Temporary Travel Office

Recent Tourism Links of Note

2008-05-05T21:38:00.003-05:00

My Heritage Can Beat Up Your History (via Alan Lew)
Neuro-Tourism (via BLDG BLOG)
Design for Despots (ForeignPolicy.com)
Interactive Postcard (Jasper_Sluijs)
Global Food Crisis, an interactive map

Tourism is NOT the World's Largest Industry - So Stop Saying It Is

2008-05-05T21:35:00.001-05:00

via the New Economics of Tourism (blog of the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change (CTCC) at Leeds Metropolitan University).

Carne Asada Con Neumaticos

2008-05-03T13:16:00.004-05:00

The NY Times has an interesting piece on local resistance to a local measure in Los Angeles that would force taco truck to change location every hour. In the Times article, the debate becomes one about authenticity, at least for those who want to get rid of the trucks. As one East LA business owner, who thinks the trucks are a blight on the community, says, "People say this is part of our culture. I don't recall any towns in Mexico having taco trucks."
One thing this makes us wonder about, is the recent upsurge in food prices along with the cost of gas... what is the future of taco trucks, and those that depend on them, in an era of commodity food prices and four-dollar-plus gasoline?

Updates on 1964 Johnnie Mae Chappell Murder

2008-05-03T12:46:00.002-05:00

Although the State of Florida and the City of Jacksonville have decided to continue overlooking the 44 year old murder of Johnnie Mae Chappell (a focus of the Travel Office's Guanabacoa Trail), the FBI has apparently been considering it one of their top 5 unsolved cases from the civil rights era. Reports about a documentary on the murder, by filmaker Keith Beauchamp (maker of the Emmy-nominated “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till”), have been showing up in lots of Jacksonville media and national outlets, and Chappell's murder was featured in Oprah's show on the 40th anniversary of MLK's assassination. Interestingly, Beauchamp recreated the scene and events of the murder on site in Jacksonville, and has been cooperating with the FBI's investigations into the case.
Of course, one has to wonder, if the FBI's investigation does actually deal with the obviously racist and illegal manner in which the original investigation was handled, will it also deal with the obvious continuation of such problems in the current city and state's legal avoidance of that historical legacy?

Touring Collectivism After Modernism in Japan

2008-04-21T23:56:00.002-05:00

We've been reading Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson's book on collective cultural practices, and the chapter on Japanese collectivism by Reiko Tomii was especially interesting due to our lack of knowledge about collective art in Japan. Of special interest is the work of the Sightseeing Art Research Institute and the Play. Of course, Hi-Red-Center's work, slightly more known to us, is also really fascinating, especially the Cleaning Event staged during the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Apparently, the Sightseeing Art Research Institute also performed a doughnut eating performance at the Olympic stadium as well. We're going to look more into this work (starting with Tomii's endnotes) and its relationship to the Travel Office, but if anyone has any immediate information, including other book suggestions, please let us know.

Teaching Starlings, Teaching Ourselves

2008-04-15T12:00:00.002-05:00

Brian Collier, a friend of the Travel Office, recently conducted a tour and Starling "teach-in" in Kansas City. For more information about what Brian is teaching Starlings, check out his website.

Rings of Dissent

2008-04-13T15:11:00.002-05:00

The NY Times has a photo slide show of some activist appropriations of the Olympic rings logo.

Temporary Travel Office Report "Contaminating the Preserve"

2008-04-11T19:56:00.001-05:00

The Temporary Travel Office has just released a 44 page report that summarizes our research and initial recommendations for expanding the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, FL.

The report, titled "Contaminating the Preserve," outlines two proposals: our 2006-7 proposal for an 800 km elevated boardwalk connecting the current Preserve to Guanabacoa, Cuba as well as the more recently proposed extension to the current Preserve that we are currently referring to as the Ash Site Annex, a 43 square mile area of Northwest Jacksonville that contains 7 former incinerator and ash-dump sites.

You can download the report as a 3.4MB PDF file

The Travel Office is also planning the second phase of our consultation, which is being planned as an exhibition and series of discussions at the University of North Florida sometime between Fall 2009 and Spring 2010.

