Temporary Travel Office

Taking Earthwork to the Streets of Chicago

2009-06-14T09:20:00.005-05:00

Some colleagues from Chicago and around the midwest recently completed a political street stenciling project in support of the Tamms Year Ten Campaign. Tamms is shorthand for a supermax prison located in a town by the same name that has been operating under conditions considered torture by many human rights organizations and Tamms Year Ten is a grass-roots campaign to bring attention to it and at least bring it back to its original, legal mandate. As you can see from the pictures, they created an outline of the state of Illinois locating the location of Tams within in. To make the image they used giant stencils and mud, a technique learned and borrowed from artist Jesse Graves. Chicago-based art historian and writer Lori Waxman has written on the action, discussing the relationship between the stencil action and the issue of Tamms in more detail.
image above from Jesse Graves' blog.

London Olympics Runs Over Iron Age Britons

2009-06-12T16:45:00.002-05:00

Looks like a road being constructed for the 2012 Games in London has been built atop a mysterious, ancient mass grave, speculated to be the remains of Britons killed by invading Romans. From Reuters.

Staging Stadiums

2009-06-12T09:53:00.002-05:00

We have been following (of course) NPR's Anne Garrels' coverage of the build up to the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, and other reports about the economic situation there. Of course, the official Russian line is that everything looks good, and the Olympics are being touted as the means to convert Sochi into a world-class resort town, with all the amenities it currently lacks.

We also ran across this Denver Post article on a Kansas City firm named Populous (formerly HOK Sport Venue Event) and their role in designing Olympic venues (along with other mega sporting facilities). Apparently, the firm has been involved in every Olympic Games since 1996, including the Chicago 2016 bid and the upcoming London and Sochi games. The firm is responsible for projects like the Autodrome in Dubai, design for the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver and the new Yankee Stadium.
For anyone wanting to follow the role of construction in mega sporting events, we highly recommend Neil deMause & co's blog (and book) Field of Schemes.
image above: Populous' designs for London 2012 Olympic Stadium.

Upcoming Event, June 25

2009-06-03T00:00:00.002-05:00

We'll be giving a presentation on June 25 at the Orientation Center in Chicago, as part of the Public Culture Lecture Series organized by InCubate and Randall Szott.
We will be talking about some newer developments and projects as well as discussing our broader interest in tourism as a form of public critical culture. Perhaps a teaser image from a recent project will entice you into coming?

Pocket Guide to Hell Tours

2009-06-01T17:17:00.003-05:00

We've posted before about the walking tours by Paul Durica (aka Pocket Guide to Hell) of the "Crime of the Century" - the infamous Chicago murder of Bobby Franks by Leopold and Loeb. We've since been in touch with Paul, who also lead a tour recently titled "A Working Man's Guide to the World's Columbian Exposition", an exploration of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. While we haven't been on one of Paul's tours (yet), we're really excited by them and hope to have the pleasure of touring Chicago with him soon.
Perhaps we'll attend his next Crime of the Century tour which will be June 7 at 11am, starting at the corner of 49th and Ellis in Kenwood (the tours are free, but Paul would really benefit from $5 donations). Email him to reserve a spot.
And read up on Paul's tour to see what you're in for.
image from Distances Between Ports

Freshkills Park Blog

2009-05-20T15:36:00.003-05:00

We just came across this blog (via) for the Freshkills Park in NY. It's maintained by "members of the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation team working to develop Freshkills Park."
While we may suffer from blog overload, this is a really great find, with posts ranging from Freshkills specific topics to larger issues of ecology and renewable energy.

World Information City Conference, Paris

2009-05-19T10:43:00.003-05:00

We just received an announcement for what promises to be an amazing conference in Paris, hosted by World-Information Institute for Futur en Seine. The conference title is "In/Visibility, Access and Urban Zoning," and features John Urry, Eyal Weizman, Brian Holmes, Bruno Latour, Saskia Sassen, Stephan Graham, and more. Takes place Saturday May 30 and Sunday May 31, 2009 14:00-19:30, and admission is free.
We don't think we could have dreamed up a more interesting line up. Unfortunately, we're not in Paris and it doesn't look like there are any simultaneous broadcast streams. Bummer.

