CHROME COUNTRY
A 3,5 year journey,
more than 2000 miles clicked,
over a 1000 images taken.
This book contains real memories,
that I think about while daydreaming,
and I dream about while sleeping,
of places I never visited
More images in different formats can be downloaded here: https://we.tl/t-AwxVinLjL3
Project information
This ongoing project started right at the end of 2012. Often I’d find myself late at night wandering Google Street View. So soon enough, I set a ground rule: No map view allowed, only clicking through Street View to get to new places. I’ve now been ‘driving’ on and off like this throughout the United States for years, taking screengrabs along the way just like I would take ‘photographs’ on real trips. I carefully organize, edit and select them into a digital scrapbook. Revisiting them whenever I felt nostalgic.
Over the years this led me to several questions:
Is something only real when it’s experienced physically?
I can recall my digital trip to California as vibrantly as my real trip to Morocco.
So is it the effort that carves an experience in our mind?
Is it photography if it’s not shot on a camera? If the photographer isn’t physically in the space?
What memories do we have from our digital experiences?
How could we create them?
I never started this as a ‘project.’ It was just something I did for myself. But over the years I thought about a good form to share my experiences, memories and images with others. Recent events made the time feel right. So I set off to make a book with a selection of my archive (which spans over 1200 images). The quotes used in the book are from books I read throughout the years, whether to help to put things in perspective (Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard) or because it felt connected to my ‘travels’ (The First Man by Albert Camus).
These are my digital memories bundled in analog form.
More images in different formats can be downloaded here: https://we.tl/t-AwxVinLjL3