I-5_Passing
I-5_Passing Project (52 Food Marts), is a journey...a journey of aesthetic inquiry across disciplines, across cultural discourses, across personal narratives, across regional perspectives and across the mythos of California itself.
I-5_Passing combines the seduction of the road trip, documentary, fictional and remediated cinematic images/narratives, with a recombinant use of data, locative, surveillance and distributed media and technologies. I-5 presents us with an imaged, telematic and nomadic experience. Initially exhibited in the Edge Conditions Exhibition curated by Steve Deitz at the San Jose Museum of Art and Technospheres at the Beall Center for Technology.
There have been many legacies invoked in the creation of I-5_Passing ranging from Ed Ruscha to Mike Davis to Reyner Banham. 52 Food Marts (both the proprietary software and the digital images series) invoke Ed Ruscha’s seminal series, 26 Gasoline Stations (1967). We had mapped the route along the I-5 with a series of photographs documenting the “Food Marts” along the way, creating an alternative portrait of the highway – ‘52 Food Marts’. This title, which riffs and doubles back on Ruscha’s 26 Gas Stations, addresses the deteriorating 20thc myth of the great American road trip .... which has now been supplanted by the quotidian nature of the round trip, contemporary commute /commuter.
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