Regime Change in Love Land

2009-05-18T23:11:00.002-05:00

A sex theme park, called Love Land, set to open in October in Chongqing, near the Yangtze River in China will, alas, not get the chance to greet visitors with its sexy statue.

via NY Times, China Daily and News.i63.com

Tours for Tough Times

2009-05-16T12:54:00.002-05:00

Our friend Nick recently sent us the Mother Jones list of tourist destinations for recessionary times. Definitely some good suggestions - we visited the Herbert Hoover Museum and Presidential Library earlier this year, and it's definitely worth the trip to Iowa (really great models!).
If none of these are your cup of tea, there's the suggested "Drug Tunnel Museum of Nogales, Arizona". Or, if you prefer your drug tourism above ground, and can get to Spain, take really, really deep breaths.

Scouting the War on Terror

2009-05-16T12:26:00.006-05:00

The NY Times reports on an Explorer Scout program that "trains" young scout to "fight terrorists".
Here's how the article describes the program and its attraction for youth:

The training, which leaders say is not intended to be applied outside the simulated Explorer setting, can involve chasing down illegal border crossers as well as more dangerous situations that include facing down terrorists and taking out "active shooters," like those who bring gunfire and death to college campuses. In a simulation here of a raid on a marijuana field, several Explorers were instructed on how to quiet an obstreperous lookout.
"Put him on his face and put a knee in his back," a Border Patrol agent explained. "I guarantee that he’ll shut up."

And what attracts youth?

One participant, Felix Arce, 16, said he liked "the discipline of the program," which was something he said his life was lacking. "I want to be a lawyer, and this teaches you about how crimes are committed," he said.Cathy Noriego, also 16, said she was attracted by the guns.

We could go on about the convergence of individualistic/libertarian fantasies, digital games and the dual role these fantasies play in reproducing legal and illegal violence... but that's not really our goal here. But we can't help but be reminded of the stories from a couple of years ago about the production of touristic experiences surrounding illegal border crossing.

Photos: Todd Krainin for The New York Times

The Nude, the Dark and the Slightly Off

2009-05-12T23:33:00.001-05:00

The Nude:
A nudist hotel opens in Germany and, just in case, the Swiss make sure visitors don't wander into the alps in their birthday suit.
The Dark:
A British firm plans a cruise to celebrate the anniversary of the Titanic disaster.
Apparently, the Killing Fields are good for gambling?
Nebraska needs a tourist site really, really bad.
And the Slightly Off:
Did you visit the four corners? Ooooh, so close.
image via

Olympic Round Up

2009-04-08T16:04:00.002-05:00

Whew... there's a lot of media being churned up around the Olympics! Here's a quick report back from some of the recent material that we've been trying to keep up with.
The Chicago Sun Times on Mayor Daley's gambling Chicago's future on the 2016 games. Interesting that he cites all these international cites as success stories and none in North America. Wonder why that is? Could it be that Montreal JUST paid off it's Olympic sized debt a couple of years ago?
The Chicago Trib on how the games would actually obstruct recreation for Chicago residents.
Obama is the "quarterback" of Chicago's bid, according to Mayor Daley, as quoted in USA Today.
The AP covered the IOC visit to Chicago, and mentioned that 205 volunteers held up flags to show the footprint of the proposed stadium. If anyone has pictures of this, please let us know! We'll be looking for them.
The Trib on the pothole protesters, apparently foiled when the city "coincidentally" headed them off by filling potholes on Garfield Blvd just before the protests were scheduled.
Japan's answer to the Chicago bid... we're more peaceful than you. Tokyo's governor says: "Japan hasn't been in any kind of war or conflict since the end of World War II. That's why Tokyo is the most appropriate city to stage the Olympics."
Despite the Oprah, Obama, Michael Jordan endorsement team, some Chicagoans aren't convinced. Maybe they've actually looked at what happens in Olympic host cities.

In news closer to home (for us at least), we'll be working on more tours and analysis of Olympia with collaborator Sarah Ross, now teaming up with long time comrade Lize Mogel to look at the spaces of Olympics and World's Fairs together. Vancouver and Chicago will likely be first on our list of comparative projects.

Adventure Tourism in the Colonial Present

2009-03-24T14:15:00.002-05:00

We're currently reading Derek Gregory's The Colonial Present, so the recent NY Times story and video on the development of tours in Iraq was particularly interesting. Gregory's historical analysis of the "war on terror" and its ideological foundations as ultimately colonial in nature (especially as it continues and reanimates Eurocentric Orientalism) got us thinking about the development of commercial tourism in this geography of the colonial present.
The statement from the first gentleman interviewed in the video, essentially that his favorite trips have been based on State Department warning lists, is echoed in the question posed to readers by the Times: "What is the most dangerous place you have ever traveled to?" Some of the comments point to what could be considered obvious places for US-based tourists: Uganda, USSR, Vietnam, Albania, North Korea...
But some people made some interventions into such expectations - suggesting that Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, Jersey City. Of course, such interventions mostly followed the conventional depiction of urban centers (especially where there is a relatively large non-white population and/or large disparity in wealth distribution). One Berliner's comments sum up this sentiment:

