“Why would anyone be interested in a book that some random guy wrote on his round trip in California” has been the most frustrating question that I have had to deal with since I started writing this one. Then I realized, I should just focus on completing this box of memories for whatever reason and I might revisit whatever urge I would have later on. This is a book of recollection of my memorable round trip I took around California in 2022, however, you won’t find photos here. I believe that social media (including my outlets as well) are so full of photos that I wanted to redesign the photos I took and redesign them with the help of AI in the form of pixels. Up to date, I have generated thousands of photos from the almost 9000 photos I took in the span of 3 weeks. Some AI photos had to be regenerated due to some errors or simply they did not represent the form I intended them to.
Pixel art is something I have been fond of, so here lies my challenge: to create imaginary vehicles of pixel art that would convey all the feelings and visuals I might have experienced throughout my journey. These images are the results of challenging textual prompts made into pixels, adding a certain nostalgia to them. My going to California stems from a childhood dream of mine, triggered by the passing away of my parents, cherished forever in my memory.
As you will see, I decided to divide the chapters by location, by the cities I visited and there you will see the 'pixelated' images of either my actual photos or some memories I could not capture ( because I was too drunk or driving).
In addition, transforming memories into pixels is not the only challenge I wanted to include in this book: the sheer description of a journey would not quite grasp the multitude and complexity of this trip, so I would like to invite you to a series of different texts of poems, fictional add-ons, non-fictional accounts, lists, essays, AI-generated texts and other tropes of non-categorizable gibberish that, hopefully, will make some kind of sense.
Apart from the gift of a journey, I will focus on other topics as well: pop-cultural references to movies, serial killers, music, or my own observations will all be part of this memoir.
Creating these images with AI has been tremendous fun, however, I must warn you no matter how exact I intended to be, there are mistakes in the generated images, such as illegible words, titles with typos, names, and characters that are misrepresented in a way. One of the most glaring examples is "myself" as I could give AI vague prompts compared to what I really look like (maybe it is better this way). Luckily, exact representation has never been the aim of this project, rather, I want to convey feelings, impressions, and different ambiances of places, hence you will find playlists and songs here and there.
I hope you will have fun in reading this non-conventional, sometimes unorthodox travel journal.
Can’t wait for the book. Never visited the US-so am looking forward to experience California through your writing.