Chronicles

A snapshot of fire-ravaged Altadena is laid out before me, hovering like a diorama. My eyes zero in on a red door, its frame one of the few surviving remnants of a home. I pull it closer to me, and in moments I see a fraction of the house as it once was — now I’m in a cozy kitchen with blurred but welcoming pictures in the background and a grandfather celebrating a birthday. A voice-over tells me that it was Alexander, a grandfather, who painted the door red.

It’s as if a memory has sprung to life and exists solely in the ether in front of me. But in seconds it’s gone, and I see only rubble — scattered bricks and tiles, tree branches and wooden boards.

I shed a tear, but it’s obscured by the virtual reality headset I’m wearing. I am experiencing a work-in-progress segment of the multimedia documentary “Out of the Ashes,” which will be previewed Friday evening at a Music Center event demonstrating how emerging technologies can help people process collective experiences such as the L.A. fires.

Musician David Low and his family in virtual reality film “Out of the Ashes,” which shows the destruction — and reconstruction — of the Palisades and Eaton fires.

(The Mercantile Agency)

Filming is continuing on the project, which began just days after the flames ignited. Filmmaker, academic and virtual reality pioneer Nonny de la Peña secured media access to the burn zones for her and a small team via her role as the program director of narrative and emerging media at Arizona State University, which she operates out of offices in downtown Los Angeles. “I knew that this was going to be transitory type of situation, that it was going to change quickly,” says De la Peña, co-director on the film with Rory Mitchell. “I’ve covered enough disaster stories to know how huge this was.”

De la Peña has long been at the forefront of merging immersive technologies and journalism. Her 2012 project “Hunger in Los Angeles,” for instance, was the first VR documentary to screen at Sundance. “I think this technology is unique,” De la Peña says. “I’ve seen a lot of helicopter footage, but when you’re right there in it, it’s a different perspective as to what happened.” For this documentary, she partnered with Mitchell, an independent filmmaker, whose augmented-reality tabletop experience “The Tent” premiered at SXSW last year.

In my preview of “Out of the Ashes,” one segment whisks me to the coastline. If I angle my head down, I see the glistening lights of the Santa Monica Pier. Look up ever so slightly, however, and the sky is charred red and black. I hear a cello, and soon musician David Low stands before me, recounting the day the flames began and the rush to remove his young son from school to help rescue a smattering of heirlooms.

The family saved a few plushies and a couple prized musical instruments, but in the urgency to leave, not much else. He sits at a kitchen table, reconstructed in VR from family photos, but the rest of the home has vanished. As I see glimpses of Low’s home before and after the fires, I again feel as if I’m standing in a liminal space, a remembrance but also a reminder. Low exists only as a 3D figure before me, but I wish I could reach out my hand.

The instinct to extend a hand feels natural in virtual reality, as it’s visceral and creates a sense of presence. And it also seems a part of the mission for “Out of the Ashes,” a work as much about the effects of the fires as it is a vessel for collective grief and empathy. “Sometimes, you just need someone to say, ‘Hey, I’m sorry that happened to you.’ Sometimes you just need someone to hug you,” says De la Peña. “When you lose that much, it’s sometimes hard to fathom.”

Landscape architect Esther Margulies discusses which trees did and didn’t burn in the Palisades and Eaton fires in the virtual reality film “Out of the Ashes.”

(The Mercantile Agency)

Adds Mitchell, “We understand the numbers and acreage,” he says before rattling off a host of fire statistics. “But it’s only through story that we can begin to wrap our hearts and brains the scale of the emotional devastation, and the psychic pain that the city has gone through. Maybe this can provide a way into this collective pain and a way to talk about it.”

Another aspect of “Out of the Ashes” is augmented reality, which will also be shown at the Music Center event. The tech is used to capture short snapshots of scenes from Altadena and the Palisades.

Retired professor Ted Porter, for instance, recalls buying a loaf of his late wife’s favorite bread when the winds first started, thinking he may need something to nibble on if the power went out. Melissa Rivers talks of grabbing photos of her late father, and running for her mother’s Emmy, recalling how meaningful the award was to Joan. “I don’t know why I grabbed what I grabbed,” Rivers says. “It’s just what I did.” They’re short scenes in which a small item floats before us, and they’re reflective of life’s unpredictability, but also how, in times of stress, our minds race to the symbols that truly matter to us.

“Part of what this process is, is trying to provide a space for the folks directly affected by it, who are trying to rebuild their lives and explain to their children what happened,” Mitchell says. “Everyone is going to process at difference speeds and in different ways, but to do that collectively and communally is the hope with this.”

The Friday event, officially dubbed the Music Center’s Innovation Social: Reflections on Loss, Hope and Renewal, will also include a live musical performance by survivors of the Eaton fire. Guests will additionally have the ability to learn how to use 3D scanning tools via their smartphones to begin to create their own short, memory-filled clips. Acorns will also be given away as representations of resilience, and audio interviews of those who experienced the fires will be collected into a sound collage.

