The itch, the spark, the urge, the inspiration, the vision, the hallucination. Whatever you may call it, the impulse manifests as an explosion of personal desires triggered ­by a response to external stimuli.

This brings me to how this Avatour came to life. I grew up with access to technology and continue to be surrounded by it in my professional and private life. With my first PC being one with the Windows XP operating system and its iconic default green meadow wallpaper, I have always associated the smooth surface of the screen with idyllic landscapes. The transition from Windows to OS X, one Californian landscape was replaced by many others. Each time I would look away from the screen for a moment long enough for it to auto-lock, I returned to the same beautiful photograph. The impulse got nurtured further when I transitioned to social media where across platforms algorithms and advertisements were inviting me to Brazil and Bali summers, globe-trotter content, and celebrity getaway weekends. FOMO ¹⁶ induced by social media peer pressure, dopamine addiction, and constant gratification-need is what the platform capitalizes on. Hacking invisible subliminal stimuli into its architecture makes resisting its invitation close to impossible. ¹⁷

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FIGURE 2. Microsoft Windows. Bliss, 2001. The default wallpaper of Windows XP. A scan of a photograph of green rolling hills and daytime sky with cirrus clouds which Charles O'Rear took near the Napa–Sonoma county line, California in January 1998. From Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 3. Apple Inc. OS X El Capitan desktop, 2015. From Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 4. Apple Inc. OS X Yosemite desktop, 2014. From Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 5. Apple Inc. OS X Sierra desktop, 2016. From Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 6. Apple Inc. OS X High Sierra desktop, 2016. From Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 7. Apple Inc. OS X Mojave desktop, 2018. From Wikimedia Commons.

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FIGURE 9. Apple Inc. OS X Sonoma desktop, 2025. Screenshot from personal archive.

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In the visually overstimulating culture of the 21st century, the lengthening exposure to “light, cascading through the shiny, polished glass of the screen”—as Alex Quicho pointed out during her GIRLSTACK lecture in 2023—­became the main incinerator responsible for impulse-modelling. ²³ Most of the time when we gaze into the screen, we desire something on it. The same luminous layer trained personal attention to filter out the exploitative activities that enabled it.

A constant in the ever-changing planetary dynamics is that any travel needs to be preceded by proper preparation. A fitting definition for it would be the mentally draining, and boring yet undeniably crucial part of traveling which demands harnessing forecasting powers so that nothing can get in the way of a perfect experience. The prep is an immediate manifestation of the anxiety that—since there is hardly time to indulge in self-soothing tendencies—everything must go well.

First, one needs to decide from the pool of available destinations and organize means to get there. The weight of making a perfect choice drives people to seek help from travel agencies. ²⁴ As with any developing service of our generation, most travel agencies migrated online, making it faster to plan trips from home. Some of the most well-known ones are Booking.com and Airbnb (contemporary brokers of spaces and prices) who, while promising to “make it easier for everyone to experience the world by investing in technology that takes friction out of travel” and “help create a world where people can belong anywhere by living in a place rather than just traveling to it” respectively, are manipulating users into renting accommodations in illegally seized territories ²⁵ and negatively impact the quality of life of indigenous residents. ²⁶

Ultra-smooth experiences have come to signify the platform era, which erased human traces from its interaction-based environment. Quoting Alex Quicho, the predominant goal of the platform era has been to render consumption frictionless and switching between different environments (apps) uninterrupted.

Strategically pressured into making a quick choice and sealing it with submitting payment details, the remaining preparations include reserving travel tickets, applying for visas—an inherently racialized and discriminatory process ²⁷ —and hoping for their approval, suitcase-packing, and confirming documents (passport/ID) validity. The same kind of preparation is required for platform users. Penetrating the screen involves a state change from the physical, biological space of the corporeal viewer to the symbolic, metaphorical consensual hallucination of cyberspace. The transition from offline to online is made possible through avatars. In computing, an avatar is a graphical representation of a user, the user's character, or persona. They can take on the form of 2d icons, or 3d models. It derives from the Sanskrit word avatāra. In Hinduism, it stands for the descent of a deity into a terrestrial form. ²⁸ In platform culture, it is the terrestrial form that turns meta. The transformation from physical to digital happens through platform-baptism during which we gain a new (user)name and confirm our existence online. Depending on the platform it can be as simple as selecting from the ready-made avatar models waiting for our life-giving finger tap to become our platform stand-ins, choosing a picture from our camera roll, or by a personalized customization where we get to make our avatar as similar or different from our actual appearance as we’d like.

