Project»Spring Fever

 

This is a custom display of points in chronological order from when I went backpacking in Virginia on the Appalachian Trail during the early Spring of 2011. I had set out to solo hike a few hundred miles starting from where I left off years ago when I had hiked 400 miles of the southernmost portion of the trail. Spring Fever is a serious condition that plagues most long-distance hikers: a burning itch to escape into the mountains for the coming of Spring.

Trail Journaling is an already established genre. But because I built my own tool for posting microblog content such as these, I own and control all the data. Maybe that sounds obvious, but the series here exists primarily as an illustration of that fact. The micro-content was born in and lives in the same system as my project portfolio. A collection of points (called a line) can easily be promoted to the position of project, with no duplication and a minimum of recontextualization. Blurring the line between origination and documentation.

As usual the photos were taken with my Android phone in 1-megapixel (640x480) format. Using this portable phone device as a gps, topo map, radio, cd player, flashlight, and weather vane, I was also planning to post lots of stuff in real-time during the hike. Well I didn't post as much as I had wanted because of battery power and because Southern Virginia has very shitty cell coverage. That didn't upset me too much though as this was all something of a quasi vacation field research art trip in the mountains of America.


this was my campsite one evening along dismal creek
 this was my campsite one evening along dismal creek
i just like this one
 i just like this one
 ok well that about does it i think ive milked all i can from a nice backpacking vacation that pretended to be an art project .. this concludes the exciting coverage of my northbound appalachian trail section hike from damascus to roanoke during april 2011