Journeys: 1900/2000 is an interactive installation about a journey--a journey in which the viewer is complicit and actively engaged.

Carol Flax, artist and University of Arizona professor, worked with ISA artists/technologists to develop an interactive photo album for the national travelling exhibition,Voyages (Per)Formed. The exhibition, curated by Alison Nordstrom at the Southeast Museum of Photography, features three other nationally known artists, along with albums assembled by early travelers from the mass-produced photographs purchased during their travels.

At the heart of the project is a reproduction of a 19th century travel album that uses fragments of memory, pieces of voyages, and bits of history. It uses single images from various existing albums, reproducing and recontextualizing them to create a wholely original "voyage." Robb Lovell, a computer scientist, developed a computerized interface for the project. Bend and touch sensors embedded in the pages of the book, trigger video and audio fragments that support, amplify, or contest the visual information received from the photographic print on the album page. Flax worked with ISA's Media Lab manager and videographer Patricia Clark to develop the video component for the piece.

The installation plays with notions of memory, presence, and the idea of voyage as a metaphor. The voyages documented in these albums from the last turn of the century were significant events in the formation of our cultural history. We now approach them with hindsight, filling in the missing pieces, allowing our own interpretations to guide our experience. These albums stand in for a century of history and change as we begin the new millennium with entirely new notions of privilege and access. Both the voyage and the voyager imply possibilities never imagined a hundred years ago. As it has functioned historically, the travel album is the bridge between experience and its retelling. In Journeys: 1900/2000, this literally becomes the case: the album functions as the actual interface; it becomes the prosthesis that allows the present to merge with the past. Through technology we find ever expanding possibilities for lived and imagined experience.

The piece was previewed in the ISA's newly dedicated Gallery space in Matthews Center at ASU in November, 2000. This "preview" gave Flax and ISA personnel the opportunity to refine the physical installation, the computerized components, and the travel requirements of the project. The preview also gave everyone involved a better understanding of how a real audience would interact with the work. As the result of this process, several changes were made to the final piece before sending it on the road. Journeys: 1900/2000 was an exceptional example of how the collaborative process works in the field of art and technology.