{"$schema":"https://ejfox.com/schema/page-twin@1.json","kind":"project","url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/motorcycle-viz","json_url":"https://ejfox.com/projects/motorcycle-viz.json","generator":"ejfox.com/json-twin@1","data":{"cacheVersion":"2026-05-13-gear-cards","html":"

I started filming my rides in case something went wrong. A helmet cam is insurance — if an accident or something crazy happened, at least there'd be a tape. But over a few years the reason quietly changed on me. I'd flip it on for the beautiful stuff instead: a good stretch of road, the light, whatever cool thing was happening. One time I caught a train and a helicopter lining up over the Hudson River exactly as I rode past.

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By the end of those first few years I had gigabytes and gigabytes of it, and I got curious what all of it looked like at once — what years of riding might add up to. So I ran the whole corpus through a battery of meta-visualization techniques, pulling images out of the footage that no single frame holds.

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Scrolling the helmet-cam corpus explorer — 294 rides, the frame contact sheet, and GPS route maps
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\n\"Every\n
Every frame from 3.5 years of riding — 294 clips, 78 rides — averaged into a single image
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Frame averaging (after Jason Salavon) stacks thousands of frames into one — the constants of riding (road below, sky above, the fairing) resolve into a soft ghost while everything transient blurs away. Run it per year and you can watch the ghost shift as the routes and seasons change:

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\n\"The\n
The average of every 2024 frame
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Slit-scan takes a single column from every frame and lays them side by side, turning a whole ride into a striated band of color and light — both horizontally and vertically.

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\n\"Slit-scan:\n
Slit-scan: one column per frame, a whole ride compressed into a band
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\n\"Vertical\n
Vertical slit-scan variant
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\n\"Dusk\n
Dusk gradient — the color of the light, averaged across the golden-hour rides
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Cinema redux shrinks every frame to a tile and tiles them into a single mosaic — the entire footage archive as one dense image, a barcode of where I've been.

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\n\"Cinema\n
Cinema redux — every frame as a tile, the whole archive in one mosaic
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\n\"Cinema\n
Cinema redux, frame variant — a denser grid
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\n\"A\n
A contact-grid of frames pulled from the rides
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\n\"Dusk\n
Dusk anthology — a tall contact sheet of golden-hour frames
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So what did it all add up to? Honestly, not much you could point at. The specific moments I'd gone looking for — the train and the helicopter, the good light — washed out in the averaging. What was left was just the general shape and colors of the Hudson Valley and its roads. Unremarkable, but with a kind of haunting beauty to it. A consistency.

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The real blessing turned out to be in what isn't there. Across all of it — every gig of footage, every year — no accident, nothing terrible ever happened. The insurance I started rolling never had to pay out. That's the thing the average quietly confirms.

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Mapping the rides

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\n\"A\n
A 56-mile Hudson Valley loop mapped from a Garmin file
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Moto GPX dumps a folder of GPX tracks into map-ready GeoJSON split by day, hour, or stage, and can merge photos and videos in via exiftool. It also generates elevation and speed profiles, with the day's peak and top-speed moment marked.

","title":"Motorcycle Meta-Visualizations","metadata":{"title":"Motorcycle Meta-Visualizations","date":"2026-05-01T04:00:00.000Z","featured":true,"category":"Art","url":"https://github.com/ejfox/motorcycle-viz","tech":["FFmpeg","Python","Generative Art","Data Visualization"],"state":"doing","ai-involvement":"ai-assisted","tags":["motorcycle","dataviz","generative","art","video"],"words":525,"images":11,"imageDetails":{"total":11,"cloudinary":11,"withDimensions":0},"links":1,"codeBlocks":0,"headers":{"h2":1},"toc":[{"text":"Mapping the rides","slug":"mapping-the-rides","level":"h2","children":[]}],"type":"post"}},"_links":{"self":"https://ejfox.com/projects/motorcycle-viz.json","html":"https://ejfox.com/projects/motorcycle-viz","index":"/projects.json"}}