The System
Dead Reckoning
Custom Software / Interactive Audiovisual Installation2026
projector, sound, ship's wheel, rotary encoder, Arduino, wood, LED spotlights, found picture frames, prints, fishing line, cable
i) Introduction
Dead Reckoning takes its name from a navigational method built on an inconsolable premise: the present position can only be estimated from the last known point, yet without an external reference, how could that estimate ever be free of error? The interactive audiovisual installation applies this logic to photographic memory. Through a Arduino-connected ship’s wheel, the player steers a Unity-engineered virtual voyage in real time, gradually revealing an image sequence along a route determined by their own movement.Developed within my ongoing My Geography research, the work examines cellphone photography as an infrastructural condition of autobiographical memory. Sustained migration intensifies the image’s epistemic authority as former environments fall out of everyday recurrence. Having retrieved five broken thumbnails from a iCloud malfunction, I returned to their original locations across 2025 and 2026 and reestablished their contexts by photographing the routes and surroundings around each site, interpolating compositional continuity between them into a 224-image sequence that appears visually coherent but narratively impalpable.
The installation borrows the grammar of an arcade game: take the wheel, follow the cues, and expect an arrival; but there is nowhere to arrive. The system is designed to gradually erode the player’s sense of progress: the image reveals along each chosen route and loops infinitely, while Yixiao Liu’s velocity-responsive score shifts with the wheel and five circularly mounted photographs light up as their corresponding thumbnails pass. As the player chooses to end the voyage, the camera ascends to overlook the route they have sailed as a tangled ribbon, refracting an indeterminate organization of autobiographical memory.
ii) Installation View
iii) Demo Video
iv) Desktop Version
Link to Dead Reckoning Desktop Version
v) Credits
Concept, photography, design, and development — Kristopher Yizhen ShiScore — Yixiao Liu
Technical consultation (in-game spawning mechanics and virtual environment) — Yinuo Chen
Camera supervision (selected image sequences) — EDi H., Zhu
First installed in Suzhou, China
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