Report of Impakt De Zondagsschool #7: Travel held at March 15, 2009 in Utrecht.
The seventh edition of De Zondagsschool (Sunday School), hosted by Impakt, focused on contemporary travel experiences. Travel is about discovery, about experiencing something new, and you don’t always have to pack your suitcases to do this. Merriam-Webster defines travel as ‘to go on or as if on a trip or tour’. And thus, you can travel at your own leisure, from the comforts of your own lazy chair. If you would actually like to go somewhere though, you can nowadays travel further than you’d ever imagined, far over the horizon.
Technology plays a major part in these experiences and was greatly represented, but De Zondagsschool kicked off with poetic observations on “the smallest city, or the biggest village”, a place close to home: Utrecht. Ingmar Heytze, Utrecht’s official town poet, has written numerous poems about everything and everyone in the city (or is it really a town?). His poems shed a whole new light on a place I regularly visited for nearly four years, but never really appreciated.
Traveling without going anywhere
David Nieborg, game researcher, also told us we don’t have to travel far to have a good time. We can stay at home even! All we need is the Internet. His presentation was an overview of the evolution of graphics in videogames. From ill-lit, narrow, pixelated corridors, to amazingly realistic views into never-ending fantasy land, the gamer can nowadays travel into games such as Grand Theft Auto IV and re-experience a trip to New York City, or travel from desert straight into permafrost in World of Warcraft. It sounds easy, and the graphics really are astonishing, but this kind of travel misses something. However entertaining the immersion into a videogame can be, I believe the ability to smell, hear and touch are crucial to the travel experience.
Jorrit Brenninkmeijer, radio artist, also represents travel on the Internet, but this kind requires even more imagination. Using a database of purely sounds, on the website SoundTransit, the user can browse destinations to get a sound preview, or can book a transit from one place to another, with up to five (random) stopovers. So put on your headphones, sit back, and imagine what a place looks like from merely hearing people talk, kids play, dogs bark, or waves roll. Questions were raised about the authenticity of the sounds in the clips. Is it necessary to only put sounds in a clip that can be heard at one point in time, in one location to enhance the travel experience? Or can the artist edit sounds, to make them like the audio version of a photo collage in a travel brochure?
Fly me to the moon
Virgin Galactic tourism
By far the most unimaginable, but however completely realistic travel experience must be the one presented by Ronald Heister. Spokesperson for Virgin Galactic, his task at hand is to convince ultra rich people to go on the trip of a lifetime. One that no travel insurance covers, and costs a stunning 200,000 US dollars. You can still be part of the first five hundred people to travel with Virgin Galactic into outer space, for a dazzling four (!) minutes of zero gravity amongst the stars. The test runs have been completed, Virgin Mothership Eve is almost ready to launch the spacecrafts. Soon it will be possible to travel from Sweden (where the nearest spaceport is being realized) to Australia in half an hour. I’d say this is the closest thing we’ll ever get to teleportation!
Intermitting the presentations, several video projects were shown. “The Last Stronghold” (2008) by Frank Koolen shows the viewer how beautiful the world is, but also focuses strongly on all the things we have done and that have occurred that destroy our homes.
Flight Patterns by Aaron Koblin
“Flight Patterns” (2008) by Aaron Koblin is the animated representation of flight schedules over North America. Without using a map as basis, in this animation you can see the outline of the US and Canada appear, purely by the density of the flight network. It’s magical. “Abidin Travels #1” (2007) by Adel Abidin is a promotional video for Baghdad as holiday destination. Over images of destruction and despair, the narrator convinces us of the beauty and greatness of Baghdad. Of what it could have been… “Owner of the Voyage” (2007) by Roy Villevoye and Jan Dietvorst is a video about travel from a unique perspective. Papuan Asmat Pupis tells the interviewers all about his cousins’ trip to the Netherlands, without having been there himself.
All in all, De Zondagsschool #7 presented a very diverse and enlightening view on travel, that made me curious and kind of disappointed about the fact that all I got to do after was sit on an intercity train, going home…
