Virtual Tourisms /issues/6/virtualtourisms/ http://vectors.usc.edu/xml/projects/virtual_tourisms_v1.xml http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/backgrounds/virtual_tourisms.jpg inc/css/screen_pastel.css projects/icons/virtual_tourisms.jpg 0 0 0 0 0 flash/vectorspace/projects/06virtualtourisms.swf 201 The goal of the project is to exhibit existing ideas, arguments and scholarly content present in the dissertation that cannot be fully expressed or demonstrated in a solely written format. Throughout different phases of urban planning history, influenced by distinct systems of transportation, hotels have played a leading role in the way Los Angeles has been planned, formed, and imagined. Virtual Tourisms, history appears somewhat more elusive, presenting itself as an amalgamation of fragments and contrasting narratives that may never be grasped in their totality. For Kendrick, the hotel serves as an interpretive lens to examine the cultural imaginary of Los Angeles as seen from a variety of social class positions. Although not exactly the heterotopic space imagined by Foucault, hotels do seem to occupy a liminal position between myth and reality; a carved out social space that functions according to its own rules and internal economy. In Virtual Tourisms, the hotel also offers a concrete manifestation of abstract cultural ideals; a symptom of the collective unconscious of a particular age and geographic region.

The interactive structure of the project invites exploration of a revealing range of artifacts including photographs, brochures, postcards and other ephemeral sources. Like Pat O'Neill's work on the Ambassador Hotel with the Labyrinth Project, Tracing the Decay of Fiction, Kendrick positions the hotel as a possibility space for thinking about the past and exploring both empirical documents and the many layers of fictional construction through which we negotiate a relation with the past. Virtual Tourisms goes a step further to suggest the transformations of experience that occur because of geographical as well as temporal distance. We are familiar with histories that attempt to reconstruct the future visions of our own present, but what about the construction of alternative spaces as they were imagined by inhabitants of centuries past? Kendrick offers us both a literal and metaphorical lens by which to scan the documents and images of the past, inviting us, in effect, to construct our own histories, mindful of the constant influences and limitations of our critical and historiographical tools.]]> differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 11 no. 2 (1999), 135.">as Siegfried Kracauer observed, they are sites of spectacle and display. This web-based project comes out of my dissertation research which explores the role of hotels in the shaping of Los Angeles. I seek to understand how their representation in visual culture reflects their particular stories in the urban planning of the city. I argue that the hotel served as a vanguard in the shaping and imaging of the city.

Throughout different phases of urban planning history, influenced by distinct systems of transportation, hotels have played a leading role in the way Los Angeles has been planned, formed, and imagined. In this context, Virtual Tourisms brings new meaning to the concept of a digital "virtual tour" by making visible the urban planning context and socio-spatial relationships involved in the historical and cultural practice of a tourist's stay at a landmark Los Angeles hotel. The digital project takes shape in the form of a nineteenth century travel album. Within the pages of the album, the digital tourist visits a number of sites and attractions in the greater Los Angeles area of the 1880s and 1890s.

Virtual Tourisms is the result of a Provost's Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Scholarship in collaboration with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC. The goal of the project is to exhibit existing ideas, arguments and scholarly content present in the dissertation that cannot be fully expressed or demonstrated in a solely written format. In a sense, I am taking my research into a new, but highly related area: from city space to cyberspace, and attempting to put the analysis of both realms into conversation. It is not, therefore, merely an adaptation of my dissertation to the web, but an investigation of the very concept of a digital tour.

Guests at the Raymond Hotel, South Pasadena, 1880s
Virtual Tourisms does not seek to capture any totalizing narrative of Los Angeles history, but rather is an exercise in digital scholarship that calls into question the ways cities, and Los Angeles specifically, have been imagined and experienced because of changing visual and spatial practices, including promotional literature, photography, modes of transportation, and socio-spatial arrangements. The space of the tourist hotel can be used as a laboratory for uncovering what we know about how tourism and its "visual narratives" affect this process. Resort and tourist hotels themselves are virtual environments in the sense that they are carefully separated from the "real" city and its troublesome social contexts. This project seeks to lay bare the historical processes behind the particular images and experiences offered to tourists. It attempts this from within the setting of a virtual environment that allows users to tour through some of Los Angeles' landmark hotels and surrounding tourist landscapes. Inasmuch as the project acts as a tourist site in itself, it seeks to be a critical agent of virtual environments rather than a glorified history video game. Calling into question the spatiality and visuality of digital media, the website trespasses traditional norms of history writing by embodying the notion that the visual and the spatial informs what we experience about a new place, but that this experience has been historically and culturally constructed.]]>
I want to thank my programmer, David Lopez, who graciously and patiently worked with me on Virtual Tourisms in its various stages and forms. David's collaboration on this project added to its depth, and he consistently amazed me by his ability to turn my ideas into functional digital spaces.

I also want to thank Phil Ethington, who contributed valuable feedback to me throughout the development of the project, and Vanessa Schwartz, who along with Phil opened up doors for me in terms of pursuing new media authoring in the first place. Thank you to Kelly Schrum, Jose Maria Cardesin and Todd Presner, who offered many insightful and constructive comments during a panel at the American Historical Association Conference.

I am also grateful to the various libraries whose rich collections made the source material for this project possible. These include the California Tourism Collection at California State University, Northridge, the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles Public Library, the Regional History Center's Digital Archives at USC, and the Tom and Corinne Tomlinson Personal Collection.]]> Virtual Tourisms makes visible the invisible network of advertising, urban planning strategies, social relations, and class structures behind the functioning of a nineteenth century resort hotel, while at the same time, underlining the visual and spatial experiences that were privileged and that guests were purposefully intended to encounter. While extending the visual narratives of promotional literature of the nineteenth century to the genre of the digital virtual tour, Virtual Tourisms exposes what lies behind the facade of the "picture perfect" postcard by contextualizing the "visualization of experience" within a larger story of city image creation.]]>