VJayBombs Turns Los Angeles Freeways Into a Political Screen
On a dark stretch above the 101 freeway, three filmmakers in hoodies and work pants unloaded projectors, lenses, a laptop and battery packs, then aimed an unauthorized animation at the wall of the L.A. Downtown Medical Center. The brief work, which looped for more than 30 minutes, turned Donald Trump’s State of the Union into a blunt piece of political satire, with slogans such as “Immigrant Bad!” and “Forget the Files” flashing across the surface.
The artists behind the projection are Ken, Bev and Cat, pseudonyms used by the members of VJayBombs, a guerrilla collective that has become one of Los Angeles’s more visible experiments in projection art. The group formed in Koreatown, where it first tested visuals on the side of its apartment building during house parties. What began as a private, almost improvised practice soon expanded into public interventions on residential streets and freeway-facing walls.
VJayBombs says the work is designed to operate in two different ways. In person, the projections are fleeting and slightly illicit, visible only to drivers and pedestrians who happen to catch them in the moment. Online, they can travel far beyond the site itself. That dual life has helped the collective build nearly 300,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
The group’s first political projection came in June 2024, after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate against Trump, when it urged Biden to step down. A month later, VJayBombs went viral with a projection referencing “Hawk Tuah” and showing the GOP bending a knee to Trump on a downtown Los Angeles building overlooking the 110 freeway. In January, an anti-ICE projection was reposted by Don Lemon and drew millions of views, with CNN also reaching out. Its most popular video so far arrived in February: “the Redacted Bowl,” a Super Bowl spoof that cast Trump, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates and others as football players whose stats were tied to references in the Epstein files.
For VJayBombs, the appeal seems to lie in that tension between ephemerality and circulation. The work is made for the passerby who catches it once, and for the feed that keeps it alive afterward.
