"The Traveller"

"The Traveler ist a low-resulution subject easy to recognize. You can find him in all these images, sometimes hardly visible, sometimes obvious, and sometimes you have to look for him as if you´re facing some kind of riddle.."
The project "The Traveler" tries to re-define traveling and its documentation in our modern internet-age: travel aims and -routes are preset by webcam locations. The traveler visits these locations, assuming that they show something important, something worth seeing. "Look, I was there", seems to be his only message, or even: his aim.
After reaching a webcam location, the traveler places himself in the picture, is caught by the camera and starts a second, virtual journey: fragmented into pixels, he travels as a stream of data through space and time, and is - by entering the correct internet address - visible on every web-connected computer all around the globe at almost the same moment of time.
Webcams produce, depending on technical abilities and the their owner´s will, permanently new images. Every hour, every minute or even in realtime. Now before one image is overwritten by the following one, we save the data, we conserve the image as a "web photography". The places visited by the traveler are documentated by these web photographies as if he sends a modern kind of post card.
Reasons to point web cams at the world are as various as the created images. Information (e.g. traffic cams), surveillance, advertising tourist attractions. Some webcams are set up out of private enjoyment or enthusiasm for modern techniques and show nothing more than its owners´s backyard. The fact that the backyard is visible over the internet makes it something important, something worth seeing.
The traveler´s aim is to visit as many different types of webcams as possible. At the end, we want him to visit every continent and thus create the impression of a world wide trip.