De la Peña and Mitchell say they have more work to do on the film, which, when completed, can be brought to festivals or become its own touring exhibition. “We want people to know what we’ve gone through,” Mitchell says.

And what we continue to experience. One virtual reality segment centers on landscape architect Esther Margulies discussing the effects of climate change and the importance of planting California live oaks — “ember catchers,” says Mitchell — rather than palm trees. In the headset, we see Mitchell standing amid fire-burned trees, a stark, dreadful landscape. This contrasts soon, however, with the surviving oaks, shown standing grandly among empty, otherwise deserted streets. Amid much despair, they’re framed as one small symbol of hope.

Maduro is out, Delcy Rodríguez is in, and yet Venezuela feels no more democratic than it did three days ago, when the former president was still boasting about air defenses and bunker walls.

The change itself was not entirely unexpected. In recent months, reporting had increasingly pointed to Rodríguez as the most viable figure to ensure continuity after Maduro, alongside speculation about negotiations involving her and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, including meetings in Doha facilitated by the Qatari government, that would have secured Maduro a negotiated exit and a prolonged, carefully managed transition.

In the end, that golden exile proved unnecessary. What followed was not a rupture, but an acceleration: the same transition logic, executed without the need for Maduro’s consent—or his presence. Still, calling this a “transition” rather than a decapitation feels increasingly strained when several of the figures flanking Rodríguez as she signaled her willingness to step in, should the Supreme Court so demand, carry the same international bounties Maduro once did, and in some cases appear in the very same indictments, now sharing docket space with far more famous recent arrivals.

If this were a democratic transition, power would be moving outward, toward institutions, parties, and voters. We would have seen the unconditional release of political prisoners. The winners of the July 28 election would not be calling for international protests demanding that their victory be respected. Instead, power has moved sideways and downward. The most visible winners of the post-Maduro moment are not opposition leaders, but many of Maduro’s former allies.

Even more telling is that while the armed forces appear to have retreated to their barracks, colectivos have rapidly expanded their role in Caracas from tolerated enforcers to de facto authorities. They patrol neighborhoods, gather intelligence, intimidate opponents, and perform basic law-enforcement functions with a confidence that suggests not stabilization, but delegation. Where, exactly, the United States is exerting the control President Trump claims to hold over Venezuela’s transition remains unclear, and, for now, largely the stuff of rumor.

Rodríguez may offer a fresher, more professional face at the head of the regime, but the internal knife-fighting, the power jockeying, and the coercive architecture remain firmly in place

This is not state collapse. It is state outsourcing. The arrested transition has reproduced Venezuela’s familiar condition of managed chaos, governed by actors who require neither legal mandates nor democratic legitimacy, only loyalty and force. For ordinary Venezuelans, the result is a familiar but sharpened experience of power: surveillance that feels more granular, coercion that feels more localized, and accountability that feels even more elusive.

The irony is that this consolidation is unfolding under the language of moderation and normalization. Rodríguez’s elevation has been framed as a stabilizing move, a technocratic turn after years of bombast and paranoia. Her record as economic vice president and minister is now being repackaged as evidence of competence, pragmatism, even reform. After denouncing Maduro’s “abduction” by U.S. forces on January 3, the very next day saw a remarkable pivot in the regime’s propaganda apparatus: Rodríguez was suddenly celebrated as Venezuela’s first female president, with a speed matched only by her plane’s return from Russia and landing in Venezuelan airspace, despite official claims that the skies were under U.S. control.

If colectivos are serious about rooting out traitors, they may find better luck checking phones in Miraflores and the Capitol than stopping cars on the highways of Caracas.

That speed matters. It reveals how thin chavismo’s ideological commitments have become, and how central narrative management now is to regime survival. Maduro was not the project; he was a vehicle. Once removed, the system adapted almost instantly, swapping revolutionary mythology for managerial language without altering the underlying mechanics of control.

For Washington, this appears, so far, to have been good enough. With Maduro gone, the Trump administration’s priorities seem to have shifted from political transformation to stabilization and risk management. A loud, autonomous opposition, once instrumental to regime pressure, is now framed less as a democratic partner than as a short-term liability. The result has not been repression, but marginalization: opposition figures are tolerated, even encouraged to remain visible, while being excluded from meaningful decision-making.

Meanwhile, the regime has solved a different problem, at least temporarily: how to continue governing under legal siege. Rodríguez’s inner circle overlaps heavily with the same network of officials who defined the Maduro years, many of whom face international indictments and bounties of their own. This is not fertile ground for the trust or guarantees required to sustain a regime as complex as Venezuela’s.

Whether Rodríguez’s presidency is a durable settlement or a trial arrangement remains unclear. So does the question many within chavismo are surely asking themselves: faced with continued pressure from Washington to “deliver,” will Rodríguez lean into the combative instincts that defined her domestic record, or will Maduro and Cilia Flores soon find themselves joined by more former comrades at MDC?

Transitions are meant to reset political and legal time. What has happened in Venezuela has merely rearranged it. Rodríguez may offer a fresher, more professional face at the head of the regime, but the internal knife-fighting, the power jockeying, and the coercive architecture remain firmly in place.

