THE BALLAD OF A LABORER, 2019-2022
An expanded cinema and land art project on Google Street View
Produced over three years, 600 panoramic images map the previously unseen digital landscape of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, unfolding into an open-ended story of a print laborer lost inside Street View, searching for a way out.
Published anonymously, the project garnered ten of millions of views, and virally spread across the web.
A private-public space and set-like design, the Navy Yard offered a unique opportunity to explore cartography and cinema through the stop-motion nature of Street View.
Beyond a linear story, the imagery creates omni-directional paths throughout the gated space that present interactive narrative possibilities and follow geographic trajectories reminiscent of land art.
It is a performance, a cinema, a drawing, and an intervention creating an internet mythology
It was first written about anonymously in Moving Image Artist Journal U.K. here.
November 19th 2022 marked the official debut of this work with Microscope Gallery— Please visit Platform for the interactive representation of this work.
Additionally, my video walkthrough of the project was part of Screenwalks courtesy of Fotomuseum Winterthur and The Photographers Gallery U.K
