Inside cars: changing automobilities and backseat passengering in experimental film and 360 video

Despite the recent upsurge of interest in passengering, there are no accounts on how backseat passengering links to experimental film and 360 video or how it responds to the broader relationship between automobilities, the organization of car travel and on-screen storytelling. To fill this gap, I follow up on the profiling of the passenger as a distinctive subject and object of infrastructures of mobility to discuss the backseat passenger’s experience, seen as both a socially engaged and embodied practice, in four stylistically distinct works, Larry Gottheim’s Harmonica, Lluis Escartín’s Mohave Cruising, Ken Jacobs’ Berkeley to San Francisco, and ASMR Driving at night: Back seat view. While Harmonica, Mohave Cruising and Berkeley to San Francisco are selective, self-aware experiments, which play out in various forms, ASMR is an authorless 360 drive video that lacks much aesthetic value and continues the long-established culture of scenic road and auto-tourism, turning on-site visitors into virtual tourists. Although each work approaches passengering visualities differently through exhibiting forward, side, parallax and 3 D views, they all articulate a multi-sensorial experience of driving and offer a relatively novel take on the practices of automobility through shifting the perspective of the driver and frontseat passenger to the backseat view.