Over the last few months, alongside developing Lessons From Departure: Shattered World, I’ve been building a small experimental tool called Tracker.
At a technical level, it is a local browser-based motion-composite system. BUT At a human level, ‘it grew from a feeling I know extremely well.’
The feeling of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and suddenly not knowing what can safely be ignored.
Watching What Moves
The core system is simple:
Tracker looks at video frame by frame, Each frame is compared against the one immediately before it. Then when pixels change enough, the system draws a mark. When nothing changes, it treats the scene as stable. Then over time, the marks fade. Movement leaves temporary traces behind.
The result becomes something that feels less like conventional video and more like a memory of recent motion.
A visual residue of change.
In practical terms, the tool was originally built for working with old tripod-shot footage, creating motion-trail composites that reveal patterns of movement over time. Think:
Birds crossing a landscape.
People moving through space.
Small interruptions against stillness.
But the longer I worked with it, the less interested I became in tracking birds.
I became interested in attention. Moreso as we live in the Attention Eccomy.
The Exhaustion of Not Knowing What Matters
In my twenties and thirties I spent much of my life travelling. Backpacking all over the world to over 135 different countries. visiting hundreds of cities and thousand and thousands of towns And there is one feeling i know very well:
You arrive somewhere new.
At first, everything feels vivid.
Exciting.
But also exhausting.
this is because you do not yet know what matters.
Every street crossing demands attention.
Every sign might be important.
Every movement could be information.
Every person, sound, machine, social interaction, or unexpected silence requires interpretation. you live in an hyperalert state.
Nothing is automatic yet.
When travelling, I would often return to a hotel room or dorm absolutely exhausted before passing out. Not from physical effort. But from concentration. From continuously scanning an environment that had not yet become familiar.
Psychology has several names for this territory: hypervigilance, cognitive overload, novelty fatigue but lived experience often feels simpler:
You don’t yet know what can safely disappear into the background.
Everything still moves. Everything still asks to be processed. Bird Tracking began to feel strangely close to that experience.
Movement As Importance
The software only notices difference. Change becomes signal. Stillness becomes background and Movement becomes meaning. That might sounds technical. But the reality, my reality is that this it is also deeply human.
then over time, living somewhere teaches us what to filter out.
Which sounds matter.
Which dangers are real.
Which social rules matter.
Which bureaucratic details can be ignored.
Which doors open.
Which conversations require caution.
We build internal maps.
The environment becomes legible.
But arrival disrupts this. And migration disrupts it even more.
Connections to Lessons From Departure
Although Tracker was not originally built for migration work, I increasingly see strong conceptual overlap with Lessons From Departure: Shattered World. That project explores displacement, rebuilding, identity, uncertainty, and the emotional realities that exist behind movement across borders.
One recurring truth within migration experiences is that people are not simply moving geographically. They are rebuilding orientation. Relearning significance. Learning what matters inside an entirely new system. For someone navigating migration, asylum processes, undocumented life, or rebuilding after displacement, the question is not simply:
Where am I now?
instead is is often:
What should I pay attention to in order to survive here?
What paperwork matters?
What language cues matter?
What social behaviours matter?
Which systems help?
Which systems threaten?
What can safely be ignored?
Until these patterns become familiar, attention remains expensive.
The world remains loud.
Tracker unexpectedly visualises something close to that state.
The Tool
Technically, Tracker is currently being developed as a local desktop web application on my Max. The current build includes:
local browser interface
video upload
metadata probing
preview workflows
motion-trail composite scaffolding
FastAPI backend
export structure for further development
The motion engine continues to evolve.
Like much of my work, the tool is less about finished software products and more about building systems for seeing differently.
Where It Might Go
I am increasingly interested in how tools like Tracker and TextFace sit alongside one another. Both projects explore questions of visibility. Both work through transformation rather than direct representation. Both ask how movement, identity, attention, language, and uncertainty can be visualised differently. Neither project is really trying to document reality cleanly. They are attempts to visualise experiences that are often difficult to explain directly.
Attention.
Disorientation.
Protection.
Rebuilding.
The slow process through which unfamiliar worlds eventually become survivable.