Touring Hidden Histories in Southampton

2008-04-07T13:11:00.004-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, we received an email from Armin Medosch announcing a new audio/oral history project titled "Hidden Histories" in Southampton.
From the project description:

Hidden Histories uses the revolutionary new concept of Street Radio developed by Hive Networks to make the treasures of Southampton's Oral History Archive available in the public realm of the city. Street Radio is a totally new way of experiencing the city. The system utilises wireless communication technologies such as WIFI and Bluetooth in combination with FM radio to create captive 'puddles' -- specific places where particular stories and themes can be heard. By broadcasting using very weak radio transmitters with a range of about 10 meters a selection of stories from the OHU can be heard along 10 nodal points (location) from where byte-sized stories are transmitted. These nodes link together to form a media rich walk that transports people through the changing life of the city.

The Oral History Unit is an almost hidden jewel in Southampton's culture and heritage department. While well known and highly regarded in the international Oral History expert community, it is literally unknown outside Southampton otherwise. For more than 20 years the OHU has been recording the life stories told by the people themselves. Through the voices of common people it offers a window back into time: on the "tale end of the Dickensian age" as one interviewee puts it himself, where men had to queue every day for work at a shed at the entrance to the docks, to the hard life on the passenger ships and tug boats, an oral history is told that does not conform to the cliches and stereotypes of the official versions produced by todays media industry. The unsung heroes of historical moments such as the sinking of the Titanic or famous journeys of ships such as the Queen Mary are telling their own stories from the insiders perspective. Lesser known stories such as the secret social life on ships, the achievements of women in the heavy industries during WWII, and the troubles of immigrants from Asia and the Caribbean surface in this archive. While many of these stories tell of trials and tribulations they also shine with humanity and joyful moments.

Supermax Subscriptions

2008-04-07T11:53:00.002-05:00

For those who accumulate frequent flier miles through credit cards and/or just traveling a lot, here's a great use for those excess miles. Our friends at Temporary Services, Tamms Poetry Committee, and frequent Travel Office collaborator Sarah Ross have initiated a project called Supermax Subscriptions, that connects your excess of mobility with those who have been completely stripped of the ability to move. Holders of miles are given the names and contact info for men held in Tamms and their specific requests for magazines so that gift subscriptions can be made out to them.
The project comes out of a group of people in Illinois working to abolish the state's Tamms Prison, or at least return it to the mandate that originally opened under. Tamms is a "C-Max" prison, which is a form of "supermax" facility in which its prisoners are kept in constant solitary confinement. For more info on this movement, see the Tamms Year Ten Campaign.

Touring the Living Kitchen

2008-04-05T19:57:00.003-05:00

An amazing Chicagoan that we just recently met, but have known about for a long time, Nance Klehm is leading a "series of informal foraging and cooking workshops that hopes to reorganize our connection to land, ourselves and our communities through the processing and sharing of local and regional foods."
It sounds great!
Here's an interview with her from a recent Weekend America.
Here's the schedule for the Living Kitchen/URBANFORAGE workshops (in Chicago) this Spring:

APRIL 20th, sunday 2-4pm
urbanforage walk humbolt park – meet at boathouse

MAY
10th, saturday, 2-4pm
urbanforage walk kinzie metra tracks – meet at kinzie & racine

14th, wednesday, 6-9:30pm
sprouting essene bread, raw crackers, nut milks, sprouting
learn the basics of sprouting and ways of using enlivened seeds

28th, wednesday, 6-9:30pm
raw milk cheese 1 - cultured butter, buttermilk, yogurt, yogurt cheese, ricotta and paneer we are using local raw milk. you will be taking home some of everything we make.

JUNE
22nd, sunday 2-4pm
urbanforage walk medical district – meet at taylor & damen

28th, saturday. 9am -1pm
local medicine herbal tinctures/salves/syrups/linaments/lozenges/infusions
the solstice is the perfect time to forage and collect plants for medicinal use through the year. go home with some of everything we make.

For more information, including registration, email Nance at nettlesting+at+yahoo+dot+com.

