Connecting histories

At the Pippin Recreation Center in Middle Earth Housing, a large multi-screen has become more than a place for announcements. This year, it is carrying a new kind of campus history, one shaped by archival research and personal connection.

The screens do not simply announce events or share reminders. They flicker with fragments of memories, campus pathways, archival footage and personal objects in the form of experimental films made by students in Art 130A: Projects in New Technology. Together, the works form "Connecting Histories," a new series of public video artworks created during spring quarter 2026 that asks students to consider a deceptively simple question: How does your story connect to the larger history of UC Irvine?

Presented June 9 at a public event and now installed for the coming year, the project brings together research, personal reflection and new media practice in a highly visible campus setting. For the student artists, it also offered a rare opportunity to make work that moves beyond the classroom and into the everyday life of the university.

Campus memory

The project was led by Department of Art instructor Zebulon Zang and made possible through the continued support of Lou Gill, senior director of undergraduate housing and residential life at UC Irvine Student Housing. It is the latest chapter in a nearly decade-long partnership between UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts and Student Housing, one that began with a question about an empty wall and has grown into a recurring model for student-centered public art.

The collaboration began in 2016, when Gill approached the school with an idea for bringing student artwork into residential spaces. Faculty Emerita Mara Lonner and Jesse Colin Jackson, associate dean of research and innovation for UCI Arts, helped imagine how a public art project could become not only an installation, but a learning experience. The first project resulted in a mural in Mesa Court. Jackson later led a sculptural project. In recent years, Zang has carried the partnership forward through screen-based works in Middle Earth.

For Jackson, the project's value lies in the way it asks students to take their relationship to campus seriously. Many UC Irvine students spend formative time in first-year residential communities, creating an immediate attachment to these sites. Through the course, students are asked to do archival research, identify a story from campus history and translate that research into a chosen medium. In previous years that medium has included painting and sculpture. This year, it was video.

"Students are always meant to do a deep dive into a story about campus," Jackson says, "and then translate that story into the medium that we choose."

For Zang, the project was built around a prompt that asked students to connect a piece of UC Irvine's institutional history with something personal. Students researched archival materials, selected an object connected to their own experiences, then developed short experimental films that bridged the two. Some works took the form of found-footage documentaries. Others leaned into personal narrative, screen recordings, campus documentation or poetic montage.

"The prompt for the entire thing is, you have to find a creative and interesting way to connect this piece of history to this piece of yourself," Zang says. "It's about students finding a way in which they can insert themselves, their own ideas, identity, whatever, within the broader history of UC Irvine."

Zang intentionally left room for students to shape their own paths through the assignment. Each project, he says, became different because there were no strict rules dictating how students had to move from research to final artwork. That open-endedness was not always comfortable, but it was central to the course.

Students began with smaller exercises that introduced different approaches to video, including documentary, found-footage documentary and what Zang calls desktop documentaries, in which artists record the screen as a way of reflecting on a virtual experience of the world. They also studied documentary, experimental and public artworks, while continually returning to the question of what it means to make art for a public site rather than for the studio.

"How does it change when something has a specific place that it's going to go to, it's going to have a specific audience, and how do you then make it work for that audience?" Zang says. "Here, the context is first-year student residents who are coming to UC Irvine for the first time."

For Zang, that context mattered. The students were not making a promotional video about the university. They were making public artworks for a site where new students are beginning to form their own sense of place. The project invited the artists to think about what they would want their peers to know, what they wish they had known themselves and how their own experiences could become part of a broader campus story.

The open-ended nature of the assignment was intentional. Zang encouraged students to move away from what they thought a public-facing artwork "should" be and toward what they actually cared about. That shift was not always immediate. At first, he says, some students worried their ideas were too small, too strange or too personal. But those moments often became the most meaningful entry points.

"For me, the biggest thing is having students that fundamentally feel like something is too silly or too ridiculous or doesn't make sense, and being able to say, 'No, that actually is the best part,'" Zang says. "The things that they're excited about are the things that other people will be excited about too. Their own interests, desires and wants actually can produce something really relevant to a lot of people."

That idea shaped the range of works now on view. Across the screens, the films explore student life, memory, place, belonging, activism, architecture and identity. They are rooted in UCI history, but they do not treat history as something fixed or distant. Instead, they show history as something built through everyday experience: walking to class, joining a club, finding community, remembering home or looking differently at a building passed a hundred times before.

Personal connections

For Ben Zhang, an art and informatics double major, the project became a way to explore the emotional impact of UC Irvine's architecture. Zhang created a found-footage documentary inspired by William Pereira, the architect and planner associated with UC Irvine's original campus design. Combining vintage footage of UC Irvine with imagery related to space, futurism and California modernism, Zhang created an abstract film that reflects on the feeling of the built environment.

"I was interested in the architecture he made, mainly related to Brutalism and California futurism," Zhang says. "I made an abstract film that explores the emotion, the feeling that this building gives to me personally, and tried to replicate that on the screen."

His process included gathering material from online archives, including Calisphere and internet archives, then shaping the work through multiple drafts, critiques and revisions. The resulting film becomes less a conventional documentary than a meditation on how architecture can carry aspiration, memory and mood.

"I decided to go on a route that's more reflective and emotional," Zhang says. "It's a lot of looking into this topic, and also into myself, how I feel about the topic. It's more like an exploration of my feeling with this campus."

For graduating art major Adanariz Baños Benitez, the project began with archival research into one of UC Irvine's early art shows. From there, she connected the idea of participating in an art exhibition to memories of childhood and home. Her film includes footage of her younger brother standing in for her younger self and a small ceramic piñata ornament that became a recurring personal symbol.

