Silk Road Shipping Stories: Life Along China’s Automated Shipping Network is a non-linear, automated multi-screen poetic documentary installation about truck drivers andbarge boat operators along Silk Road routes in China in the age of automation. 

This installation is a poetic illustration of a core industry (the biggest shipping industry world-wide) on the verge of a pivotal change. The project presents a series of meditative, textural vignettes that relay conversations, daily moments of operators at work, and portraits of surrounding landscapes, cityscapes and barges while exploring what projected obsolescence may mean for them, as well as the ancient waterways that they navigate.

The framework utlizes an on-going, chance based, modular editing system based in interactive Chinese poetry forms, like Lian Ju(see link to publication here), which emphasize multi-dimensional account of people, place and time . The installation in this combines audio, video and text clips in a perpetual randmonized montage array of relatoinal possibilities between clips thus interweaving a collage  of association and meaning into an overarching vast visceral superstructure. 

The automated, non-linear video installation framework further correlates conventional documentary video aspect ratios to traditional landscape painting in a multi-screen array.

These methodologies explore how ancient aesthetic systems can serve automated, non-linear interactive portaiture and narrative storytelling in a way that communicates a subjective, ambiguous, meditative, and fluid documentation of people, places, machines, and traditions.