art

#N?S?E?W?

“Pack your bags, gang. Where to?”

So begins Khris Soden’s new project, #N?S?E?W?, a virtual road-trip on which we can all tag along and whose itinerary is crowdsourced. I’ll admit I just used that word-du-jour to annoy TdR whose heard it far too often in recent days because thus far, “crowd” = friends and family. You’re going to change that.

Portland-based artist Soden documents the trip on his blog (where you can vote for the next direction he’ll “move”), or you can follow it on Twitter via the searchable hashtag #NSEW, or join his #N?S?E?W? Facebook group. Document includes photo, a little history as only the curious mind of Soden can tell it, points of interest, and related…such as a 70s commercial for Rainier beer. Soden took off from Portland, headed up to Olympia, visited Mount Rainier, and is now, directed by the voting mechanism on his blog, headed north.

But when he says, “pack your bags,” he’s inviting the greater us along in more ways than one. It starts with asking for suggestions on what to see in a particular place, inviting us to add links, stories, etceteras into the comments section on the blog. And what’s going to be very interesting is that the “us” is going to grow and grow over time. I am imagining an accretion of information, memories, voices gathering in these comments, growing like a coral reef around the nodes of each post, building the story of place as the story of the road trip continues.

I’m hoping he makes it to Nova Scotia. He is also making me think about crossing the Nevada desert in a 1968 Ford Country Sedan station wagon with all the windows open and a block of ice in a pan on the floor of the front seat having left Winnemucca at 5 AM to “beat the heat,” said my father.

POSTED: June 18th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: , , , , | No Comments »