The Outcast of the Universe (Wakefield)

Outcast of the Universe (Wakefield) is a trailer for a film that does not exist. It is the first installment in a twelve part series that builds a portrait of Los Angeles through randomness, repetition, and reinvention. Each film begins with a GPS coordinate generated by AI, disconnected from human bias and selecting a location without narrative intent. From each of these sites, a fictional character emerges: a person inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Wakefield, someone who disappears from their life and lingers unseen on its periphery. The first installment opens with a coordinate that led to Dockweiler Beach, a liminal stretch of coast beneath LAX flight paths. The beach becomes part of the trailer’s visual and emotional vocabulary, reflecting themes of transience, dislocation, and waiting. Its pacing and tone borrow from the trailer for Magnolia, using that familiar Hollywood cadence to introduce a figure shaped by both cinematic archetype and machine logic. The voiceover is melancholic, observational, and timed to visual fragments that explore identity as performance, erasure, and return. While the trailer draws from Los Angeles as a site of reinvention, the fictional film it previews spans both coasts, suggesting a broader geography of disappearance and reemergence. This project uses AI not to simulate humanity but to interrogate it. Each film is a collaboration between algorithmic randomness and human interpretation, revealing how stories of selfhood, like AI output, are often variations on a theme. Through unfamiliar locations and quietly recurring characters, Outcast of the Universe offers a counter portrait of Los Angeles, not the city of spectacle but a landscape of disappearances, muted transformations, and intimate fictions shaped by chance. Hide