From Here to L.A.

From Here to L.A.

Year of Production: 1999 – 2000
Duration: 28 minutes (excerpt: 3:08)
Stereo audio: (audio starts in black)
Editing: Tony Allard
Camera: Tony Allard & Kristine Diekman
Sound: Tony Allard, Kristine Diekman, Dwight Frizzell, Ricardo
Additional Music: Doug Hitchcock and the Hari Karokai Tri of Doom (NYC)

FROM HERE TO L.A.: a post-human western in progress From Here to LA traces the partly factual, partly fictional journey of Toni La Bone (and a variety of personas/avatars he adopts) from his home state of Kansas to Hollywood. The story takes place in a pseudo cyberspace that combines emerging multimedia nonlinear narrative genres on the internet with a variety of “classic” movie genres such as the western, the road movie, coming of age stories, and recent high end animated apocalyptic disaster films. These traditional and new genres are presented through the experimental form of video that is edited to ape the speed and rapid visual information downloads from cable tv and the WWW. The journey takes place during the year 1999 and culminates in a potentially apocalyptic ending for millions of electronic bodies in cyberspace at the stroke of midnight, December 31st at the turn of the millennium. The Y2K hysteria of 1999 and the “crazy” life of Southern California set the tone for my journey.

Toni La Bone, a fictional Hollywood B Grade movie director and internet drifter, is one of the personas I take on as I make my way to Hollywood–VIA a Wizzard of OZ tornado. The “Scenario” is centered on a road trip that simultaneously traverses terrestrial space and pseudo cyberspace. The time is during the recent “gold rush” days of the “Internet Dot.com landrush” in Southern California. The scenario, or “plot” advances through a series of prophecies or visionsToni La Bone receives from a hack Southern California prophet named The Prophet of @. The space and time of the journey weaves in and out of cyber space, television, movie plots, FM & AM radio broadcasts, pseudo virtual realities and the post manifest destiny landscapes of 21st century America. The journey ends at midnight on December 31st, 1999 in Hollywood when the fate of millions of electronic bodies is to be decided by the “Y2K bug”.33