Doors opened at 8pm. The room was in Downtown LA, the night came around every other month, and the program was experimental animation and video art, cut into fifteen-minute blocks with a break after each one so the crowd could talk. That was Ghosting.tv: a live screening series that ran in Los Angeles from 2013 to about 2018, founded by Ricky Jonsson Jr, its curator, and Kristel Brinshot, its creative producer. Then the pages stopped changing, the domain lapsed, and the series became the first ghost this site ever had.
This is its story as the record keeps it. We are not the founders, we did not run the series, and we were not in the room. What follows comes from the original site’s own pages, as the Wayback Machine captured them on September 25, 2020. Where those pages go quiet, so does this one.
A house on a hill in East LA
It started as house screenings on a hill in East LA. The record says little more about those first nights than that, and we will not furnish the rooms for it. What the record does show is the direction of travel: out of the house and into Downtown LA, into a recurring night held every other month.
In its first two years, by the founders’ own count, it went “from 20 buddies to 400 new friends.” That figure is theirs, written by the people who did the counting, and we have no other source to set against it. Their tagline read ”…Because everyone needs a little fantasy.” The founders’ names and titles are on the archived info page.
What the founders said they were making
The original site described itself in two sentences:
…a hangout for experimental animators, video artists, and everyone else looking to interact with art and tech in unconventional ways.
We provide an exhibiting platform for participating community artists to do their thing IRL as well as online.
Both halves of the second sentence did work. IRL meant a room, a projector and a crowd. Online meant the site itself, which listed each showcase, credited the artists by name and kept a running roster of the people who had shown. The mission and the listings are on the archived main page.
The word to hold on to is “hangout.” The founders did not call it a festival or a cinema. They called it a place to be, with the work at the center and the audience expected to talk back.
Doors at 8pm: what a night looked like
A straight screening of short films runs as one reel. Pieces by strangers butt up against each other, and a viewer leaves remembering two or three works without much sense of who made the rest. Ghosting.tv cut the night by artist instead. Each block ran fifteen minutes and belonged to one maker: long enough for several short pieces or one longer work, short enough that the room was still paying attention when the next block began.
The breaks between blocks turned the audience back into a crowd. LA Game Space provided games. Brun’s Creole Soul Food Kitchen provided food. On some nights a musician played a live score, and on others there were installations to walk around between blocks.
Read together, the listings describe something closer to a party with a program than a screening with refreshments. That reading is ours, not a phrase the founders used.
JAM nights and the Experimental Half Hour
On an ordinary night the curator chose who showed. On a GHOSTING.TV JAM, the program opened to submissions from the audience and the wider community, and the people who came could bring work of their own. It was the most literal version of “an exhibiting platform for participating community artists.” The archive names two of these nights, JAM #2 and JAM #3.
The Experimental Half Hour was a segment that came back more than once. We know its name and that it recurred; we do not have a reliable account of what went into it, and we will not guess. It also turns up on the site’s own roster of past artists, listed among the animators and collectives. The series counted one of its own formats among the things it had shown.
The names on the bills
The listings name a handful of specific editions: GHOSTING VOL. 15, a March 7 night, and the two JAMs. The volume number implies earlier editions; the archive we cite does not show them.
Across those listings, the artists named are Titouan Bordeau, Will Rahilly, Malcolm Sutherland, Michael Frei, Natalia Stuyk, Joseph Bennett, Alexandre Louvenaz, Jordan Speer, Shen Jie, Daniel Swan, Sean Buckelew and Charles Huettner. Benedek is credited with a live score, and Theoklitos Trian, kyttenjanae and Jeanette Bonds with installations.
We have not paired these names with particular nights, to avoid putting anyone on the wrong bill; the snapshot shows who was listed when. None of them appears on the separate past-artists roster, which is one reason that roster reads as a partial record. Being named here records a listing on the original site, and nothing more.
The permanent room that stayed a plan
At one point the founders wrote publicly about turning Ghosting.tv into a permanent physical space. We found no evidence in the archived record that it opened before the pages went dark.
That is not proof it never happened in some form. It means the record we can cite does not show it, and we will not write it as fact in either direction.
The pages stop changing
Sometime around 2018 the series stops appearing in the record. The snapshots were captured on September 25, 2020, so the old pages were still being served then, listing nights that had already happened, an archive of themselves. After that the domain lapsed.
We do not know when the last night took place, how many editions there were in all, or why it ended. We have not guessed.
How these pages were put together
Three snapshots from the Wayback Machine, all from September 25, 2020, and nothing else: the main page for the mission and the listings, the info page for the founders and their roles, and the past-artists page for the roster. Every factual claim in Origins traces back to one of them. When we draw an inference, such as reading an edition number, the text says the inference is ours.
Some things that circulate about the original series we could not confirm, press coverage and ties to particular venues or institutions among them. None of it appears here. A thinner record that holds up is more use than a fuller one that does not. The Wayback Machine, run by the Internet Archive, is the reason any of this can be told at all.
Why the story is kept here
The address was later taken up by new, independent stewards with no connection to the founders or to any artist named on these pages. Ghosting.tv is now a site about ghosts on screen: in films and series and the cases behind them, in footage and photographs examined frame by frame, and in the houses themselves.
The line from one to the other is the honest reason this story stays. The original series put moving images in front of a room and asked people to look closely. This site looks closely at what appears on screens. And the series now exists only as pictures of pages that are no longer there, which is as plain a ghost on screen as we have. Who publishes the site is on the about page.
If you were there
If you showed work, ran a block, stood in the crowd or kept a flyer, and something here is wrong or missing, the submissions page is where to tell us. A correction we can source goes in and gets cited like the snapshots above. A memory we cannot source is still welcome; it tells us where to look next.
The archive names JAM #2 and JAM #3. Nobody has told us yet about the first.