- Title: Distorted tourist
- Artist: Mark Templeton
- Additional Contributor: Ryan Diduck (contributed written journal entries)
- Designer: Dmytro Nikolaienko
- Editor: Mark Templeton
- Imprint: GRAPHICAL RECORDINGS
- Printer: Burke Group, Edmonton, Canada
- Publication date and place: June 20, 2018 / Edmonton, Canada
- Edition: 100
- Format, binding: Softcover / perfect bound
- Size: 18.4 cm x 18.4 cm
- Number of pages and images: 106 pages / 44 colour images / 5 one-sided flexi disc records
- Type of printing and paper: Digital / Cougar uncoated Opaque cover/text stock (100lb/80lb)
- Retail price: $48 CAD
Book description:
Distorted Tourist is the visual, auditory, and textual travelogue of journeys through five manufactured and reclaimed landscapes. The book contains five one-sided flexi disc records with compositions corresponding to five apocryphal places. Stemming from routine drives across industrial-commercial areas near the artist’s neighborhood, each photograph captures, mid-fall, the familiar and uncanny spaces of dislocated urban decay — monuments to the failures of modernity. Rather than attractions, the tourist here bears witness to the inevitability of moths and rust. Each location is captured sonically in augmented field recordings, a soundtrack haunted by deceased materials and dying matter. Templeton’s signature compositional characteristics — faraway melodies, recurrent phrases, ruined echoes — evoke a cyclical trajectory toward Distorted Tourist’s center, the concentric spiral of a record, a voyage on misremembered roads into the middle. Accompanying journal entries written by the author Ryan Diduck summon the hallucinatory diary of a Herzogian quest against reverse rotation. Photos and text appear to form and deform on the page. Together, the manuscript, sounds, and photographs represent an impossible portrayal, an audio-optical illusion, the roadmap to an eerie expedition that is at once unreal and urgent.