ROAD TRIP

 

The idea of this series is to take two formerly intelligible technologies whose workings most of us no longer understand—the camera and the automobile—and make them more visible.  They have in common the property that we think we’re in charge of them, but increasingly we are not. My car places computer controls between my operation of it and what it actually does, and the next one I get could well drive itself.  My camera, if I want it to, can focus itself, set its aperture and shutter speed, adjust its own white balance and even look for faces in the image. In this series I have let these technologies take an unusually prominent role. For three rather rainy weeks in February 2019, I carried the camera in the car, set it on the dashboard, and occasionally pressed the shutter.  The motion of the car combined with the exposure controls of the camera to produce the image. As the third participant, I was not completely inert. I uploaded the images and wrote this statement on a machine whose workings I understand even less. The result, I hope, is a metaphor for everything our technologies manage for us: it is a glimpse at the wild, uncontrolled world that our machines encounter before they tame and soften it to a degree that renders us insidiously unconscious.