Using digital technology, Professor of Art Daniel Jauregui is giving new life to an old publication.
Jauregui’s new online art project Disguised Ruins was inspired by the undercover publication The Address Book, which served as a guide of safe locations for the Los Angeles gay community in the 1960s.
Jauregui discovered the book while researching the history of Los Angeles and wanted to do more with this new historical find.
Through a grant he received from Whittier’s Digital Liberal Arts program, Jauregui was able to create various digital maps, pinpointing every location included in the book with details of each location. Jauregui was featured on KCET’s talking about the project when he first began working on it.
“I wanted to visualize the rise and fall of these spaces [and] I wanted to see it on a map,” said Jauregui in the article. “I started inputting every single address one by one into the software.”
Now complete, the interactive digital maps can be found online renewing a piece of history previously not recorded on a technological platform.
