A Travel Guide

A Travel Guide is a location-based, mobile-centric application for creating poetic texts in the style of the travel guide. The project has as its goal to give visitors an alternate reading of place, through the serendipitous juxtaposition of their current location with evocative procedural text. As more people visit the site, more travel guides will be generated, until eventually the surface of the planet has been blanketed with travel guides. The guides are generated randomly and so not traditionally “accurate.” You may need to try harder than usual to apply the information contained in these guides to the locations in question.The guides are generated from a database of sentences from Wikivoyage (“the free worldwide travel guide that anyone can edit”). The generation algorithm randomly selects sentences from similarly-named sections across all WikiVoyage pages, rejecting sentences that contain proper nouns. The text created by this procedure has the familiar cadence of travel guides, but describe no place—or every place—in particular. A Travel Guide is a 2014 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its Turbulence.org website. It was made possible with funding from the Jerome Foundation, now celebrating 50 years of the creative spirit of emerging artists. (Source: http://elo2016.com/festival/allison-parrish/)