Moving from NYC to LA can be disorienting. It feels simultaneously so small and so big. Spur of the moment interactions can become subsumed by the car. The question posed by Freewaves' mission statement, “Can we learn together in public?” seemed almost a challenge as I entered my second year of living in the city. It turns out that Freewaves is one of the special organizations in Los Angeles that is committed to cultivating community, something that becomes abundantly clear by talking to Anne Bray, reading about the organization’s projects, and engaging with testimonials from artists and audiences that have participated in their work.

As a transplant, space and place can feel all the more important - the connections between which are explored through many of Freewaves' projects. When the organization first began in 1989, Bray was working out of the “arts district" in downtown Los Angeles. This was well before it began gentrifying. At the time, it was a space where artists could actually afford to work and live (10 cents a square foot). Although throughout much of LA there was a lack of interaction between people of different ethnicities and economic classes, downtown did provide a central location for collaborative interactions between artists from different neighborhoods and backgrounds. Freewaves then moved through other neighborhoods in the ensuing years, including Echo Park, Little Tokyo, and Hollywood. Now, the organization now has no physical home base. The importance of flexibility and the open-ended nature of this lack of a spot to call their own means that they can be even more reactive, moving about the city, meeting people and artists where they are – whether it be in physical space or in cyberspace.

Los Angeles is a place that we often see documented on the “big” screen, some sort of imagined reality more than a true place to live, work, breathe, and connect. Hollywood can mean a million things to a million people, but it also means distortion of reality, something that Bray was well aware of when she began her work with Freewaves. This dichotomy of reality versus fantasy continues to inform many of the projects that Freewaves curates and produces to this day as they have used some of the same media that Hollywood uses to combat their fantastical depiction of the world.

Freewaves' projects are creative with “bending” space and time through medium, location, and network building.

Freewaves does not have a headquarters. They instead activate spaces around LA County, particularly public spaces, with their projects (as well as nationally and internationally) including inside of buses, street storefronts, and parks. They also use digital space in a multitude of ways: asking the public to participate with their projects online, sharing content via social media, and through extensive online video archives. As they are not grounded in one particular community, they have the ability to build networks throughout Los Angeles, and beyond.

The boundaries of how we view the world have expanded as technology has shifted. Even as much of the world became dominated by digital communications during the COVID-19 pandemic, Freewaves was already adept at changing technologies. From VHS to Instagram, Freewaves has figured out how to engage with their audiences throughout the decades -- expanding and contracting the boundaries of physical space and offering up new versions of reality -- both real and imagined.

That’s what I admire about Freewaves – pushing boundaries of the external world, while building community and bridges between those that are willing to take a chance, absorb, listen, accept, delve into difficult and real topics and get down to the bottom of what it means to be a human in the world at the present moment - whether its 1992, or 2022.