travel log /01
My encounters with travel are anchored in words. Words fill the idea of travel with meaning, words structure the experience of travel. They advise me on how to navigate the space and the time of 'another' place, and lend form to my inchoate perceptions. Words orientalize unfamiliar spaces, but in return, they provide me with a sense of orientation.

travel log /02
When traveling, I have always gladly taken refuge in the handrails provided by travel agencies, the stories and opinions of friends and strangers, and most of all, the Lonely Planet Guide Book.

I was first introduced to the world of travel guides by a friend at the American liberal arts college that I attended--her first and only encounter with my country had been through the 'India' Lonely Planet guidebook. At first I was uncomfortable with the ways in which the book condensed impressions of orientalist encounters into words--'exotic,' 'dangerous,' 'remote,' 'soothing.' But I soon grew addicted to its vivid and yet somehow predictable descriptions, and now I buy a site-specific Lonely Planet every time I travel. The words of my guidebook provide a comforting structure and a pleasing sense of control to the danger of space that always remains seductively unknown. They let me know that I can enjoy the pleasure of immersing myself in the experience of travel, of becoming-other to whatever degree I desire, while still being 'oriented' by words, I can always hold on to those words.

travel log /03
Over time the Lonely Planet guidebooks have successfully channeled into consumption my uncomfortable awareness of the ways in which travel fuels the economies of orientalism. Indeed, tourism seems to need to perpetuate and proliferate its own economy in order to survive, so it is no wonder that the beach, rainforests, and ethnic peoples are all coded as lost and disappearing commodities that nonetheless require the verification of tourism in order to have meaning. The rhetoric of tourism posseses an uncanny ability to simultaneously evacuate and evaluate the experiential, economic, and cultural 'worth' of spaces, so that the site of tourism becomes literally located at a pulse point where the flows of economic capital intersect with those of cultural capital.

travel log /04
With the wholesale displacement of the infrastructure of planning travel onto the space of the internet, the circuits through which the economies of travel feed into each other have become more imperceptible, and yet somehow been rendered more transparent. On the one hand, the ways in which words link to one another betray the interests invested in those connections, but at the same time each itinerary of my hyperlinked movement remains idiosyncratically contingent, yielding strange and unpredictable combinations of words. On the other hand, the exercise of planning a trip on the uncomplicated interface of a hub such as Lonely Planet intensifies the spell of simplicity that tourism casts over the travel experience, encouraging me to forget with each easy click about my own struggle to be able to travel, allowing the enormous infrastructure of capital flows, border control, and labor that supports this illusion of ease to fade into invisibility.

When the site of travel is rendered as a website accessible by a single click, is it any wonder that the space of travel feels as safe and accessible as the space of internet, which in turn feels as easy as navigating the familiar systems through which we organize our lives?

travel log /05
The beach, that most popular of travel destinations, and the ultimate site of immersion, submersion in the otherness of water, is also the site where this piece is located. The footage that you see here is predominantly footage that I shot during two separate trips to the beach: in Tulum, Mexico, and in Palolem beach in Goa, India. The beach at Tulum lies below a protected territory that contains Mayan architectural ruins. Swimming is officially forbidden to tourists at Tulum, although this rule seems seldom to be obeyed--the lure of the pristine sea is too much. Nevertheless, Tulum was one of the only places along the coast of the Yucatan where it was possible for me to photograph a stretch of the ocean uninterrupted by hotels, restaurants, clothing stalls, and the bodies of tourists.

Tracking down Tulum for the sole purpose of recording a clean shot of the ocean had a profound impact on my experience of the temporality of the space. An air of nostalgia for time that was slipping away, and perhaps was never within grasp seemed to pervade the water, and the cliffs that overlooked the ocean. Most of all, it seemed to envelop the bodies of tourists who entered that space, those who, like myself, were making their way down the coast from the crowded shores of Cancun and Playa del Carmen, and who were now taking pictures of themselves against the sea as proof of this sublime experience. That feeling that evacuates all the words that language is composed of, is it a plenitude that makes time seem slower, somehow earlier, more primitive, in the space or travel? Or is it an emptiness that stalls the dialectic of time, emptying it out and replacing it with an unknown potentiality?

The weight of time was disorienting in an entirely different way when I traveled to the beach at Goa during a trip to India later that year, becoming a tourist to 'my own' culture.

travel log /06
The websites that unfold in this frame in response to your clicks inventory the trajectory of links that I followed while planning my trip to Mexico. I suppose it is a perfectly ordinary course, characterized more by the tangential lines of flight I pursued rather than any linear trajectory, although my movements revolve around the Lonely Planet homepage. Sometimes your clicks will result in a new browser window, allowing you to navigate through the internet to produce your own trajectory through the space of the internet, in addition to the space of this travelogue.

Your clicks also trigger certain words to emerge from the distance, into the screen and over you. These are some of the words that leapt out from the literature I read and stuck with me, haunting and constantly predetermining both the trajectory through which I planned my trip online, and the actual itinerary of my travel. Throughout the course of my journey these words were my constant companion. They never failed to rise from the unconscious depths to which my hyperattention had relegated them and up into affective consciousness, waxing and waning in intensity, anchoring the dimensions of the hotel rooms I inhabited, defining the texture of the sand, the smell of the sea, the taste of the food I sought out at local restaurants. They even fought for my attention as I shot the footage that you see, as I am sure they fight for yours.

What mixtures do these words enter into with the trajectory you make through the links and the images you see? In what ways is your itinerary of movement a product of words? Can the site of tourism also be a site where new discursive dynamics are generated?