LA Interchange, 2010

LA Interchange: a Proposal for a California Highway Victims Memorial Park is a site-specific public art project that proposes a real-time memorial at the intersection of downtown Los Angeles freeways. Set in a renewed urban park at the intersection of the Harbor (110) and Santa Monica (10) freeways in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, the LA Interchange memorial takes the form of an illuminated water fountain that uses real-time accident data from the California Highway Patrol Incident Report website to affect the intensity of the fountain’s stream and colored light, thereby creating an immersive atmosphere revealing unseen data. Included in the discussion is a detailed description of a working prototype of the memorial, and research that develops the significance of the work as a real-time memorial and sublime monument, revealing the intensity and awe we experience when confronted with the interconnectedness of people and technology.

Statement for exhibition:

Luther Thie's monumental work LA INTERCHANGE rises five stories above the confluence of Los Angeles' 10 and 110 freeways—a living memorial that makes visible the ordinarily invisible toll of vehicular modernity. This data-driven fountain translates the California Highway Patrol's real-time incident reports into a perpetually shifting aquatic choreography, where each water jet embodies an accident, its trajectory and chromatic intensity calibrated to the severity of human impact. When the system registers a fatality, a sublime blue pulse ascends skyward—a momentary rupture in urban consciousness and opportunity for communal reflection.

Thie's intervention operates at the nexus of public memorial, data visualization, and systemic critique. By situating this work at one of the city's most congested arterial junctions, he transforms passive infrastructure into an active site of collective reckoning. The fountain becomes a secular cathedral to speed's casualties, echoing J.G. Ballard's prescient understanding of the automobile crash as "the most dramatic and pervasive metaphor of man's relationship with technology."

What distinguishes LA INTERCHANGE is its refusal of spectacle in favor of ritual. Each water pattern emerges not from aesthetic predetermination but from the lived reality of bodies in crisis. The work thus establishes what Obrist might term a "zone of immanence"—a space where art abandons representational distance to become entangled with the precarious conditions it addresses.

Through this hydraulic cartography of trauma, Thie invites us to witness how velocity and vulnerability intertwine in contemporary experience. The fountain performs a paradoxical function: commemorating individual tragedies while revealing their systemic nature, offering both elegy and indictment. In transforming the freeway interchange into a site of contemplation, LA INTERCHANGE disrupts the anesthetic flow of urban existence, compelling us to confront the corporeal costs embedded within our architectures of acceleration.

Essays by Frederick Young and Anu Vikram
LA Times Article
Essay by Luther Thie in Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 16 Issue 6 – 7