Memory Space: Chinatown AR

Welcome back to Los Angeles's original Chinatown.

Use your phone as a portal into the past to meet and speak with the founding members of Los Angels's Chinese community

Step outside the front doors of Union Station and find hidden windows into Los Angeles's past. The streets of Old Chinatown still sit below the surface of the station to this day, and the memories made and shared along them still have energy and stories to share.

The Temporal Memory Anomaly Institute

Strange anomalies are occurring within people’s phone cameras at Union Station. Visitors to the station have noticed strange figures and incomprehensible changes to the environment occurring within their camera window. Buildings and people will appear and vanish within a blink of the eye.

The Temporal Memory Anomaly Research Institute (TMARI) believes the area in and around the station is experiencing temporal memory anomalies (TMAs). TMAs occur when a point in history, mostly forgotten by the average person, rapidly returns into the public consciousness. This rapid and localized re-remembrance leads to the generation and concentration of memory energy: an inter-dimensional state of matter that causes tears in the fabric of time and space itself.

In the case of the Union Station area, the buildings and people that momentarily appear are those of Los Angeles’s first Chinatown, which stood in its place before being demolished to make room for the station.

To further investigate these anomalies, TMARI has developed a special technology that stabilizes memory energy. They are asking anyone at Union Station to help mark memory anomaly locations and capture images of anything that appears on their screens.

Credits

Project & MEML Lab Director Scott Fisher

Project Managers Tyler White, Sofia Rodriguez, Jenny Choi

Lead Developer So Sun Park

Lead Designer Lesley Moon

Art Director Kevin Yin

Character Capture Nate Fairchild

Lead Historian Ilena Moses

Lead Performers Robin Stanton (Peter Soo Hoo), Kevin Tai (David Lee)

3D Team Hsien-Tung Liao, Caden Chung, Xander King

Engineering Team Xinyun Liu, Spencer Lin, Miru Jun, Rylan Daniels

Design Team Sean Jin

Research Team Patrick Waechter, Sultan Sharrief

Concept Art Mo Chuang

In Association with Huntington-USC Institute on California & the West, Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, Metro Art, Union Station, 8th Wall, Arcturus Studio, Metastage

Special Thanks Masaki Fujihata, Ewan Johnson (Arcturus Studio), Ian Curtis (8th Wall), Evan Carlson (8th Wall), Li Wei Yang (The Huntington), Linda Bentz (Chinese Historical Society of Southern California), Eugene Moy (Chinese Historical Society of Southern California)