Montage
Bricolage
Assemblage
(Film Essay)
The Pioneers operates as a discursive network rather than a platform, unfolding across film, publishing, and exhibition on and offline. Through Agile Cinema®, a theory of media articulated via film narrative and Internet art, and Vera Maurina Press, a text–image poetry formation attentive to the conditions of inscription, the project mobilizes montage, collage, décollage, assemblage, and bricolage as structural operations. Meaning emerges not as message but as effect, produced through adjacency, recursion, metaleptic embedding, and temporal overlap, resisting closure, authorship, and fixed interpretation.
(Hyperlink Film)
Vera Maurina PressAgile Cinema®

Bricolage: Narrative Fieldwork

(Based on a True Story)

Moving fluidly between fiction and nonfiction, scripted and unscripted forms, the practice treats each project as an evolving composition shaped by lived experience, imagination, research, and the unpredictable moments that emerge through encounter. Rooted in painting, it extends into participatory film as an expanded field of image-making, where authorship meets collaboration and images emerge through archives, environments, and cultural memory. The resulting work becomes a layered composition shaped by chance and the exchange between artist, subject, and viewer.

Saul Appelbaum
Director
‍
Saul Appelbaum is an artist, media director, writer, independent curator, producer, and digital strategist in the arts and culture sector. His practice combines storytelling, design, architectonic thought, and media to amplify cultural narratives and experiment with new infrastructures for collaboration. He is committed to the ability of participatory media and art to reshape how audiences experience culture across disciplines, fostering engagement that is both intellectual and emotional.

Appelbaum is the Founding Director of The Pioneers, a media production company and “co-op of gifted and generous minds” that champions Agile Cinema®, an agile, hybrid mode of media creation spanning fiction, non-fiction, scripted, and unscripted formats. Through The Pioneers he has overseen projects such as on the Curator platform for The Broad Museum, Serpentine Galleries, Marian Goodman Gallery, and Petzel Gallery, works reflecting his commitment to experimentation and multichannel cultural storytelling.

His collaborations include Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, InStyle, L’Officiel, Grazia, Numéro, Critical Inquiry, Hirmer Verlag, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of the African Diaspora, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Kunstmuseum Bern, The Columbus Museum of Art, The Singapore Art Museum, Atlanta Art Fair, TRANSFER Gallery, New Museum, The Jewish Federation, Perry Ellis, ASICS, Kids of Immigrants, The Visionaries Agency, TCAmgmt, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, FGP Atelier, Rocco Castoro’s SCNR, and Nato Thompson’s The Alternative Art School.

He has also worked with artists and cultural figures including Tony Cragg, Ann Hamilton, Pope.L, Mick Jenkins, Snoop Dogg, Adam McKay’s Yellow Dot Studios, Heidi Klum, Diego Boneta, Natalia Reyes, and Zión Moreno.

Appelbaum holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Master of Architecture from Cornell University, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Chicago. He is based in Los Angeles and travels globally for work.
Elodie Goldberg Jacquemain
Assistant Director

Goldberg Jacquemain is a Brussels born, Los Angeles-based designer, coder, and researcher whose practice weaves together open-source software, critical theory, and the poetics of translation. Trained in design numérique, Goldberg Jacquemain's work inhabits the space where code and language meet, interrogating how design is not only a technical or aesthetic discipline, but a linguistic and political act.

At the heart of Goldberg Jacquemain's research is translation in its broadest sense: not just the movement between languages, but the transformation of ideas and struggles rooted in decolonial, queer, and anti-racist contexts. She asks what it means to translate newly theorized concepts, often born in Anglo-Saxon academic traditions, into a French or Francophone semantic and political imaginary, and whether translation can itself be a site of generative resistance.

Her creative output manifests as digital experiences that are as legible as they are useful: tools, websites, and interactive interfaces that expose their own architecture, making visible the very scaffolding that shapes how we read, think, and act. In doing so, Goldberg Jacquemain invites her audiences into a conversation, not just with her work, but with the systems, linguistic, technological, social, that underpin it.

Committed to openness, Goldberg Jacquemain shares much of her process through GitLab and other open-source platforms. Her projects are simultaneously archives, experiments, and provocations: each one seeks to cultivate not passive users, but collaborators in the ongoing task of meaning-making.

Goldberg Jacquemain's design practice is deeply situated in questions of power, access, and identity, particularly as they emerge in marginalized or emerging semantic spaces. By foregrounding translation and legibility, she grounds her work in both theory and praxis: designing not just for the present, but toward possible futures where language, code, and politics are intertwined and mutable.
(Character Outlines)

Characters

Montage
Bricolage
Assemblage
(Film Essay)
The Pioneers operates as a discursive network rather than a platform, unfolding across film, publishing, and exhibition on and offline. Through Agile Cinema®, a theory of media articulated via film narrative and Internet art, and Vera Maurina Press, a text–image poetry formation attentive to the conditions of inscription, the project mobilizes montage, collage, décollage, assemblage, and bricolage as structural operations. Meaning emerges not as message but as effect, produced through adjacency, recursion, metaleptic embedding, and temporal overlap, resisting closure, authorship, and fixed interpretation.
(Hyperlink Film)
Vera Maurina Press
Agile Cinema®
(Email)
media@thepioneers.la
(Studio)
THE PIONEERS
244 W. Florence Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90003