Mapping Health

2008-04-03T22:46:00.002-05:00

Christian Nold, who has been investigating the mapping of physiological and emotional responses to space in various cities (like San Fran and Silvertown), is continuing to move the maps in even more complicated and interesting territory this April and May in Brentford (London, UK). Under the name Brentford Biopsy, Nold is teaming up with designer Daniela Boraschi to work "with local residents to gather information for digital and physical visualizations of the ecological, cultural and economic 'health' of Brentford."
Taking the notion of health beyond the individuated body, they project the metaphor of the biopsy into the realm of public health. As they put it:

Instead of taking tissue samples as one would from a human being Christian Nold and participants will be using a range of cultural probes to investigate the local social body and its unique ailments.

Since cartography and public health go way back, we remain skeptical of utopian community mapping projects. But we're also heartened to see the expansion of inputs to include the sensing of issues that might lie below (or beyond?) the physiological surface.

Area of Detail

2008-04-03T22:36:00.003-05:00

We just received an announcement from another colleague about a new project that sounds extremely interesting. Lize Mogel (co-editor of An Atlas of Radical Cartography) is opening a show at common room 2 in New York titled Area of Detail.
Speaking of which, here are the details:

common room 2
April 6 - May 31, 2008

Opening Reception:
Sunday April 6, 6-8pm

Artist's Talk:
Thursday May 8, 7pm

The translation of the spherical world onto the flat plane of a map is a mathematical problem; the translation of the political world into a map is an ideological problem. How does one represent the world in a way that does not show dominance? Something or someone is always on the top or at the center.

The United Nations emblem is a world map centered on the North Pole. The continents are not divided by national boundaries, thus geopolitical relationships are not pictured. This map is purely symbolic, representing nations united under common interests, all parts considered equal.

What is at the center of the UN emblem? A blank spot that belies the geopolitical realities of the area. This area of detail, the ice-bound
ocean of the Arctic Circle, is regulated by the UN through the Law of the Sea which sets how nations define and exploit their territorial
boundaries. As the climate warms and ice recedes, new possibilities for commerce and capital become possible. This center of the World is becoming a focal point in other ways, as surrounding nations look to claim territory in order to develop new energy resources and commercial routes.

Area of Detail is a continuation of Lize Mogel's work on rethinking familiar representations of the world, including the world map and the spectacle of World's Fairs.

LA to TJ Mobile Conference

2008-04-01T21:15:00.004-05:00

Travel Office Los Angeles friend James Rojas just sent us an announcement for a mobile conference taking place between LA and Tijuana. From his announcement:

Join urban planners, architects, environmentalists, and community activists for a one day mobile conference by train, trolley, and foot that explore the local and regional cultures, land use, and environment within the Southern/Baja California region.

The train travels through both spectacular natural settings and heavily polluted sites. The train trip brings together both man-made systems such as transportation and land use patterns with natural systems such as rivers and water sheds. The train travels through the poorest and richest communities. This conference will use transportation infrastructure to host discussions on four topic areas: transportation, social issues, and how the natural and built environment impact the region. In addition the conference will take advantage of views from the train, trolley and foot to illustrate these points while cruising by the LA River, Hobart Rail Yards, 710 Expansion, Great Park, San Gabriel River, Casa Familiar, Tijuana River and many other projects.

Community activists from Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana have been invited to participate and share their ideas. These groups include Natural Resource Defense Council , The Nature Conservancy, Reconnecting America, East Yard Communities for Environmental Justice, Friends of the Los Angeles River, The Coalition for Clean Air, Latino Urban Forum, Environmental Health Coalition, Casa Familiar and many others. This will help frame local issues into a large regional framework.

The date is May 3, and for more information check out latinourbanforum.com

Real Protest at the Olympic Torch Lighting Ceremony

2008-03-24T11:37:00.002-05:00

Some French activists with Reporters Without Borders staged a disruption of the torch lighting ceremony in Athens today! Along with the banner unfurling, other peaceful demonstrations pointing to the ongoing repression by China in Tibet were planned and executed, including a woman who doused herself in red paint in front of a torch bearer. The protesters were arrested by police, and Chinese television apparently cut away to some pre-recorded footage, no doubt created for just such an occasion.
This may not be the end of the Olympics portrayed in the Travel Office's recent tour of Los Angeles' Olympic park in a speculative 2030 future, but there's still time...

