Views from the Automated Silk Road is a multi-media poetic documentary installation about truck drivers and barge boat operators navigating Silk Road routes in China within the backdrop of automation.

The installation components consist of three video screens programmed by randomized automated audio/ video media players, photography, 3D-scanned video, and 3D-printed sculpture from documented locations.This automated installation is a multi-dimensional illustration of a core industry (the largest shipping industry worldwide) on the verge of a pivotal change.

The project presents a series of vignettes that relay conversations and daily moments of operators at work in vast landscapes, cityscapes, and workspaces, while exploring what projected obsolescence may mean. The video framework presented here utilizes an automated modular editing system based on interactive Chinese poetry forms, like Lian Ju, emphasizing a multidimensional account of story, place, and time (see the Video Frameworks section below and the link to my HCI publication here). The installation combines audio, video, and text clips in a perpetual randomized montage array of relational possibilities between clips, interweaving a collage of image, sound, association, and meaning into an overarching visceral experience.

These methodologies explore how ancient aesthetic systems and emerging technology can communicate with an ambiguous and fluid documentation of people, place, and tradition.

Note: This project was cut short by COVID-19 travel restrictions and is still ongoing. Photos and videos presented here illustrate intial production stages pre-color correction, along with exaples of 3D scannin and stitch photography, non-linear poetry methodologies, multi-screen framworks, and tradtional Chinese landscape aspect ratios.  

Further work will expand on this platform with the addition of contact microphone recordings of machines and barges, interviews over CB radio, as well as 3D-scanned and animated images of landscapes, barges, and trucks.