Ansel, a young city dweller, drifts through a city that feels familiar and unreal, its neon glow pulsing like a heartbeat he can’t quite sync with. The streets of this Caribbean-inspired metropolis—somewhere between San Juan and Miami—are alive with strange figures: a cat girl trading “miracle pills” for cryptic exchanges, a boisterous tourist offering empty warmth, fleeting faces that vanish as quickly as they appear. Each encounter pulls Ansel deeper into the city’s rhythms and further from himself. As the night unfolds, reality bends, conversations loop and his own reflection becomes something distant and distorted. Fan Cams & Laurels is a fever dream of alienation, indulgence, and the quiet ache of being untethered in a world that never stops moving.
Director statement
Fan Cams & Laurels emerged from a desire to capture the strange dissonance of feeling visible yet unseen—haunted by the brightness of a world moving too fast to hold you. The video began with a question: What does it mean to be disoriented not by loss, but by excess—of imagery, of connection, of simulation?
Ansel’s journey reflects a deeper personal and cultural anxiety I often feel navigating cities shaped by spectacle and alienation. Drawing from Caribbean textures, nightlife ecstasy, and the aesthetics of internet subcultures, I wanted to explore how urban space, identity, and desire blur under the glow of screens and synthetic intimacy. The characters Ansel encounters are both archetypes and avatars—echoes of personas we adopt or encounter in digital life.
The project uses CGI and AI-generated elements not as novelties, but as languages of contemporary alienation—tools that, like Ansel’s city, mirror and distort our perception. I’m interested in the ways these technologies amplify a kind of surreal banality: a city too vivid to feel real, too fast to feel human.
Fan Cams & Laurels is not a story with a resolution. It’s a loop, a feeling, a late-night walk with no destination—where every flicker of recognition is undercut by its own strangeness. It’s about the quiet panic of being awake in a world that seems to be dreaming.
Bio
Misael José Oquendo is a Los Angeles-based video artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores the emotional and cultural implications of technology in contemporary life. Rooted in a fascination with the absurd and the existential, Misael employs tools like video game engines, AI-generated imagery, and CGI to create surreal, fragmented narratives that confront themes of media saturation, fear, and the erosion of innocence. Their work seeks to reveal the quiet intrusions of digital culture on our collective psyche, blending humor, introspection, and poetic dissonance.
A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA) and CalArts (MA in Aesthetics & Politics), Misael’s projects frequently engage with parafictional storytelling, addressing sociopolitical themes with humor and poetic absurdity. Their work has been exhibited in galleries and screening programs that celebrate experimental and interdisciplinary approaches to video art.
Special Thanks to SUICIDE MOI (Who’s song Jennifer 7 is featured in the film)
Pebbles Underground is focused on showcasing and promoting experimental, avant-garde, underground, and no-to-low budget projects by artist-humans from all over the world. Absurd, uncanny, witty, humorous, slow-video – all are welcomed, and loved.
Pebbles Underground is an independent project not funded by any government or corporation, and we intend to keep it that way. Main source of funding is personal donations from humans organizing the project, who are artists themselves, and the main drive of the project is formed by the energy and involvement of the organizers, and the public.
