Blind Spot, 2024

paracord, ripstop nylon, video projection
111" x101" x 336"

The trucker is at the heart of the interstate ecosystem. Soon, autonomous trucking (AT) will replace 90% of all highway truckers on the open road. Trucking culture will fade from an American mainstay into a memory.

Blind Spot examines the dissonance between AT and the American trucker. The scale semi replica serves as a blank canvas to host the digital fleet pulled from all fifty states on Google Street View (GSV) while referencing both human noises and highway soundscapes. GSV serves as a digital archaeological record exclusively shot from the road and taken continually from a purpose-built digital eye mounted on a vehicle that is driven by a human. I tasked artificial intelligence to fill in the blank space after each truck is extracted from GSV. The machine renders pixels to create foliage, signage, humans and their infrastructure– rendering the void these 18 wheelers will leave behind.

Placing the 1:1 trailer in a gallery designed for foot traffic highlights the scale disparity between humans and semis and subverts the differences between humans and machines by mimicking the shape of a semi and the movement of a human lung. The air compressor adds to the cacophony of sounds as it continuously reinflates the trailer. The accompanying soundscape is composed of recordings from hours of driving along the Sunbelt’s highways intertwined with a human heartbeat. This steady rhythm melds man and machine, collapsing the distance between our collective human past and inevitable machine futures.