trip - 63 mins., single channel digital video (2008)

trip is a road movie that moves across continents, languages, spectacles, commerce, migration, and war. Traversing more than seventy countries and twenty languages, the journey takes its viewers to the physical borders of nations, the conceptual borders of nationalism and tourism, and the borders of language, ethnicity, gender, and class. In trip, these borders and the binaries they produce -- nationalism/transnationalism, insider/outsider, motion/stasis, local/global -- are variously crossed, sustained, or reinforced by financial, social, sexual, visual, or violent exchanges.

Using YouTube as a repository of documentary footage of the recently and repeatedly seen and recorded, trip is made entirely from clips shot from cars and other moving vehicles. The clips are edited together to form a single journey across the globe, with locations linked together by the road, like sites linked on the Internet. The presence of the road and the car, homogenous conducts of modernization, industrialization, and globalization, is so pervasive in the film that their periodic replacement with rickshaws, tuk-tuks, or barely passable roads, becomes a pointed reminder of modernity's uneven distribution across the world. Other obstacles along the journey suggest sometimes fierce local resistance to the seeming forward movement of modernizing globalization.

trip depicts a world in motion far beyond the movement of the car on the road: identity, space, and geography are all in flux. What a viewer might expect to see and hear in one location rarely matches expectations. Sound becomes a way to mark, describe, blend with, or separate from the territories through which the travelers pass. Throughout, we hear the multiple soundtracks that people set to their lives, another means by which local and global identities are articulated. The use of classical road movie tropes -- driving into the sunset, singing in the car, getting lost, getting pulled over, experiencing the world through the frame of the car windows, and learning life's lessons along the way -- makes the film's central challenge to this paradigm even more pronounced: rather than telling the story of an individual or individuals on a single quest. trip presents a constantly shifting array of subjectivities, among them the tourist, the tour guide, the migrant, the soldier, the trucker, the human rights worker, the expat, the guest worker, the activist, and the missionary.

The use of the first-person perspective, together with the shifting points of view, makes visible the unstable position inside the car, that supposedly protected space that seems to separate the viewer from the outside world. Yet this shell of protection, which mimics the act of filmmaking itself, is a fragile one at best.

trip reflects the circulation of images, of people, of goods around the world, occasionally stalled by natural effects or by war, but ultimately, like the lines of trucks in the film driving across borders, relentless, plodding, and without an end.