Road Casualties: I-80, 2023
2 hour video of screen recorded footage via Google Maps
Road Casualties: I-80 is a video that documents a cross country drive on I-80 completed on Google maps, spanning East to West, from New Jersey to California. This highway traces historically significant travel routes such as the Oregon Trail, the California Trail, as well as the first transcontinental airmail route, the first continental railroad and mimics the Lincoln Highway, the first road to span across the United States.
The moments of glitch on the non human animals bodies are representative, in a metaphorical way, of how technology divorces itself from cycles of life and death; how even technologies hyper-mediated portrait of the world cannot escape the reality of its blemishes. Google Maps, a tool strictly designed for humans, inevitably picks up non humans misdirected in the process. Through recording a recording, what is captured is the highway as a form of hostile architecture and the existing hierarchy of a being's value while examining human expansion and contemporary colonialism.
