Rivers and Roads is hallucinated by a custom model trained on LA’s mind-boggling freeway system and the various concrete aqueducts that transport water hundreds of miles across desert landscapes to quench the thirst of the city’s human occupants. In the video, neon-tinged rivers morph into sprawling roads and back again, echoing historical and thankfully unrealized plans to transform the channelized Los Angeles River into an additional car conduit for the city.
Alice Bucknell, Rivers and Roads, 0:30 runtime, single-channel full-HD video file, 2023.
Oscillating between organic and artificial, abstract and hyper-real, near-future apocalypse and post-human sublime, these videos lay the conceptual groundwork for The Alluvials, a new video project and playable game environment by Alice Bucknell.