The surface content of this project involves the camera and photography, along with drawings and other fun

things, of me dressed as the Tourist, in supposedly familiar situations, like being at home with family, or

riding the bus to work. The manner in which I typically make art is that I don't fully know what it will all

look like in the end. The essence of the content is that it's an excuse to make more work. The challenge for me

in making artwork is in generating experiences, and in this way, supposedly expressing my own language or

'culture', that comes from me; as opposed to borrowing something outside myself that could be construed as

derivative. That's when I did the walk to my studio last fall, filmed it, and made paintings from it. It was an

experience of my 'own' and so I could give myself permission to make work about it. But to say it's an

experience of my 'own' implies that I have "ownership" over the experience, and that is not quite what I mean

either, as it's impossible to own an experience. And that's what The Tourist is about.

Here is the introductory video of The Tourist. I wrote a script containing aphorisms and bits of texts I

had been reading, and spit them into Google’s web Translate tool. I then recorded the phonetic sounds of the

computer speaking the foreign language, rehearsed them, and that’s what you hear and see me saying in the video.

Google’s Translate tool is not a one-to-one replacement for a “native” speaker. The computer uses codes and

algorithms based on the text one enters into its web tool. What you get in response is a crude approximation,

close to what one would actually speak. When I asked a friend who is Japanese how my Japanese came across, she

told me she could only understand “bits and pieces”.

That’s just it though; there is no such thing as “native” language. We don’t create language; we learn and

assimilate it in order to communicate with others. So the Tourist also crudely approximates language, but the

words do not do justice to the intent. Language always 'fails' him. There's something he wants to say, and

things he wants to understand, but language (culture) is only ever approximated, even familiar ones like say,

the English language, or the structures of identity language between say, father and son (which i don't know

about you, but for me parenting involves a lot of wild hand-gesturing and improvisation). None of it is natural,

none of it is comfortable, none of it is 'home'.