The people from glass magazine invited me to write about space and distance in relation to my project80Days (oehm) project. Read it here

My fellow readers, (you still there?) yesterday at about 20:00 May 13, 2009 I finally had my first finished trip around the world in-game. It was a moment of joy. It felt very strange after such a long time (and essentially about 70+ developers days only though), to have it all work. Now the only thing thats left is all details to make it more user-friendly, add heaps of design and work heavily on the community presence of the site and then it’s “hello beta!”. I hope to still get the ‘gamma’ version out this month.

is a grandesque project.

have a look. The essence of it connects it seemlessly to 80DAYS, yet the format and again the browsing aspect of it is filtered and limited thorough an editor, which is where the similarity ends.

watch it here

80DAYS is a social network website with a geographic twist. It is a real world social travel game, in which the participant has to virtually travel around the globe(in 80 days). In order to achieve this, starting whereever the travel profile is created, the user has to collect travel credits(km) by having people visiting his/her travel page. The geographic aspect lies in the fact that the only people able to help our digital Mr.Fogg are the people geographically close to the virtual traveller’s location on the world map of the travel account. E.g. if the traveller’s current location is in Paris, only people visiting from an internet access around real world Paris will add to the traveller’s travel credits. The travel credits can then be used by the traveller to move eastwards around the globe till he/she reaches the starting point of the journey.
During the travel, both traveller and helper will be able to leave messages and images in a blog-like diary.

The obstacles and differences to the usual way of building a friends or aquaintance list online are immediately clear. The geographical limitation restricts the people who can help you travelling through a certain area. There might not be internet in that part of the world, you might not know anyone in this part of the world, you might not speak the language to find people there, etc. The internet’s infrastructure might span the planet, but the inherent groups and sub-networks are not as connected and accessible as media might want to make you believe. As artists, we cross those cultural and/or geographical barriers as a default position and try to build bridges, but we are not the majority. 80DAYS tries to help everyone build bridges and challenge themselves a bit, even if it is only from the secure place of the local internet access.

How travellers find their way around is partly supported by 80DAYS’ interface, but to a big part, it is left to the individual user to find people from the locations where they want to travel through. Geographical proximity might support this, as I living in London I might only know someone in Germany, but they might know someone in Italy, who knows someone in Greece, who knows someone in Turkey and suddenly I have a person in Turkey.

Getting to know people who still live in their countries rather than meeting the people who left their country is very often a very different experience. Many times, the people who you meet somewhere else didn’t feel to fit in our don’t even like their own country for some reason. Another issue is to get to know the world a bit better. Where is that country I am just travelling through?

The project builds on the part of Verne’s book during travelling through india, where a train line part has not been build yet and Phileas Fogg has to improvise despite his thorough mathematical planning.

It also questions theone-click shopping and click-and-friend culture of popular social websites like facebook, where you can ask a thousand people to be your ‘friend’ without ever contemplating what ‘friend’ means in this context. The basic meaning of what a friend is is hardly negotiable nor meaningful if the communication interface is as black and white as a mouse click.

The essential adventure is that, geographical and cultural distance still means something and has to be accounted for in order to understand the world and the nature of the communication. 80DAYS acknowledges this by mission and message.

Thinking about yet someone else telling me that ‘they love to travel’ and ‘want to go on a world trip’, I start to feel uncomfortable. Maybe I am too busy with my work that I love doing, just been to Brighton and Madeira a few weeks ago and, oh yeah just got married off the north coast of colombia to my beautiful colombian wife and am back in London. Only the latter being of a private nature, all other work related, I for the last 10 years have been living the luxury to go abroad, see other countries and visiting friends of mine, mostly natives to the place I visited them, mostly paid via work or work related engagements. Plus I never liked the planned kind of holiday. The kind that that my secondary school mates clique-style planned one year(!) in advance, only to experience the default ‘german goes to mallorca or the like to get drunk and loose their virginity several times to other drunk germans’ gig. There are many versions for many different age and social groups doing just that. Have sushi in japan, see a kangaroo in oz, but please, never walk off the comforting path of the cultural cliche.
That’s why I hate generic tourism. When people ask me if I found one of the panty vending machines in Tokyo, or if the coke in colombia is really that good. Realize it: media can’t capture a country and it’s people. Or can it? Well there is always the easy way to get attention. Michael Moore, before he was more bearded, did a documentary about germany called ‘Codename: Charlie’.
I watched it in germany and had never heard of most of these things he was talking about. And if I heard about them, then there were mere tiny anomalies rather than what the usual german ever experiences in their life. Yet, according to Moore, we are very very crazy about garden dwarfs and cockoo clocks(which everyone agreed is very 60s at the least) and are a country that indulges in demonstrations where noone knows about what they are demonstrating for and employs university professors preaching the Auschwitz lie, amongst other common right-wing activities seemingly on the daily menu of germany. The movie left me disturbed, now 10 years later, the pattern of information filtering is a rather clear one. Both sides are using it and they question is, if extreme positions can make a good case for cultural and knowledge exchange.
Where was I? Yeah, would a world trip fix this, or is it just the luxury of not having to work and staring at nice things?

As I am slowly making my way out of facebook, I also just noticed the graphic they are using on the new mainpage.

As an infographic(which it rather not is) it gives the perception that everyone talks to everyone across and regardless of any cultural or social pathways already existing. It reminded and re-assured me what 80DAYS is about: To expose and research into the existing pathways of modern communication and cultural exchange.
Similar to the experiment of the restricted use of urban space(take a GPS device and track your poor explorational feature of yoru own everyday use of your environment) or the fact that our eye sees only a very fraction of what’s really going on and assumes the rest, we are living in a world, where 99.8% of our reality is based on assumption without having ‘proper’ empirical proof for most of the ‘truths’ that are at the root of our secular and non-secular beliefs.(whoopey, got Dr.Phil on it again)

Only shows the biggest ones per country, so it doesn’t give an impression of how large some of them really are. (Think, one could be second in every country, therefore not even listed)
That orkut is still biggest in Brazil might amaze, but not if you know it has always had bigger numbers than europe in terms of usage.
Can be found here.