Centerline
Editing in progress.
Centerline combines video and sound to explore what happens when guidance is reduced to its smallest available cues. Through orientation, perception, and the systems that direct movement through space, it examines how we navigate when almost nothing remains—the moment a painted line ceases to be background and becomes the primary structure through which movement is understood.
The work moves between roads, gas stations, parking lots, motel rooms, and other temporary spaces of transit. Across these environments, recurring systems begin to echo one another: centerlines passing beneath the car, reflective lane markers, rotating hot dogs, slush machines turning beneath intermittent flashes of white light, long rows of refrigerator doors extending beneath fluorescent lighting, motel corridors receding into vanishing points, numbered doors, painted arrows, and the geometry of borrowed rooms.
These places are not destinations but infrastructures of orientation. They organize movement through repetition, rhythm, light, sound, and spatial arrangement. Roads direct the moving body. Gas stations slow it without fully stopping it. Motels suspend movement without resolving it. The room is borrowed, unfamiliar, and occupied only briefly. Motion becomes quieter without disappearing. HVAC systems cycle on and off. Mini refrigerators hum continuously. Plumbing moves through the walls. Distant footsteps arrive and disappear. Even in stillness, the building continues its own choreography.
Sound is central to the work. Recordings gathered throughout the journey—including tires moving across changing pavement, rumble strips, windshield wipers, rotating slush machines, hot dog rollers, refrigeration units, fluorescent hum, motel room tone, hallway ambience, air conditioners, distant traffic, and roadside machinery—gradually become as important as the image itself. As visibility is reduced by darkness, rain, glare, speed, and fatigue, orientation shifts toward listening, vibration, rhythm, and habit.
The film unfolds through duration, repetition, and small perceptual adjustments rather than narrative progression. Roads dissolve into motel corridors. Fluorescent aisles echo painted lane markings. Rotating machines answer the rhythm of passing centerlines. The same directional logic reappears across roads, gas stations, parking lots, convenience stores, and temporary rooms until they begin to feel like parts of one continuous system.
The project began while driving alone through Arizona, Utah, and Nevada and becoming aware of the guidance systems embedded in the road: centerlines, reflective markers, arrows, rumble strips, and the changing vibration of the pavement beneath the tires. As visibility shifted between daylight, rain, dusk, and darkness, these markings became more important than the landscape itself.
One night I was pulled over by a police officer and told my headlights had been off. I hadn't realized. I had mistaken the darkness of the landscape for the limits of visibility itself.
That moment shifted the project. What began as an interest in painted lines, motel corridors, fluorescent interiors, and roadside infrastructure became a study of navigation under incomplete perception.
The project examines how trust is placed in these systems, how perception adjusts as conditions change, and how the body continues forward by following little more than white lines on black pavement.