Rirkrit Tiravanija / Untitled 1998 (On the road with Jiew Jeaw Jieb Sri and Moo)

"For his 1998 project at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which this three-part "passport" documents, Rirkrit Tiravanija made a month-long journey by motor home across the United States followed by a residency at the museum. Joining him on the trip were five art students from Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand. Tiravanija cited the road trips of the beat generation poets and writers, such as Jack Kerouac, as one source of inspiration for his cross-country journey, and he subtitled the project on the road with Jiew Jeaw Jieb Sri and Moo (the students' nicknames). Tiravanija also called the project - his most ambitious venture to date -"a typical family vacation." He envisaged the trip as an exploration of the United States through the eyes of Asian visitors and considered the motor home a mobile cultural laboratory from which the travelers could make an evolving record of their journey. Each day they communicated with the museum's audience through an interactive website (which included video clips) and by telephone. Every few days they also made live broadcasts, which were relayed by satellite to the museum and to students in a network of classrooms across the country, who followed the trip from start to finish and offered the group travel suggestions and invited them to their hometowns. In Philadelphia, the travelers stationed the motor home at the museum for two weeks while they learned about its collections and met with its visitors. This passport to the project was designed by Tiravanija to show his preparations for it in the United States and in Thailand, and to preserve the website documenting the cross-country journey and the interactive communications." from the book.