Pauline Cassier

I Met Them Mid-journey is a photographic and writing based documentation of the great American road trip, although this one, never really took place.

I created Nilsey, an author who has gone off on an American road trip as a means to research her novel, "Dark Rivers Run Deep." This character offers a space for immersive world-building, a way to transport both myself and the reader into an alternative America that exists only in our collective perception — a world that embraces melodrama and departs from the confines of reality.

Since I couldn't physically embark on such a journey due to geographic distance, I turned to the resources available to me to craft the trip I yearned for. Combining my creativity with the assistance of artificial intelligence, I aimed to explore the possibilities of world-building and push the boundaries of storytelling. My goal was to create a world so captivating that readers would find themselves fully immersed, blurring the line between fiction and reality. It wasn't about striving for complete realism, but rather venturing beyond reality into the realm of the uncanny valley.