New Travelogue: Mayfly, 2025

 

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2 minutes 40 seconds AI-generated animation, 16 minutes 15 seconds travel footage 

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This two-channel video installation, presenting a digital collage and an experimental film, interrogates the collapsing boundaries between authentic and virtual in the digital age. The dual monitors create a dialectical tension that exposes how our perceptions and experience of the multifaceted world can be challenged with the algorithmic flattening of places into consumable data.

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The left screen presents a hyperactive montage of travel blogs, Google Earth snippets, and AI-generated landscapes. These fragments construct a place that never truly existed—a composite fantasy assembled from the digital debris of others’ curated experiences. The rapid cuts mirror the shortened attention span cultivated by algorithmic feeds, where the act of seeing is reduced to skimming, swiping, and forgetting.

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The right screen lingers on the raw, unpolished moments of real travel (Madagascar). In contrast to the “bucket list” locales, this handheld video documents the unprofitable realities in a tourist attraction, with durational shots resisting the pace of tourist consumption.

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Like the mayfly whose adult life lasts a day, our digital encounters with places are ephemeral, shimmering with the residue of others’ curated experiences before vanishing into the next algorithmic suggestion. The work does not mourn some lost purity of travel, but instead lays bare the impossibility of return: once we have seen the algorithm’s version of a place, can we ever see it anew?

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Flickering between the digital and the physical, authenticity was never a fixed truth, only a shifting negotiation between what we are shown, what we remember, and what we choose, consciously or not, to recreate.