| Ideal Tourism | |
| Tourist postcards depict smooth surfaces of nations, people, landscapes and cultures. Postcards are bought, send or kept as souvenirs that stand in for the place visited. These iconic and indexical signs are also visual pieces of evidence through which different places are memorised. | |
| Postcards are paradoxical by nature. On the one hand, they stand for the exceptionality of the place in question, illustrate its specific character and speciality. On the other hand, however, they are generic to the degree that different places and people can easily be mixed or collapsed as "pictures on folk culture", "beaches", "hotels", or "cities by night". | |
| In a way, it is somewhat unclear, what the tourist postcards actually represent. | |
| Simultaneously homogenising and iconic in their specificity, the postcards function as idealised facades that are about what places should, in the best (im)possible case, look like; what the tourists should see and remember; what is most characteristic of the place. | |
| Unreflective forms of situating the self through nationality, ethnicity, religion, etc. function somewhat similarly to tourist postcards. The axis of east vs. west, south vs. north can get us only so far, and can actually block communication instead of working the other way. | |
| What we want to do is to play with these discourses on place, identity, and representation, and argue for messy locations, both metaphorically and concretely. | |
| Tapio Mäkelä and Susanna Paasonen both come from Finland, the land of thousands of lakes, snowy winter, Santa Claus, reindeer, sauna, and women in folk costumes. | |
| Steve Bradley, again, comes from the US of Coke, McDonalds, and conspicious consumption, and is geared accordingly. | |
| In curious ways, media artists are ideal tourists in their practices of memorising locations, situations, and views with, as well as on, multiple media. What remains to be seen is how far these positions of recording and archiving can differ from those of tourism in general, and what impact these differences can have. | |
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If you
are interested in contributing to this project, please contact us (Steve
Bradley, Tapio Mäkelä,
Susanna Paasonen), and locate postcards
and your personal ideal tourist snaps into our exclusive web based do-it-yourself
PostcardManipulator
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