Silk Road Shipping Stories: Life Along China’s Automated Shipping Network is a multi-media non-linear, automated multi-screen 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 a randomized audio/ video media players, photography, and 3D scanned video and 3D printed sculpture from documented locations.  

This 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 relaying conversations and daily moments of operators at work in vast landscapes, cityscapes, and workspaces while exploring what projected obsolescence may mean for them and the ancient waterways they navigate. These video clips include photos, as well as 3D-scanned and animated images of landscapes, barges, and trucks from my interviews (see Photos, and Stitch/ Capture sections below)

The video framework presented here utilizes a chance-based, modular editing system based on interactive Chinese poetry forms, like Lian Ju emphasizing a multi-dimensional account of story, place, and time (see 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, thus 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 travel restrictions and is in current pre-production development for final completion.