new ways. It’s always in flux, communities are always in flux. The neighborhood (Echo Park), it’s kind of the first stop for people coming in. It’s a very transitional neighborhood, and a lot of the projects we’ve looked at are about that idea of how migration, or that sort of transitional experience, changes the city and how experience changes your view of urban space or storytelling. Why not have the organization do that too.

RG: One of the things that is really important to me, in OnRamp’s projects is the presence of an unresolved tension between the specificity or locality of where you were working/who you were working with and the utopian, yet homogenizing, promise of digital media and telecommunications. This tension seems to always be there, even if it’s not always in the foreground.

JI: It’s so true. At least for me, and my own work, what I’m always thinking about is that tension between that utopia and what I think of as dystopia. LA is such a great city to work in, if you’re interested in that. We always joke that, “If you like noir, all the scandals are here.” It’s a dramatic city, literally. It’s fun if you have the right attitude. You have to have a sense of irony. You either learn to have fun with it, or you leave. But it’s been interesting to work on projects with people who have had a very different experience. Young kids, immigrant kids, who again, their experience is very different, and even though they might do the same things, they might appraise them differently. So, that was always interesting. The project we did, Turning from the Millennium, you know Norman Klein had written a book, largely around Echo Park, Chinatown, those neighborhoods, and as we were doing research, walking tours, documenting, we would have these conversations with kids and talk to them about how the neighborhood developed. The kids would often say, “Oh, we don’t call this neighborhood this, we call it that.” And he (Klein) was like, “Oh, great! I’m finally finding out what it’s really called!” he loved hearing it from people who were actually occupying the space. It became less a theoretical thing. It actually grounded it “all of his ideas”, which is hard to do, to have in terms of university faculty or artists. There was one, really cool grant that the University of California has for collaborations, either with university or community organizations, so we were able to get a few of those and pay faculty and artists to come in and be visiting artists. It completely put the dialogue on a whole other level. It was kind of a big deal, because it wasn’t about helping out, or doing something “good,” it was about research in a way, about developing a new kind of dialogue and getting it to happen. But even now, I do get frustrated with the level of distraction. For myself, I think, “How can your research be devoid of your actual experience, especially when going through the city is so difficult?” It’s literally overwhelming. Personally, I just can’t understand how you would separate that. A lot of the projects were about trying to have this relationship.

RG: I actually show OnRamp’s projects in undergraduate classes I teach as a way to introduce complexity and dealing with personal experiences; something other than the desire to uncritically reproduce special effects. And I think it usually helps, because the projects are accessible and interesting while also pretty sophisticated. The experiential component to all the projects comes through and, I think, brings people in, which is very useful to me as a teacher.

JI: That’s great to hear. That’s exactly what we wanted. That it resonates outside of here. You could take that same model and tweak it around. We were always surprised by that. With the “Turning from the Millennium” project, we put it up and we felt like nobody in LA cared at all. But the Germans were like “Wow!” Everybody in Germany was really excited, and we were like, “What is this?” It’s also something we’ve been trying to do, to adapt the methodology of the project for development in high school classes. Everywhere, arts funding is down. It’s so cut back. And all that push for everyone to just go out and buy computers …and what are they going to do with them? Of course, they’re just going to mimic what they see on TV. It’s really much more about sifting and thinking about what you’re able to do with media. Those core ideas and core possibilities. Basic ideas, like a layered thing, that you can layer things so easily. To look at things in layers. Then it becomes so much less about, “Wow! Flash MX is out. I don’t know Flash MX, I only know Flash 5,” that sort of fixation on the technological side.

RG: I’m sure it’s effecting primary education as much as higher education. The pressure to churn out people who can work for a particular industry parallels the pressure to keep up with upgrades and industry standards, often to the detriment of other aspects of education.

JI: Right. I mean, I think this applies also to working in new media, keeping the emphasis wholly on the theoretical idea without basic skills, like drawing or visually understanding how sequences work. This is an aside, but I’m teaching this intro to web class right now, and I’m supposed to be having this conversation with my students about interface design, but it always ends up being like graphic design 101. They didn’t get the color info they need, or how to layout a page, or what that means. Pretty basic ideas of the foundations. Before you can go in and make something exciting and interactive, you have to have a basic understanding of the language. And they’ve sort of lost that because they are so consumed with spitting out buzzwords and getting hooked in. I mean, a lot of it they know, just from using the technology on a basic level. It’s a weird balance. It’s an interesting time to be working in it; it’s a challenge to have that right balance of critical thinking and a real foundation of visual language together in a technological setting. The technology always comes last., even in the projects we did with OnRamp. With “Turning from the Millennium,” we spent maybe three months having participants take pictures and talking about them, then throwing them all away–we didn’t keep any of them. Then we finally got an idea of what we really wanted to do. We spent four months walking around and taking more pictures and gathering data. We didn’t actually get on the computers until six months after doing all of this and figuring out what we wanted to do, those ideas that we’d bring into the lab.With the “Tropical America” game, we took four months before turning computers on. They (youth participants) didn’t know anything about history at all. Then we spent two to three months just figuring out that idea that history interrelates, that some moments connect other moments. Again, this idea of connectedness and interrelation became central. That applies in many settings, and of course, the game setting. You don’t turn on a computer as if computers are going to help you figure that out. It was a mental thing, and it was really hard. I mean, you could make a map of all this stuff until the end of time, but at some point you have to figure out, “OK. What are we going to do?” But it wasn’t until maybe seven months after we started it that we actually started designing something that would work on a computer. And then another month went by, and we were like, “OK. We’re ready to get on the computers now.” And everything’s like that. All our interactive projects draw on our neighborhood, on our experience. Map your apartment, write a story, a mystery, re-write it. I think it’s frustrating, it’s tiring, it’s hard to build in that time, and it’s one of the luxuries we’ve had. Well, it’s not a luxury, but a thing we’ve learned is that good collaborations take time. A lot of times, in educational settings, it’s hard to squeeze something into a semester. University of California schools operate on quarters, which are only ten weeks, so it’s even worse. But that is an important part, that commitment, taking that time to flush all of that out.

