Created by Bo Shen Tan, and described as “non fictional”, The Seventy Degree Route follows climatologist Brian Brettschneider’s proposal—a year-long road trip across the U.S., always maintaning a constant 70°F (21°C). The project uses this route to explore how mobility, infrastructure, and media intersect in a climate-altered landscape.
The 19th-century American traveling circus, a nomadic spectacle, offers a historical mirror. Here, Hollywood is reimagined as its modern counterpart—displaced by extreme weather yet continuing to stage stories whilst perpetually in motion. This serves as a frame to examine society’s troubling inertia and the dualities between fiction and reality, watching and acting.
Films have long exploited real landscapes and environmental tragedies, embedding warnings inside spectacles of collapse. They raise awareness yet numb audiences through repetition and sensationalism. Cinematic destruction blurs dangerously with real-world catastrophe, evident in both fictional narratives and the daily bombardment of disasters presented by news channels. At the same time, film-making has developed the most complex and suitable tools for simulation and preparation.
Bo Shen Tan
The project intentionally inhabits this unstable ground. Bo Shen Tan questions whether shifting our gaze, or reconsidering the ways in which we view spectacle, could potentially inspire meaningful action and help avert the nearly certain (for many already present) environmental catastrophe.
Created with Unity.
