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Shifting Landscape

Visual Art & Photography

via Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand

Rolling Stock

Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing parked cars, industrial buildings, fencing, railway signals and rough ground. Digital stitching distortions stretch parts of the scene across the wide frame.
Rolling Stock 1

Rolling Stock is a series of glitch panoramic landscapes made on iPhone while travelling on southbound Auckland trains. The works come from the phone’s attempt to stitch together a landscape moving too quickly to be held as a stable view.

Rail corridors, industrial yards, bridges, pylons, houses, trees and containers stretch, split and repeat as the scan catches up with the train’s continual motion. The image is shaped by the movement of the train, the movement of the hand, and the software’s effort to assemble a scene from passing fragments.

Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing railway tracks, scrubby ground, fencing, signal lights and repeated tall vertical poles. The wide image has subtle panoramic stitching distortions, with industrial buildings and rail infrastructure in the background.
Rolling Stock 16

What begins as a technical glitch becomes part of the work itself. Upright structures such as poles, signals, trees and bridge supports briefly fix themselves within the passing landscape before bending, doubling or breaking apart. They appear as unstable points of orientation: momentary anchors around which the rest of the image shifts and reforms.

There is a tentative and lateral visual echo here of pouwhenua, Māori land posts encountered around Auckland that mark boundaries or places of significance. In Rolling Stock, the upright forms are not fixed markers in any settled sense. They only appear, through the artefact of the image, to become fixed points in a shifting land: digital, fleeting and unstable. The camera seems to find marks to hold onto, but the landscape will not stay still. It is scanned, stretched and rebuilt in the same moment it is being seen.

  • Black and white panoramic photograph of railway tracks and a pedestrian footbridge seen from a moving train. Two people walk on the bridge, while stitching glitches create horizontal bands and distortions across the sky and parts of the structure. Industrial buildings, utility boxes and trees appear beyond the tracks.
    Rolling Stock 5
  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing cars and trucks along a motorway beside rail-side ground. Tall poles, road barriers, distant houses and trees appear across the wide frame, with subtle motion blur and panoramic stitching distortions.
    Rolling Stock 12

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing a station platform with a concrete staircase, vertical poles and several people on the right. Panoramic stitching distortions fragment the staircase and figures into stepped forms, with roadway and buildings visible in the background.
    Rolling Stock 11

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing parked vehicles in an industrial yard, low buildings, trees, fencing and rough rail-side ground. Strong panoramic stitching distortions stretch vehicles, poles and structures into pale vertical smears across the wide frame.
    Rolling Stock 13

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing a grassy area with dinghies, covered boats, small structures and trees in the distance. A row of trees is repeated and stretched by panoramic stitching, while foreground objects and figures are blurred into overlapping dark shapes.
    Rolling Stock 8

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing railway tracks, signal structures, overhead wires, fencing and low industrial buildings. Repeated vertical poles and frames stand across the wide image, with subtle panoramic distortion and motion blur visible in parts of the scene.
    Rolling Stock 2
  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing a container yard with stacked Maersk containers, industrial buildings and open ground. Panoramic stitching and motion blur create horizontal smears and broken patches across the lower part of the wide image.
    Rolling Stock 10
  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing hillside houses with bay windows and gabled roofs, trees, fences and rooftops. Strong panoramic stitching distortions create vertical bands and dark smears across the wide frame, with parts of the houses and trees appearing offset or fragmented.
    Rolling Stock 7

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing railway tracks in the foreground and freight or industrial buildings beyond. Parts of the image, especially on the right, are distorted by panoramic stitching into stepped horizontal bands, with poles, towers and yard structures visible across the scene.
    Rolling Stock 15
  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing an industrial area fragmented by strong vertical panoramic glitches. Buildings, trees, poles and fences are stretched into dark, repeated columns, with parts of a street, yard and distant structures visible between the distortions.
    Rolling Stock 9

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing an industrial street scene with trees, buildings, fences, road markings and distant structures. Strong panoramic stitching distortions stretch parts of the image into dark vertical bands and fragmented sections across the wide frame.
    Rolling Stock 6

  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing railway tracks, a large pylon on the left, portable buildings, trees, fencing, a footbridge and low commercial buildings. Panoramic stitching breaks the pylon’s latticework into jagged, splintered fragments, while the rest of the scene remains more stable.
    Rolling Stock 3
  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing a wet station platform with several people, large dark building forms, poles, signs, railings and shelter structures. Panoramic stitching and motion blur slightly displace figures and architectural elements, with reflections visible on the ground.
    Rolling Stock 4
  • Black and white panoramic photograph taken from a moving train, showing a container yard with stacks of shipping containers, industrial buildings and wet or pale ground. Motion and panoramic stitching create blurred, repeated distortions across the lower part of the image, with poles and container stacks visible across the wide frame.
    Rolling Stock 14

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