ABSTRACT
The metaphor of vacationing as a cultural laboratory makes sense, but what kind of experiment is it to be? It can be a new awareness of the body, the luxury of regressing into playful childhood, the feeling of freedom of choice or the luxury of not having to choose. It may be the challenge of handling new social relations or redefining old ones … stretching old rules or even transgressing them. … Perhaps the most important tourist experiments concern daydreaming and mindtraveling, skills of transcendence, which vacationers explore and practice. Here, you learn to move simultaneously through landscapes and mindscapes, in time travel and flights of the mind, as fantasy turns into social practice in constant interaction with the very concrete materiality of technologies and flows of media.