Terror Tourism

2008-03-17T16:38:00.002-05:00

Slate has an article on a tour of the impact of violence in Israel. But more interesting is one of the author's (Sharon Weinberger) background narrative on leisure and terror in Israel:

Summer camps, in popular culture, evoke memories of bonfires, tents, and teenage crushes. For me, it evokes memories of gun-wielding terrorists on an El Al flight to Israel.
The hijacking, of course, was imaginary—a re-creation staged in an auditorium at Camp Interlaken, a summer camp sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Milwaukee. The bizarre scene involved counselors dressed up as Palestinian terrorists, wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and wielding fake guns, while the campers, some as young as 8, played the part of frightened air travelers.

At Your Service

2008-03-17T16:06:00.003-05:00

The Travel Office's Parking Public video tour is included in a DVD compilation (curated by Andrea Grover) in the latest issue of Art Lies magazine. This issue looks particularly interesting... with a discussion of new media, art and the academy by members of Double Archive and Potter-Belmar Labs, a discussion of "The Email Obsessional" by irational.org and lots of other stuff. The DVD has videos from the Institute for Applied Autonomy, Brett Stalbaum/Paula Poole, Rick Prelinger, Natalie Jeremijenko, Aaron Koblin, and Aram Bartholl.

Touring Olympia

2008-03-06T22:37:00.003-06:00

Touring Olympia: Exposition Park, Los Angeles

March 14th - 2:30pm
Pasadena City College

The Temporary Travel Office and artist Sarah Ross will be leading an experiential tour of Exposition Park in South Los Angeles, the site of the 1932 and 1984 Olympic Summer Games. The tour will look at the site from the vantage point of a post-2020 future, where the Olympic Games no longer exist due to a popular revolt against their waste and inequities. As tourists are transported South from Pasadena to Exposition Park and forward into the future, they will hear a narrated history of Olympism, the international movement responsible for the Games. Once at the Park, an exploratory walk of the grounds, now a memorial to the last Olympic Games, will conclude with a participatory reenactment of the last Olympic torch lighting ceremony.

The audio tour and accompanying guide book will be available for purchase and as a free downloadable packet.

The tour is conducted in conjunction with the Anytime, Anyplace: Collective Art in the 21st Century program at Pasadena City College's Digital Media Center

The symposium also features the Futurefarmers, Temporary Services and a keynote address by Grant Kester.

Touring the Subprime

2008-03-06T22:20:00.004-06:00

We saw this picture on the great Space & Culture Blog, and followed the url. At first, we thought (hoped, actually) it must be satire or some kind of intervention. It isn't.
This isn't disaster tourism... but it is a disaster.

Trauma Tourism

2008-03-02T10:07:00.003-06:00

The Travel Office was recently a guest at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where we had a great experience with folks in the Art Department. Aside from a public lecture and meeting with graduate students, I had the opportunity to check out the faculty art exhibition and came across Laurie Beth Clark's "Memory Sites/Trauma Memorials" installation. There is also an online component collecting sites of trauma and a Google Earth layer.

Educating Tourists

2008-01-27T15:47:00.000-06:00

Earlier this month, "seven indigenous people from Raposa Serra do Sol land were detained and abused by Brazil’s Federal Police after inspecting and promoting cultural awareness among tourists at Caracarana Lake, an area that’s frequently promoted in tourist packages." It sounds from this story, that these folks were creatively intervening in "tourist spaces" in order to educate tourists about the effects they have on the people who live there, before the authorities brutally acted on some complaints from tourists who didn't appreciate the lessons.

The U.S. Has Charm?