What emerges, then, is not a failed transition, but an arrested one. Politics has been paused in the name of order. Democracy has been deferred in the name of stability. Venezuela is governed as if perpetually on the verge of change, never quite authoritarian enough to provoke rupture, never democratic enough to allow arrival. Maduro is gone. Democracy, once again, is told to wait.

In Caracas, in early January, explosions are a common sound in the morning hours. To be honest, it’s not unusual for some irresponsible person, after a few too many drinks, to decide to disrupt the sleep of the entire neighborhood by launching firecrackers or fireworks. We’re quite used to it. That distinctive whistling sound, a couple of seconds of silence, and an explosion that makes dogs bark and babies cry.

That’s why, perhaps, the explosions that sounded shortly before 2:00 a.m. in the early morning of January 3, 2026, didn’t seem strange, until they were accompanied by the vibration of a cell phone. Since I have most of its contacts on silent mode and I don’t care much about what might be happening in the world outside my four walls when I’m asleep, I was about to turn it off. But when one of those WhatsApp calls came in from a group chat, my wife, who already had her phone in her hand, worriedly asked me not to. Something was happening. She had just heard a loud bang.

“I think something exploded in Caracas.”

As soon as she said that, we started receiving videos that quickly went viral on social media. The first one we saw was a convoy of planes and helicopters heading west of the capital, leaving a trail of explosions across the valley. The only thing missing was the classic “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival as its soundtrack, typical of any Vietnam War movie.

“They’re bombing the city,” my wife added.

Is it true? That’s the first question in times when artificial intelligence can create any kind of video. So, seeing is believing, as the apostle Thomas said. Like many skeptics, I went outside to look at the sky and listen. The roar of aircraft flying over the city at that hour was enough to confirm that it wasn’t just rumors.

Indeed, they weren’t fireworks, nor was it a false alarm. I had just gotten up, and, amidst the confusion, stunned, I went out onto the terrace to listen to the explosions of the bombs, as well as to see the sky light up in different places on the horizon, despite the dense night fog that usually shrouds the mountains around the antennas of El Volcán in its whitish mantle.

“We’re safe here,” I thought naively, very casually. I went back to the room to tell my wife, exuding all the confidence in the world, that we had nothing to fear, since all the impact reports were in the area of Fuerte Tiuna and the Generalisimo Francisco de Miranda Air Base, far away enough for us to feel safe.

I will never forget the roar, that light, or the panic that I can only describe as when your blood freezes and your heart skips a beat.

But at the same time, out of pure reflex, I was getting out of my pajamas and putting on jeans, a sweater, and sneakers, anticipating that we might suddenly have to leave urgently for some unknown reason, without knowing where to find shelter.

Suspecting the possibility of a power outage, I turned on the phone, and in less than two minutes it rang. I didn’t want to answer, but when I realized it was one of my good friends from school, one of those I’ve seen twice in the 20 years since he left the country, I had to.

José Ricardo, with the classic greeting, “What’s up, Joe?”, immediately asked if we were okay, and I could only tell him the same thing I told my wife.

—Aircraft and explosions can be heard in the distance. We’re far away, everything is calm, but it sounds like things are rough and it’s raining bullets along the Guaire River.

I promised to call him with more details as soon as the sun came up. At that precise moment, I didn’t have much to say, other than confirm that the bombing of Caracas was true.

—Nothing’s happening here in El Hatillo—I said before hanging up, unaware that, in a matter of seconds, I would eat my words. I left the phone plugged in to recharge the battery and went out onto the terrace to continue contemplating the sky and listening to the buzzing and booming sounds. The only thing running through my head was the lyrics and melody of Pink Floyd’s “Goodbye Blue Sky”: Did you see the frightened ones? Did you hear the falling bombs? Did you ever wonder why we had to run for shelter when the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath the clear blue sky?

It was impossible not to recall what my grandfather once told me about his adolescence during World War II. Of all the grim anecdotes in his repertoire, the one that impressed me most was the terrifying sound of the bombings, when they heard the sound of the planes flying overhead, the whistling and the impact, the shaking of the ground making the walls and ceilings creak, as if death were dancing above their heads, claiming lives without distinguishing between the righteous and the sinners. “The only thing you can do,” my grandfather would say, “is pray that that hell won’t last long.”

That cruel memory haunted me just as I heard the roar of the engines approaching and I looked up. I heard the whistling sound and didn’t even have a chance to move. I was petrified with terror. The explosion illuminated the bleak landscape as if the sun had peeked out for that fleeting moment, adding color to a blast that shook the floor, walls, ceiling, and windows of the house with the force of the most violent earthquake.

I will never forget the roar, that light, or the panic that I can only describe as when your blood freezes and your heart skips a beat. The sound of war and a bombing raid is the most terrifying thing I have ever heard. No one can imagine it until they experience it firsthand, murmuring prayers to God for it all to end quickly, for the bombs to stop falling, and for dawn to break, while the uncertainty of what the end of the storm will bring gnaws at you from within.