I drive a lot. This year I made ten 10-hour road trips between Pittsburgh and the Midwest, and left a dashcam running the whole way — through a towing incident, two snowstorms, a swerve on I-76. The footage accumulated into hours of highway, weather, and road texture: everything a car processes automatically and nobody watches.
Digitally, slit scans collapse each frame to a single column and concatenate across time, compressing three hours of interstate into a single image. Text-prompted segmentation with SAM3 isolated "snow" after a February storm; lens distortion correction via OpenCV chessboard calibration enabled 3D Gaussian splat reconstruction from the corrected frames. The snow segmentation produced something unexpected: sneckdowns, the informal pedestrian desire paths visible in snow that trace how people actually move through intersections — ghosts of human presence in footage that wasn't looking for them.
The same material was rendered physically for Golan Levin's Drawing with Machines studio: slit scans extracted via ffmpeg, SAM segmentation to isolate moving elements, and SVGs generated with halftone hatching via vsketch and vpype, plotted on an HP Draftmaster and a USCutter MH871 using watercolor pens, Posca markers, and Micron pens. Yupo paper with watercolor proved most effective — the synthetic surface takes pigment differently than paper, and the plotter's consistent pressure produces a mark quality I couldn't replicate by hand. The results look like damaged signal or compressed memory, which is approximately what they are.
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