Most terrifying experiences I had visiting San Francisco the multiculture city of love in the 90ies.
Iraq is changing and although I would not go there on my own I am pretty sure that you are much more safe on a well organized tour in Iraq then in some quarters in US cities (to be fair this goes for other cities like Paris ot Rio too)

These comments reveal the colonial present within the local spaces of empire, but are rarely called upon as authentic in the same way. They remain spaces that have simply resisted control and management, or perhaps more accurately that have been abandoned by colonial interests, except for attempts to cordon them off as much as possible until they're needed for something else.
The travel company featured in the story, Hinterland Travel, offers packaged tours through Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Kashmir and other contested spaces. There may be something useful in a comparison of adventure tourism in spaces of extreme military intervention and the "internal" spaces of organized abandonment. We're not sure yet...
Image above from Hinterland Travel

Shame Tourism

2009-03-22T16:18:00.002-05:00

After reading the NY Times story on the Working Families Party sponsored tour of bonus-receiving AIG executives' homes (such as Douglas L. Poling, who allegedly received the largest bonus of $6.4 million), we thought there had to be some other people who have written about "Shame Tourism".
There are lots of examples: Michael Moore's Roger & Me, a documentary travelogue of his quest to find and confront former GM Chariman Roger Smith, followed by all of his other similarly shaming film and television antics; various instances of activist organizations like the San Francisco Bay Area Toxic Links Coalition's Cancer Industry Tour; and of course, it relates to the age old protest tactic of taking the complaints to the door of the oppressor.
Like other forms of tactical tourism (e.g. toxic tourism), shame tourism is about located witnessing, conditioning our view of something through an experience in a place. Where toxic tourism locates the abject in spectacularly polluted landscapes, shame tourism locates the abject in morally compromised individuals and companies. The visible disparity between the wealth of the exectutives and the economic hardships of the tourists, shifts from jealous admiration (that is the basis for the Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous and tours of celebrity homes) to moral outrage. As in toxic tourism, a major rationale of these tours is to draw attention to the spatial aspects of inequity and conflict - it's easier to confront something/someone if you know where they live. And the tourist act marks these spaces/places as somewhat "public", at least open to public (re)viewing.
But a more usful tour might link the homes of AIG exectutives with those of legislators who own AIG stock. Or maybe with the myriad other businesses that are AIG's lenders. The questions for us are, "How can the shaming of exectutives also add to our spatial understanding of economic inequity? What are the missing components that can be added to the itinerary? And what do we do when the causes of inequity are impervious to shame?"
Image above: activists/tourists pass the home of James Hass, an AIG executive, Saturday, March 21, 2009 in Fairfield, Conn. From AP Photo/Douglas Healey, via the Huffington Post

An Olympic Sized Problem

2009-03-19T22:23:00.002-05:00

With the 2010 Olympic Games bulldozing ahead in Vancouver, we've been trying to keep up with the news surrounding resistance there and in the other upcoming host cities of London and a likely Chicago.
We just watched The Five Ring Circus, a story about resistance in Vancouver to the 2010 Winter Games, specifically focusing on the environmental battles at Eagle Ridge and struggles over housing in the city. The film portrays a diverse group of citizens engaged in direct action, from squatting evicted low-income hotels and apartment buildings to campers blocking the construction of roads to vocal protests at city council meetings.
One thing that we were surprised was left out, however, is the claims of indigenous communities, specifically that a good deal of the province of British Columbia is actually non-surrendered Native lands.
Just a few days ago, on March 8, indigenous protesters disrupted an Assembly of First Nations meeting where tribal bureaucracies were apparently making deals with Olympic organizers and developers.
The BBC, as part of it's Building the Olympic Dream series, featured a story about resistance to development around the historic (going back over 100 years!) Manor Garden Allotments in Hackney Wick. The area would be surrounded by the proposed Olympic Park.

