Transitional States of Perpetual Continuity

‘Transitional States of Perpetual Continuity’ explores how invisible human labour sustains the illusion of frictionless automation. Rooted in fieldwork and interviews at a remote data annotation facility in northwest China, the project investigates how people become agents bridging the temporal and procedural gaps within machine processes. Blending voice-over narration, 3D-rendered environments, and documentary research, the video work straddles the boundaries between speculative cinema and digital ethnography.

The project renders data centres, call centers, daycare facilities, and tunnels as spaces of passage, process, and waiting. Viewed from the perspective of a passenger and embedded in a landscape of recursion and transition, the work interrogates automation not as a purely technical shift but as a lived condition. One where labour is essential yet structurally unseen, and humans become the process itself. It traces how human time unfolds alongside, yet out of sync with, the linear acceleration of automated systems.