Sectional Travelogue (Catalog of Trackside Profiles as Determined by Light and Shadow, Reconstructed as Individual Sections)
A personal reconstruction of small topographies.
Sectional Travelogue (Catalog of Trackside Profiles as Determined by Light and Shadow, Reconstructed as Individual Sections) documents a weekly early morning train trip I took for several years. The particular alignment of the train's orientation to the rising sun converted the gap between train cars into a sliver of sunlight that would rise and fall with the trackside topography.
Using an algorithm to skew the perspectival video footage to flat sections, the sliver of light become an accurate topographical section of this hour-long trip. Transferred to glass the sections recompile into a three-dimensional model of the trip.
Included as part of Parallel Projections, University of Michigan Architecture Gallery, 2008
A weekly train trip at the same early morning hour aligned with the rising sun...
...creating an hour-long trip where a sliver of sunshine passing through the train cars was cast against the trackside topography.
By overlaying a perspective grid onto the video, I can measure the profile of the trackside topography.
Creating a "straightening" algorithm yields a series of trackside sections for the entire trip. These sections are transferred to glass slides and sandwiched together to create an indexed three-dimensional reconstruction of the trackside sections. This entire piece becomes a detailed sectional travelogue of a particular stretch of trackside topography.
Installation view as part of Parallel Projections, installed at the University of Michigan Architecture Gallery, 2008.