Meanwhile, down the road to the speculative 2016 games in Chicago, the problems of that campaign are becoming more and more visible in the media. Just today, the Tribune ran a story about controversy surrounding the improvement of select roads in preparation for an early April visit by the International Olympic Committee.
Philip Hersh over at the LA Times Sports Blog, has an interesting post about the IOC's threats to the Chicago bid over the ratio of revenues shared between the IOC and the USOC. Basically, the IOC is threatening to withdrawing its revenue sharing contract with the USOC unless it agrees to a cut in its share. Hersh points out that the USOC probably holds an advantage when it comes to holding sway with the largest advertisers, i.e., as goes the USOC, so goes Coca-Cola. While we think Hersh's main point is largely irrelevant - we don't think either the IOC or the USOC should be getting ANY revenues at the expense of anyone - it only goes to point out what the Olympic Games are all about from the get go.
We hope that orgs like Communities for an Equitable Olympics 2016 get more coverage as the likelihood of Chicago winning the bid becomes larger. But we also don't put much weight on promises for community benefits. Games after Games have revealed the willingness of host cities to reneg on any and all promises.

Today Your Host Is...

2009-02-26T20:56:00.003-06:00

Recently, we've re-encountered some familiar artists that have got us thinking about the politics of mobility and privilege in relation to our interests in tourism. Specifically, they've got us thinking due to the unflinching confrontational nature of their gestures.
A writer friend reminded us of Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, as we were talking about Stephanie Black's documentary film Life and Debt that borrows from Kincaid's book. A classic post-colonial work, Kincaid's 1988 polemic (critiquing both colonial Antigua and its "independent" tourist-destination descendant), uses "You" and "I" to such direct ends that it's hard not to squirm in your seat. Even if we can believe we are "better" than the narrator's accusations, we are reminded that it is simply because we haven't been there.
Last week, we had the extreme pleasure to be in the company of Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds, who was visiting the campus of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Heap of Birds installed a new sign project titled Beyond the Chief along a prominent campus street and was here to deliver a couple of talks about his work. Beyond the Chief, like his previous sign works uses the orientation of written language - specifically writing words backwards - to call into question the subject position of the viewer in relation to the land they occupy. Heap of Birds' work reminds us that, even for those if us staying at home in North America, we are already invaders, colonizers and tourists, occupying land that was never really "free".
Both Kincaid and Heap of Birds present the humanity of confrontation in the face of indifference, inertia and a past that simply cannot be reasonably reconciled. The humanity they ask us to consider can never be universal, as it is always grounded in the reality of displacement and violence that takes place by taking a place. The specifics of the colonized matches that of the colonizer.
So what is the potential for the tourist? For those that offer only a mobile gaze? We'll get back to this with a discussion of John Urry, Gregory Ulmer, Dean MacCannell, Renee Green, Phaedra C. Pezzullo and some others...

Park and Fly

2009-02-07T19:32:00.002-06:00

Our lovely friend Sarah Lewison just sent us a story about expats living in Dubai, who are now in trouble due to the global economic crisis. Apparently, airport authorities there have found more than 3,000 abandoned cars, left by people fleeing debts that they can no longer pay.
Some stats from the story:

3.62 million expatriates in Dubai
864,000 nationals
8% population decline predicted this year, as expatriates leave
1,500 visas cancelled every day in Dubai
62% of homes occupied by expatriates 60% fall in property values predicted
50% slump in the price of luxury apartments on Palm Jumeirah
25% reduction in luxury spending among UAE expatriates

We wonder if that explains this.

When Will Iraq Be Safe For Tourists?

2009-02-07T18:39:00.002-06:00

That's the question a recent NY Times article asks, inspired by an odd Italian tourist named Luca Marchio, who decided taking a public bus to Falluja sounded like a good idea. That question should have been followed by: "Who cares? When will Iraq be safe for the folks who live there?"
According to Iraq Body Count, the number of civilian deaths caused by violence since 2003 is just under 100,000. While the number of civilians killed seems be going down - the number for January 2009 was 254, the lowest since the invasion in 2003 - it still seems a long way from being considered anything near "safe."
A friend of the office, Chicago-based artist and organizer with Iraq Veterans Against the War Aaron Hughes, has made some emotionally provocative comparisons between his tour of duty in Iraq as a soldier and the process of sightseeing as a (involuntary) tourist. Along with the analysis of the infamous Abu Ghraib pictures as being quintessentially tourist pictures, presented by many writers (and Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure film), there is certainly a more complex relationship between tourism and Iraq (and contemporary war waged by post-industrial societies like the U.S. in general). As Dean MacCannell wrote a few decades ago, "Our first apprehension of modern civilization, it seems to me, emerges in the mind of the tourist."

