The Ballad of a Laborer

"The Ballad of a Laborer" is an internet artwork existing in the Brooklyn Navy Yard on Google Street View. Approaching Street View as a stop-motion medium, the click-through experience of the Navy Yard can be understood as an expanded cinema that transforms an industrialized private-public space into an unexpected and animated feature. Developed over the course of three years through building constellations of imagery captured on-site, the covertly published media functions as both a map of previously unseen virtual territory, and as a performance work. 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. Connecting ideas of occupation to digital surveillance technologies, the story of a laborer unfolds as they look for a way out of the virtual architecture. Paralleling the comedic performances of Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, the space of the Navy Yard becomes a theatrical set for playful spectacle intervening in the spatial meaning, representation, and perceived neutrality of virtually rendered terrain.

If clicked on, the moving images below will direct you to their respective maps location where the work exists, or you can start 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.