Introduction
by Mark Kremer
With great pleasure I present to you the website called The Trip.
This website renders in an artistic way the experience of a group of eleven artists, two tutors and one stalker/guide, of a journey in the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia, and their stay at Olkhon island on Lake Baikal, in the last week of May and the first week of June in 2010.
The way in which the website is structured, basically follows the places where we found ourselves, trying to make sense of our being there. There are seven stations: Departure, Amsterdam – Moscow, Moscow, Trans-Siberian Express, Irkutsk – Olkhon, Olkhon, Return. Images, maps and texts combine so as to complete the picture of the trip: a grand journey that moved us all, and continues to move us deep inside.
We express our big gratitude to James Skunca and his brother Andrei Skunca who gave their energy, their ideas and their time to accomplish the website. And to you visitors we say: learn and enjoy!
Prologue
by James Skunca
When I got the assignment to make the website about the trip in the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Irkutsk in Siberia and the stay at Olkhon island on Lake Baikal, my first concern was how to structure the story of the experience. Returning from Olkhon I literally told the story many times. Usually I would choose for a linear narration. But, as a matter of fact, several stories begin at several points during the days of journey. A conversation on buildings and urban architecture would make me give examples of Moscow, or the recent forest fires in Russia would make me talk of the five-thousand-something kilometers of forest that we traversed on the Trans-Siberian Express train.
A website that would render our journey could be a report or testimony, an account or a travelogue. Since the Romantic period many such travelogues have been written. Its basis is often a journey that finds its purpose in itself, in the travel and its experience. Some of these journeys had a destination, others just a starting point.
In our case, the trip would take us far away. More than leading us to a remote place, the journey and traveling would create a space and condition that we wished to experience and live through. Exactly this is a trip. Any trip has a beginning, any trip has an end. One leaves a place and a state of mind in order to reach another. While one leaves the old and familiar behind, one aspires to move forward.
A trip is an adventure, one leaves well known ground behind and faces the unknown and insecure. In GoodTripBadTrip we were introduced to art of the sixties that finds itself between the poles of Conceptualism and Psychedelia. In this context, the trip in/as art has a spiritual, psychological and philosophical sense. In the best case a trip opens the doors of perception and leads to apotheosis; in the worst case a trip leads to bad experience and trauma. But all these trips take place in the form of a dialogue between the individual and the universal.
Individuals make very individual connections with their surroundings. On Olkhon each of us moved in a particular way, and the things we discovered opened different possibilities to each of us. All the participants had their own expectations and made their own experience. As a very diverse group of artists and theoreticians we would navigate in varying contexts, according to our own concepts and needs and processes.
A travel-guide usually has three main parts: maps, texts and images. It is made to guide someone in unknown territory. It names, describes and illustrates locations in order to allow one to prepare and plan for the unknown. But this website follows the idea of the travelogue. It is not a tourist-guide: for timetables or flights and accommodation one can go to existing websites. Probably all the participants of this project will recommend taking the Trans-Siberian Express from Moscow to Irkutsk and visit Olkhon, but it's not aim to just illustrate our journey and spread breadcrumbs for those who would follow us. In this website we wish to offer you a rendering of our experiences and what we did on our trip.