The Final Parking Spot

2009-01-28T17:00:00.002-06:00

A friend just sent us a link to a blog post by Wesley Treat about cemeteries that have become surrounded by parking lots... a land use conflict we hadn't considered in our Parking Public research. Of course, there have been plenty of land use disputes involving sights of significance, including burial sites and heritage-related claims, but this is such an odd way to see such a conflict "resolved". Also such a strange way to remind ourselves that there is earth under there, and it has a history.
Lots of comments to that post point to even more examples.

Touring Urban Food Production Zones

2009-01-24T15:00:00.002-06:00

The Futurefarmers have just launched a "garden registry" component of their extensive San Francisco Victory Gardens initiative, which will enable a map and connectivity tool for city gardeners there. The online map shows the area's micro-climates, visualizes how much land is farmed versus available and also shows "surplus alerts" - when someone has an overflow of produce.
We have been working with some folks in our own 'hood on some neighborhood growing strategies, and have been looking at Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell's past Amity Works projects as a source of inspiration.
The production of these "everyday" produce-places as simultaneously exploratory and touristic is something we'd like to look more into, as it's something we've been engaged with for a while in various ways. The relationship between these more DIY, participatory forms and more conventional agri-tourism (which occurs at a variety of scales, from the small to global) is equally interesting.

Military Natures

2009-01-15T15:38:00.002-06:00

Last October, the Travel Office presented with some other fine folks at the Public Memories Project's Visible Memories conference at Syracuse University. Our session, titled "Remembering Military Natures" was co-organized, and included presentations by Nick Brown + Sarah Kanouse, Laurie Palmer and Shiloh Krupar, along with ourselves. One of our goals was to discuss the manners in which environmental languages and policies are utilized for militaristic and otherwise violent regimes. In order to help facilitate and distribute our concerns and ideas a bit more, we (the organizers/presenters) produced a poster/map. We've decided to make it available here as a document/record. Download the PDF.

Positive Speculation

2009-01-14T21:20:00.002-06:00

So, we just got a message from the Yes Men - their much anticipated (at least by us) self-directed follow up film to Chris Smith & Sarah Prices's 2003 film is apparently completed. You can read more about it and see a trailer on their site. The Yes Men have crafted a combination of critical irony, satire and utopian gesturing that is hard not to appreciate. While their work has rightly been discussed in terms of tactical media and pranksterism, including the problems that plague a lot of that work, we think it deserves to also be considered in terms of speculative fiction, utopian prefiguration and uncoventional documentary. The Yes Men may be responding to current developments in capitalist disasters, but their ironic speculations certainly recall aspects of literary disaster fiction, like Poe's Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, even as they ironically pretend to "fix the world" rather than depict its spectacular end.
We'll be thinking, and writing, more about speculative fiction and pre-figuration in the near future, as we continue our "consulting" work with the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in Jacksonville, FL.

Black Gold, Texas Tea

2009-01-14T21:19:00.000-06:00

Lots of great announcements coming into our inbox! The Center for Land Use Interpretation has been busy down in the land of big hats and armadillos as the first artist-in-residence at the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center. They've been working from a field station (built with the help of students in the School of Art, College of Architecture and the Creative Writing Program) at the site of a former junkyard, located near a metal scrap yard at the juncture of the bayou and the Port of Houston Ship Channel, an important nexus for the refining and transportation of oil in America.
The exhibition at the UH's Blaffer Gallery, Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry will be the culmination of the CLUI’s study of Texas and will show how the extraction and refining of oil has sculpted the state’s terrain. The exhibition will open with a “landscan” video, an extended aerial shot of petroleum refineries and shipping yards that shows the massive scale of these places. In addition to this projection, the galleries will be filled with CLUI photographs and texts on many different sites across the Lone Star State from west Texas oil towns such as Odessa and Kermit to petrochemical processing centers on the Gulf Coast and everywhere in-between. These places tell the incredible and often surprising story of an industry that fuels our civilization by using deposits of hydrocarbons to create gasoline, fertilizers, plastics, and many other products.

An Unnatural History of the Golden Gate Bridge

2009-01-01T14:58:00.002-06:00

The SF based Studio for Urban Projects has produced an audio tour of the Golden Gate Bridge area. At their project site, you can download PDF maps and download the audio tour (via a podcast) or access it with your mobile phone by calling a provided number.
image above by Anirudh Koul

Hidden Travels of the Atomic Bomb

2008-12-09T22:45:00.002-06:00

Via the NY Times.
Also, check out their map of Manhattan Project and a video walking tour.
And for a broader exploration of the visual culture of the bomb, check out Joy Garnett's long running Bomb Project.