interior view of Our Vacation
interior view of Our Vacation
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Our Vacation

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Hardback, 11" x 8.5", 86 pages, full color, 2020

Continuing my interest in working with historical and 'found' texts I present the game Our Vacation. Our Vacation is built around a photo album in which the family never appears. I've paired the pages of the album with words extracted from Great American Road Stories like On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Damnation Alley (both the film and the book by Roger Zelazny), Little Miss Sunshine and other films and novels.

The game book is left in one place for days or weeks or months, along with scissors, tape, and pens. People with a free moment can sit down and cut out words and stick them to pictures; if a photo has three words stuck to it someone can write a story about the picture next to it using those words as prompts. The notes are written as if by someone who was there, telling us what happened that day or why the photograph was taken.

This is a game about the banality of vacation photographs, exploring the classic American leisure trip through play, and the awesome horror of cutting up nice books. I see it as a descendant of Jackson Tegu's game Permanence (which I hope to see in print this fall).