The 70 Degree Route, from which this project takes its name, is not fictional. It follows climatologist Brian Brettschneider’s proposal: a year-long road trip across the U.S. maintaining a constant 21°C. Adapting this, the project uses Hollywood as a lens to explore spectacle, resilience, and complicity in a climate-disrupted world.
The 19th-century American traveling circus, a nomadic spectacle, offers a historical mirror. Here, Hollywood is reimagined as its modern counterpart—displaced by extreme weather yet continuing to stage stories whilst living nomadically. This serves as a frame to examine society’s troubling inertia and the dualities between fiction and reality, simulation and survival.
Films have long exploited real landscapes and environmental tragedies, embedding warnings inside spectacles of collapse. They raise awareness yet numb audiences through repetition and sensationalism. Cinematic destruction blurs dangerously with real-world catastrophe, evident in both fictional narratives and the daily bombardment of disasters presented by news channels. At the same time, film-making has developed the most complex and suitable tools for disaster simulation and preparation.
The project intentionally inhabits this unstable ground. To speculate once meant to observe carefully in pursuit of truth; today, the term is diluted across economics, politics, architecture, and entertainment. Yet the question remains: could shifting our gaze, reconsidering the ways in which we view spectacle, inspire meaningful action? Could the very act of viewing cinematic narratives and spatial speculations provoke environmental transformation?