2008-01-17T22:15:00.000-06:00

We've been pretty busy recently, so our posting duties have been neglected. One quick comment on a story by the New York Times (yes, we're actually sorry we refer to the NYT so much) about U.S. city and state efforts to boost tourism. The story points to the nose dive of the dollar and the attraction that its demise should have for foreign tourists bringing more competitive currencies. The author points out however, that the decline in U.S. tourism since 9.11 has however not quite recovered. Apparently, the U.S. is an odd ball when it comes to global tourism, as it doesn't have a centralized tourism bureau (although this is in the works).
What the story doesn't discuss, not surprisingly, is the impact of U.S. policies on visitation of various kinds. Seems like the number of people visiting the U.S. might drop if it is made more difficult for them to visit, no?
On another note, the Travel Office has some great stuff coming up! We're excited to be a part of a weekend-long event at the fabulous community art space Mess Hall in Rogers Park, Chicago. In late February, we'll be presenting our own form of tourism to the art department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And in March, we are extremely excited to join our friends Temporary Services and the Futurefarmers for a weekend of events and discussions at Pasadena City College organized and hosted by Deena Capparelli and Claude Willey. We'll (with the help of artist Sarah Ross) be giving an experimental tour of Exposition Park in South Los Angeles, as the first in a series of explorations of the global Olympiad.
Happy travels in 2008!

Doom Tourism

2007-12-16T13:04:00.000-06:00

More on tourism from the New York Times... a follow up of sorts to their previous piece on Antarctic tourism. Author Allen Salkin discusses the emergence of a branch of "ecotourism" some are calling "doom tourism" - visiting places predicted to disappear or dramatically change in the very near future. Currently, that includes sites like the Arctic, Antarctica, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and the Amazon - places viewed as under threat from global warming and industrial activity. While there are some interesting connections and points of analysis between these kinds of tours, the development of "ecotourism" since the early 1990s and the histories of "adventure" tourism, Salkin makes some odd choices to drive some of the points. One is pointing to the increase in travel to cities like Buenos Aires as a parallel to the fact that there is a Baskin Robbins in Katmandu and five star hotels in Goa, India. Tourism covers a broad range of desires and practices, so to move from a focused discussion of eco-adventure-doom tourism to more general travels to distant (in terms of the privileged Euro-US sense of geography) locales and cities doesn't do service to the complexity and significance of what's going on. The article could have easily, and more compellingly in our estimation, moved from the Euro-US desire to witness disappearing ecosystems to the surely disappearing ability for many to to travel anywhere, much less far-flung locations, that will accompany a fuel and energy crisis. The link between the privileges that are the cause of ecological destruction and those privileges that facilitate the leisure travel to witness that destruction go beyond a simple analysis of carbon footprints.
Another kind of doom tourism that could be discussed is that practiced by some Evangelical Christians in relation to Israel and the Book of Revelations. A couple of years ago, there was talk of some plans to build a Christian theme park on the Sea of Galilee. Of course, Bill Moyers has made the connection between the thinking present there and the environmental policies of the current Bush Administration and the religious right-wing of the US in general. And if the "Left Behind" series isn't sci-fi tourism for the religious right, we don't know what is.

Touring New York City

2007-12-14T13:04:00.000-06:00

The New York Times has expanded its ongoing Weekend Explorer series of walking tours, led by John Strausbaugh, in New York City. All the tours are available virtually as a Flash-player application and as a download to actually use on a walking tour. The current tours include "Brooklyn's Freedom Trails", "East Village: Paths of Resistance", "The Gangs of Hells Kitchen", "Upper East Side: Insiders and Outsiders" and "P.T. Barnum's New York"

Psychedelic Tourism

2007-12-09T21:36:00.000-06:00

A friend just sent us this article from San Diego about tourists going to Mexico in search of the hallucinogenic cactus plant, peyote. Those travelers searching for the mystic experience offered by the plant are referred to as peyoteros. The article's main point is the danger of extinction that the plant is facing due to a number of recent activities. Although the tourism component is significant (and provides for a better "human-interest" narrative), a smaller portion of the piece discusses what sounds like much more devastating activities - greenhouse tomato production and silver mining. Where the tourism story becomes more interesting is where it connects to the evolving micro economy of places like Real de Catorce. The economic relationship between the peyoteros and the region sounds a lot like the widespread phenomenon of ecotourism, where it's a balancing act of preserving both the non-human and cultural ecologies while navigating the economic potential of tourism in the face of cultural, economic and spatial encroachment.