jenny odell
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Travel by Approximation: A Virtual Road Trip (272 pp.) is a self-designed and -written book about a "road trip" that I took entirely via the internet. For one real year—two virtual months— I photoshopped myself into countless screenshots, read hundreds of reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, InsiderPages, etc. and watched even more YouTube videos in order to form as "real" of an experience as possible. Preview the book on Blurb here.

Wraparound cover (front, back and spine) of the book, including just a few of hundreds of pictures of myself in places I've never been.

Pages 97-98, in which I brave the tourist-masses of the Grand Canyon. In the first page, I'm encountering a guy who claims (on TripAdvisor) that "the thing with the Grand Canyon is... once you've seen it, well, you've seen it." (Those are his bored kids in the photos.) On the next page are user photos all geotagged at the same exact spot on Google Maps, a lookout point just off the main road.

I was interviewed by KQED for the Gallery Crawl video podcast about the project, during its installation (book, framed prints, and video) at the SFAI graduating MFA show. You can see the interview here (mine is about three quarters into it). I also manned the "Ministry of Approximate Travel" most days of the exhibition, in which I had conversations with visitors about my virtual memories of places as compared with their real ones.