In the 19th century, English families of standing typically sent young adults for several months on a Grand Tour of the continent. The goal was to experience first hand the art, culture, history, and customs of Europe. Parents understood the grand tour as a cultural and social coming of age for their children, and they were not unaware that the knowledge and experiences thus gained would establish them in the select club of those who could share such references. 
For their part, young people welcomed several months away from the family home, and their pulses quickened at the prospect of thrilling encounter in the chilly night air of Tuscany. [Of course, young people were always accompanied by chaperones; but as we know, these dotty fools can easily be set to looking in the wrong direction.]
In addition to trunks of too-wintery British attire, Grand Tourists traveled with their writing desk – a folio of writing materials, journals and the like, if not actually a lap-desk. And, of course, their sketchbook. In the era before photography, drawing was the only means to record and remember what the eye encountered. Sketching ancient ruins, for example, required sitting at length before a picturesque view to study it, a necessary part of drawing. Sketching extended contemplation in time, and articulated it. Because one was nearly always accompanied by friends or a guide, drawing was bathed in conversation: visual highlights were remarked upon, technical terms exchanged, history interrogated. Sketching was a form of social thinking and shared remembering.
What then should constitute the journal of a Roadtrip [the name itself a morph of Grand Tour, but now edgier and with a hint of the neo-gonzo] on a journey in these first fresh years of the 21st century? For our Roadtrip, the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at Carleton College commissioned a project from digital artist Patrick Kelley. The challenge was to create a digital arts work in which students would participate while tripping.
Although we will hear more of this in later posts, the key elements of Patrick's project include:
1. A final online display format, which rather than a 19th century sketchbook will now be Google Earth, one of the cartographic marvels of recent years. Anyone who would like to follow this project should download this free program. It only requires a click or two, and it's extraordinary.
2. Eight to ten images – our digital equivalent of sketches – created by each participant for each of the four cities of our journey, New York, London, Amsterdam, and Berlin.
3. Each image will take the form of a cube with six sides, each side of while will be a separate image. The cube will be digitally stitched together so that it can be rotated, as if from within, by a visitor. The cube may be constructed by making six pictures in a single location [typically up and down, and in the four directions], or they may be an amalgam of pictorial and perhaps auditory impressions.
4. Each of these images will reflect a particular cultural understanding of our sense of place Participants will interrogate each city as place, creating eight or ten image-cubes that reflect contrasting responses to and definitions of place. The categories are:
a. Place as social process.
b. Place as personal psychology.
c. Place as a locus of one's sense of safety or danger.
d. Place as myth or legend.
e. Place registered as movement.
f. Place perceived by a sense other than vision.
g. Place as micro-culture.
h. Place as the built environment.
5. Because each of the images will have associated geographic coordinates, each image cube will be mapped to its exact geographic location in Google Earth. The final project will be a grand map of a grand tour with roughly 250 image cubes for each city of our tour, coded by maker and coded by typology of place.
You can explore Patrick Kelley's work further at Patrick Kelley. [Bottom: Patrick Kelley visiting the Roadtrip crew in New York to implement his project.]
dood, change the link to patrickkelley.org
Posted by: pat | September 19, 2006 at 09:39 PM