RG: That really comes across in OnRamp’s projects. It’s hard to imagine getting that level of complexity without that extended period of research and predesign. When you started OnRamp, did you feel like you had other models to follow or work from? There are only a few well-documented examples I know of where artists critically engaged educational efforts, Tim Rollins with KOS and Ben Caldwella’s KAOS for example.

JI: With media arts, and sort of educational artists–whatever that is–is a pretty small circle, and it didn’t take long to figure out who’s doing what. I think that it’s definitely valuable to look at what other people are doing, and I’ve definitely learned from those other organizations like Ben and KAOS and Reach LA. Actually, before OnRamp, I was doing a UC program with the Long Beach Museum of Art that was a really intense program. But it was very empowering, just learning how to do that. It was only a two and a half week program, but we worked on one project all day, everyday. And it was amazing what we got to produce. Part of OnRamp was realizing that we didn’t have to compress everything like that – we could extend it. But we didn’t have a model in mind. At least Steven and I didn’t. It was really kind of an experiment. “Let’s see if we can get this thing open. Hopefully something good will come out of it.” A lot of our projects began with something pretty nebulous. For “Turning from the Millennium,” we said, “Let’s write a grant about the past, present and future of the neighborhood.” We wrote it and thought, “This sounds good, it sounds interesting.” But I didn’t have an idea of what it was going to look like, or how much work it would be. When we finished it, I was in shock over how much content we were able to find. I had no idea. What’s really amazing is the things that the kids (working with us on the project) found. One of them had all of these audio interviews with her neighbor that grew up in these areas with all these oil wells and drilling where she describes her experiences there. And you know, we stumbled across things like this unknown part of LA’s history. We would find something and say, “Wait a minute. This is where the 101 Freeway is, but it says here that it’s a graveyard! What happened? And now it’s the site where the LA Unified School District is, so this is weird.” And then this kid found these interviews and a neighborhood woman said, “Oh, I remember when they were digging that up. There were bones everywhere.” And this was so funny and amazing. You think, “this really is a place for noir.” Even with the game, “Oh, it’d be great to make a game.” But we had no idea what it would end up being. So it’s out of that sense of dialogue and the other people involved, their perspective and what they bring to it. It’s kind of a funny position to be in, especially with funders, that sense of openness. If you’re an artist, you’re open with the process and if you’re a good artist you’re willing to change it up and experiment all the time. Applying the same model to an organization is hard because funders don’t want that. They’re like, “What are you going to do with the money?” And you’re like, “We don’t know.” In a way, you have to get them excited about the idea of discovery, rather than fearful around the idea of an unknown. I think that once they do get that idea and see that that is valuable in and of itself, but also that you have a track record of doing stuff. It’s not like we just sit around having these conversations and feeling good and that’s the project. At the end of the day, we have a record of putting things together. We’re artists, and we want to have that in the end, that’s the whole point. So, over time, I think we’ve been able to make funders a whole lot more comfortable with that.
So, how did you first hear about OnRamp?

RG: Let me think…it was through the LA Freewaves “TV or Not TV” program. There was a video production that featured you and Steven and some of the work going into the “Turning from the Millennium” project I think. After that, I remember looking up the projects online, about the time that the “Tropical Americas” game was released. While visiting a friend at UC Irvine last year I caught your presentation of the game to David Trend’s class, which was an unexpected treat.

JI: One of the things that I have wanted to do with that game, that I’m going to work more on, is developing a curriculum for using the game in class because it’s really smart and if you pay attention, you can get a lot out of it. But, I know, for a lot of people, they’re going to say, “Oh, it’s really cool and funny and sad. And I’m going to win it.” And they’ll enjoy it also, but it’s hard to gauge. There are a lot of decisions and ideas for why things were structured the way they were. The idea was to not do that kind of thing where it’s an “educational game.” Where Christopher Columbus goes, “Hi. I did this and that!” And you pay attention and then you get to play with little animations. So, at certain levels in the game you can quit out of it and then actually have a class discussion about why it was designed that way. After you play the game, you get the database. The whole idea of tying on the database later – to be able to go research the actual history then come back: you’re taking what you traditionally do in a classroom. Like a history class, with readings, writing, research, debates. At least that’s how it should be. Applying that to the game structure, you would use the game as the starting point. The kids we worked with for a year, at that level were seniors, and none of them even knew who Columbus was on the first day. There’s obviously something that they’re not getting in school. It’s like a machine; it’s so overcrowded. It’s about just showing up, like it’s a warehouse. So once they started doing all of the research and design, they really liked the storytelling aspect of looking at history. It really brought them in and they were involved in debating how to organize everything. They felt more ownership by the end of it. They also had an image. They loved symbols. They’re the ones that made up the game’s symbols. I think that’s important as a way of making things more relevant for young people in particular, because obviously it’s not working now. When I recently interviewed at another school, there was a lot of traditional approaches to many things there. It makes many people nervous looking at games, multimedia, whatever. I say to them, “At the end of the day, it’s not going away. So you might as well engage it in a way that you think is appropriate.” And they usually reply, “You’re right. It’s not going away.”