–
24.3 Miles Per Gallon documents a three-month drive across the United States through a camera mounted in the rear window of my car. Programmed to photograph automatically once every minute, the camera produced a serial archive of the country glimpsed in reverse. Indifferent to my embodied experience of driving, this mechanical rhythm transformed the road trip into a durational performance shared between body, vehicle, and the camera’s machine vision.
The resulting photographs form an afterimage of America as landscape and infrastructure recede in reverse. Unlike Google Street View’s panoramic cartography, 24.3 MPG constructs an index of omission: obstructed, fixed, and fragmentary. The car becomes both an extension of the body and a mechanical instrument of seeing, producing an accumulated record of the landscape while tracing its gaps and distortions.
What emerges is an atlas of serial fragments, where the American road reveals itself as both material infrastructure and cultural framework. Looking backward, the project considers how America is shaped by and for the automobile, and how our sensory experience of driving—its speeds, repetitions, and erasures—structures our ways of seeing the nation.
View photographs