A speculative city exploring the intersections of artistic and technological gentrification. Roadside Desert Picnic follows an explorer breaking the rules of their fictional society to venture out of their building in the abandoned tech hub in which they live to explore the city they once enjoyed. This city symphony is interlaced with quotes from June Jordan’s “Apologies to the People of Lebanon”, a poem that conveys the feeling of despair individuals have in the face of systemic problems they have no power to change.

This animation is inspired partly by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and visits to Marfa and Rockdale, Texas, as both deal with gentrification from the art and tech industries, respectively. The short animation explores life after rapid and unsustainable growth ends and leaves behind the carnage of abandonment. The attractions that once drew residents and tourists to the city are now buried under the sands. Unregulated growth and extraction that once produced a temporary paradise for well-off artists and technocrats, has now become a permanent ghost town where temperatures reach dangerous levels and water is nowhere to be found. Our guide shows the places they used to frequent and the expanse of desert that encompasses the city.

This animation, created with Maya, serves as a re-enactment of an illegal act and mirrors what the explorer would use to show people. I chose this topic and medium as it mirrored what the explorer would be faced with in order to tell their story. Even though technology destroyed their environment, in the end it is all they have to broadcast their narrative. It mimics the experience the viewer would have and makes them question their relationship with technology and how much influence it and wealth have in our everyday lives.