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ARTISTIC STATEMENT

A Railway Named Expire is an interactive tactical media project created using GameMaker Studio 2 which serves to critique the apathetic response of United States infrastructure to the continuous loss of life throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

I was inspired to make this work after taking the MBTA to get home for Thanksgiving. Foregoing working on my assignments, I stared out of the window for most of the ride. At some point I became acutely aware of the consistent stop and start of the train – kinetic versus static motion – as it made its way through its route stops. That, along with how I felt as a passenger seated within that vessel, was something I wanted to represent with this work.

While researching, I found that the United States commuter rail is unique to the rest of the world in that its transit times are centered around the average American citizen’s workday. At the height of the pandemic, these trains continued to run without passengers; empty shells mindlessly plodding along the tracks from point A to point B. These machines, which act as symbols for our country’s public works as a whole, were indifferent to the country’s steadily dwindling population. After looking into COVID-19 mortality rates in the U.S., which have averaged around one death every 30 to 60+ seconds, I thought of using the stop and start of the commuter rail to represent this continuous pattern of loss and how desensitized both this country’s infrastructure and we have become to it.

I wanted to use a program like GameMaker Studio as this project’s medium to accomplish two main objectives: coding it so that the train will stop at random intervals to represent the past and current COVID-19 death totals and giving the viewer a purposefully limited sense of control over the scene.

Through these interactions, I hope that the viewer will gain greater insight into this virus’ continual devastating presence both here and abroad, as well as question as to whether this trend of indifference is by design.