The Alluvials is a seven-chapter video work and video game that explores the politics of drought and water scarcity in a near-future version of Los Angeles.
The story is told through numerous more-than-human perspectives, including the Los Angeles River, wildfire, a 400-year-old sycamore called El Aliso, and the ghost of the city’s celebrity mountain lion, P-22.
Merging history, future, and fiction, The Alluvials focuses on the slippery interplay between engineered ecology, disaster capitalism, and nonhuman systems that shape Los Angeles. The story is told across media, including custom-built game environments, “modded” versions of the fictional city of Los Santos from Grand Theft Auto V, 3D scans of LA the artist captured by drone, AI “hallucinations” merging historical images of the River with future development proposals, and visualizations of GIS datasets/pollution data of the LA River.
Acknowledging Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the Tongva People of the Greater Los Angeles Basin, the project underscores that nature is an intelligent system, a technology in its own right.
Artist Bio
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist and writer based in Los Angeles. Working with game engines and speculative fiction strategies, their work explores interconnections of architecture, ecology, magic, and nonhuman and machine intelligence.
In 2021, they founded New Mystics, a digital platform merging magic and technology. In 2022, they organized New Worlds, an experimental event series expanding on emergent worlding practices, held at Somerset House Studios in London. They have presented their work internationally, with recent exhibitions at Ars Electronica with transmediale, Arcade Seoul, the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles, Gray Area in San Francisco, Basement Roma in Rome, Singapore Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth, Texas, Fiber Festival in the Netherlands, and Serpentine in London.
Their writing appears often in publications including ArtReview, Flash Art, Frieze, e-flux Architecture, and the Harvard Design Magazine. They are currently faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles and an Associate Lecturer in MA Narrative Environments at University of the Arts London. In 2023, they are a Supercollider SciArt Ambassador in Los Angeles, a resident of Somerset House Studios in London, and a resident at transmediale in Berlin. Bucknell studied Anthropology at the University of Chicago and Critical Practice at the Royal College of Art in London.
