ON THE ROAD FOR 17527 - MILES GREGOR WEICHBRODT

There is still no acknowledged definition of a « processual book », but an attempted one would be that it’s a book containing the results of a calculated process in a coherent form, which has been provided by a machine. In this respect On the Road for 17527 Miles by Gregor Weichbrodt can be fully entitled to be a processual book. In fact it’s based on the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac and transformed through the Google Maps Direction Service. The spot that Kerouac described in its masterpiece are then parsed by Google Direction Service API, rendering then the book into a direction instruction of 55 pages (indeed with matching chapters) and quantifying the journey in hours and miles. The translation of the literary content into another domain of data renders the aura of this book from an only apparently scientific and aseptic way. What is then accomplished is then an objective characterisation, providing an alternative reading of the very same content in a contemporary, quite familiar, IT vernacular (the maps’ itineraries). The book then it’s a « hybrid » since the content is consistently calculated by the machine as a process, carefully relying on the original, and then embedding both in the reprinted and completely different form.

Gregor Weichbrodt was born in Potsdam, Germany and currently resides in Berlin where he is studying Communication design. Since his seconds semester he did several projects concerning the subject of conceptual writing and some of them became popular. For example the word-for-word transcription (in collaboration with Grischa Stanjek) of the final live TV show Germanys Next Topmodel 2011 – The Final starring Heidi Klum, layouted in the guise of classic drama, including stage directions and commercial breaks.
http://ggor.de