The world according to…

We live in a world that is seemingly within arms reach. The
global village(McLuhan), globalisation, air travel and internet
let many of us believe that thanks to modern advances,
cultural knowledge and geographical peculiars can be
made ours with the click of the mouse or a few hours on
a cheap airline flight. Everyone can seemingly be a multicultural
explorer these days without the dangers and
challenges facing explorers like Cook or literary characters
like Verne’s Phileas Fogg.
Is this really true? European internet users can be lucky to even
display japanese websites, community sites have spanish-only
or turkish-only speaking communities closed off to outsiders, turkey and
china are continuously trying to limit access and information
flow onto non-national websites. Google-maps runs separate versions
for countries like iran and israel and an
alarming number of teenagers in the UK can’ even spot
their own country on the map.
Every server links us to a
physical location, the people we email, chat and send video
messages to give us information related to their social and
cultural surroundings. Even when we don’t travel, we travel, but do we make the connection?

Tour du monde…
Inspired by Jules Verne’s famous novel about an english
gentleman journey around the globe, 80DAYS
wants it’s participants to travel around the globe, starting
from wherever they live. Exploring the opportunities and
limitations of modern communication, the 80DAYS
community members have to find people from the
geographical locations they want to travel through and
collect them in their travel diary.

IP Deserts
80DAYS connects the physical with the digital as the core of it’s interactive mechanism.

Travelling without moving
80DAYS is a study into the influence of the technoscape
onto the exchange of experience in the ethnoscape (Global
Culture: Nationalism, globalisation and modernity, Appadurai 1990)

80DAYS © 2007 by Marcus Kirsch