Can You Travel Without Physically Moving? "Online Lodging" to "Virtual Travel"

The talk starts with the pandemic ending most intercontinental travel. A friend working for a small Japanese municipality hit by the 2011 tsunami asked the speaker, an artist and researcher based in the Netherlands, how to spend leftover budget from a cancelled culinary residency. The speaker drew on "online lodging," a format in which guesthouses in Japan ran video calls that recreated the conversations of a shared common room, and on the idea of a region split into two overlapping places, as in a city-state novel. The project paired a Dutch coastal city with the Japanese town as two halves of one virtual region.

The middle of the talk covers the work itself. Artists were commissioned to film local places on phones, to make 360-degree videos, paintings and face-in-scene photo experiences. The centerpiece reused the box design of a home antigen test kit. The package contained a foldable headset that looked nearly identical to a test kit and resembled a cardboard viewer. Buyers assemble it, insert a phone and launch an app, skipping the testing and travel-permit steps. Demonstrations covered iOS and Android apps with scenes such as a sauna, a seaside view and a pig farm.

In the Q&A, the speaker said the project came from specific circumstances and that turning it into a series would not be of interest. The main takeaway is the framing of travel as something shaped by a local person's perspective, and of pandemic gaps as a space for new design.