SPRAWL 2011: The American Landscape in Transition Revisited

SPRAWL began from a question about the American landscape: what happens when a built environment becomes a system of navigation, consumption, displacement and belief? I approached suburban expansion as a spatial and informational condition, using panoramic imaging, video, text, geography and interface as a way to move through the problem.

This work is a documentary series of panoramas shot roughly from the same locations that were explored in the original Sprawl project in 2011.  As expected, much had changed. Simple i tersection s had become large muti-lane ones, and the construction density overall had bacome far more sense. In. addition, when the first project was met with little concern, SPRAWL: 2011 was often met with curiosity or sometimes suspicion. This signalled the changes in American society in the post 9/11 landscape.

The SPRAWL series builds a scaffold for later projects such as Googled Earth, AR works and the Confinement Spaces project. Across these works, space is never neutral. It is captured, rendered, authored and made legible through systems that carry politics inside them.