The object, she says, reminded her of birthdays, family gatherings and the feeling of home. In the film, the ornament appears along familiar campus routes, marking the places she walks in daily life.

"It's a little piñata made out of ceramic," Vanos Benitez says. "It's just something personal that makes me feel connected to home, because growing up, birthdays were always like, you tend to stay with the family."

The piñata becomes both a personal object and a marker of presence. By placing it along paths she takes every day, Vanos Benitez created a visual trace of her life at UC Irvine.

"It's to follow my trace, where I walk by," she says. "Most of the footage is on the way to my place here, so it's literally where I would walk around. I've been here. I've been here. I see this plant every day."

Her hope is that viewers will reflect on what brought them to UC Irvine and what helped them persist. For her, that force was family. The film becomes both a personal memory and a small offering to future students, a footprint left behind in a place she helped inhabit.

"I hope they think back on what brought them here, what made them work so hard to be here," Vanos Benitez says. "For me, it was family. I hope everybody gets that, and also just to leave a little footprint around campus, even if it's the tiniest little thing."

For Alina Yuan, an art and psychological science major in her final quarter at UC Irvine, the project became a way to reflect on Asian American community, cultural continuity and her own place within campus life. Her film begins with archival materials from Rice Paper, a newspaper that helped East Asian American students find community before the establishment of UC Irvine's Asian American Studies major in 1997. From there, Yuan connects that history to contemporary student organizations, Chinese orchestra and her own experiences of music, food and belonging.

"I've had some time to reflect back on what my contribution to UC Irvine is, and also how UC Irvine has impacted me," Yuan says. "I found that through Chinese orchestra and the East Asian American community, and then how it connects to the broader history of Asian American studies on campus."

Her visuals move from archival objects to personal photographs: receiving her first erhu, performing with Chinese orchestra and gathering with others around shared cultural experiences. In doing so, the film traces a line between past student activism and present-day forms of community building.

"Before the Asian American Studies major was founded, people created this community through the newspaper, and they were trying to petition for that major," Yuan says. "I thought that was interesting, because what then comes next? Where then is that community? I found it through clubs."

For Yuan, the story of Rice Paper is not only a historical artifact. It is part of an ongoing effort by students to create spaces where culture, identity and belonging can be shared.

"This whole time people have been trying to find community through whatever means they can," Yuan says. "Being part of Chinese music culture has been really meaningful, because I'm contributing to that."

These individual works speak to the broader purpose of the project. "Connecting Histories" is not a singular story of UC Irvine. It is a collection of perspectives that reveals how campus history is continually being interpreted, questioned and extended by the students who live within it.

That sense of discovery was evident at the opening event, where visitors watched the videos cycle across the screens while students, faculty, staff and family members gathered nearby. Some viewers recognized familiar campus traditions. Others encountered histories they had never known. As one attendee observed, UC Irvine is so large and layered that no one can ever fully see all of it. There is always another story, another corner, another memory coming into view.

Public practice

For Gill, that is part of what makes the partnership meaningful. Student Housing is often seen as separate from the academic life of the university, yet residence halls are where many students first learn what it means to belong to a community. By collaborating with UCI Arts, Housing becomes not just a backdrop for student life, but a site for inquiry, creativity and public engagement.

The idea, Gill says, began with Mesa Court Towers and a large blank wall.

"I was looking at this wall, and I thought, I wonder who we could get to paint something on this wall? Art students, right?" Gill says. "Mara says, 'I have a drawing class, and we could do a mural type thing, but we could create it so that the students get the experience of being hired to do a public work of art.'"

That meant students had to research, speak with constituents, develop ideas and present them for consideration, mirroring a process similar to what they might encounter in a city or civic public art commission. For Gill, the practical experience was as important as the finished work.

"Those students could use that as practical experience when they graduate and say, I did a public work of art," Gill says. "It was a real leap of faith to connect with somebody and have students paint a wall, so it took some deep breaths, but she did a fantastic job."

The collaboration has since expanded across multiple projects, including a 3D-printed sculpture led by Jackson and two years of video projects with Zang. Gill sees the ongoing partnership as a bridge between residential life and academics, one that benefits both the students who make the work and the students who live with it.

"I think it's a wonderful collaboration between UCI Arts and Housing and Residential Life, where we're trying to teach our students about community, and then tying with academics," Gill says. "It all ties together."

It also gives student artists a professional experience that mirrors the realities of public art. They must consider audience, site, context, research, presentation and permanence. They must think about how a work changes when it is made not for the studio, but for a public space filled with people who may encounter it in passing.

For Zang, that question is central. In Middle Earth, the audience includes first-year students arriving at UC Irvine, many of whom are just beginning to form their own memories of campus. The videos now waiting for them in Pippin Recreation Center offer something more layered than an introduction. They offer a record of other students asking what they wish they had known, what they want to remember and how they hope to be part of the university's ongoing story.

The installation will remain on view throughout the next year, and plans are already forming for a future project that may explore projection mapping and celebrate the larger arc of the partnership. As the collaboration approaches its 10-year milestone, its impact is visible not only in the murals, sculptures and videos left behind, but in the students who have learned to see themselves as part of something larger.

At its heart, "Connecting Histories" reminds viewers that a university's identity is not held only in official archives, buildings or timelines. It is also carried in personal objects, daily walks, student newspapers, cultural performances, family memories and the quiet realization that one's own story belongs here too.