No avatar or username equals no account equals no access. The same logic applies to owning a valid passport—no valid document equals no travel. Therefore, the essence and cruciality of the prep phase lies in granting access. The passport/account verifies your identity permitting you to enter different spaces. It is a key to the world embossed with a name and photo. ²⁹ This key however doesn’t come without an implication of privilege and control. Passports in the form we know today serve as the main identity certificate when crossing borders. On as little as 125mm by 88 mm, they hold information from full name and citizenship to biometric identifiers such as fingerprints, face, and iris structure. The current standard for passport pictures is a black-and-white mugshot, with face and eyes fully visible and mouth closed in a ­“neutral” (non-smiling) manner. Neutrality generates better matches for face-scanning softwares. Stiff guidelines, time pressure, and the judging camera lens leave many people dissatisfied, to say the least.

A 2022 platform trend changed the way people approach this act. Started on TikTok by Georgia Barrat as a make-up tutorial became a viral guide how to redefine mugshot-photography into a new standard of attractiveness—bare and “natural” invitations to engage with our profiles. Worldwide, users began updating their profile pictures by this self-defined go-to format, until circa mid-2024.

FIGURE 10. Barrat, Georgia (@georgia.barrat / TikTok). Viral passport photo makeup – and it's all about winged-out eyes and sculpted skin, 2022. From Glamour UK.

FIGURE 11. Instagram users. Passport-profile picture, remnants of the trend as of 2025. Screenshots from personal archive.

While the unified platform-face-phase made an impact for a few seasons and could be understood as a logical activity since our profiles on the platform are passport stand-ins, the format of the profile picture is not imposed a priori and can be changed at a whim. The same goes for the username as long as it's unique enough to be the only one existing on the given platform. The comfort of non-binding decisions in how one wants to appear online masks the reality of personal data ³⁰ fed to the platform.

IRL ³¹ we pay money to acquire a passport, on the platform we pay with data. Whether offline or online as long as we are willing to submit to external surveillance and control systems, we have a right to be a tourist.

Stepping out of one's day-to-day environment is the condition for becoming a tourist. As exciting as leaving your home grounds is, it includes hardships such as unforeseen delays, traffic, lengthy travel- and waiting time, or dangers of accidents due to vehicle malfunctions.

Romanticism—known for its predilection for the foreign, remote, and mysterious—glamorized traveling and resulted in a reinterpretation of the anxieties that accompany it. One of the movement's most defining works—Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich—represents the first prototype of a tourist. While having certain expectations of what the journey will bring, the thick layer of fog prevents the wanderer from knowing what he’s about to pass through. His wander is a confrontation with the Unknown, which could be seen as either a sign of stupidity or intelligence. What if embarking on a journey despite not knowing puts his life at risk? But, by refusing to take that leap, he would deprive himself of the pleasure of experiencing something new. Romantic wanderlust ³² and Fernweh ³³ cultivated the desire to conquer fear in pursuit of self-improvement. Just like a flame that draws the moth in, the fog strengthens the wanderer’s desire to travel rephrasing the fear of the Unknown into the thrill of the Unknown.

FIGURE 12. (left) Friedrich, Caspar David. Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. 1818. From Wikimedia Commons.
FIGURE 13. (right) Main character energy while travelling. 2024. From Medium, article by @dmlfyv.

Inspired by the human instinct to track progress and impressions, many tourists record their experiences in travel diaries. ³⁴ Early European records from non-European contact, while promising reliable and factual eye-witness stories, sought to impose European ideology on their expanding physical world. Those fictional first-hand accounts encouraged many to follow in their footsteps. They currently exist predominantly in the video format of vlogs and reels. Started in 2000, vlogging—a blend of video, text, images, and other metadata—became a primary tool for individuals to document their activity. ³⁵

FIGURE 14. Hammam, Iman. Main character energy while travelling + vlogging.. 2024. From Vogue Taiwan.

FIGURE 15. (left) Vlogging. 2024. From Pinterest (@lesiconique).
FIGURE 16. (right) Vlogging. 2021. From Instagram (@nailsbymarysoul).

The unique, first-person storytelling, enabled by a camera, has made many people’s lives feel like ­movie scenes. This shift in perspective ties directly into Main Character Energy, a recent internet-born term that reflects the idea of seeing your life as a narrative where you’re the protagonist. It encourages taking charge of your story and embracing a sense of adventure in how you spend your free time. Many travelers adopt the main character feeling, gazing out the window as they daydream about upcoming adventures. Therefore, the window is a bridge between the familiar and the unknown and a portal to becoming a tourist.

In computing, a window is a visual and interactive space that allows users to manage and interact with software, typically as part of a larger operating system environment. Multiple windows in a graphical interface enable efficient multitasking, serving as tools for productivity and gateways to data, communication, and entertainment through the screen. ³⁶ The light illuminating from its surface, just like the flame for the moth and the fog for the wanderer, generates desire for exploration. A desire constantly fueled by the platform’s Explore page. Platforms serve as aspirational spaces, drawing users in with the promise of discovering something new. Sharing private data and coordinates seems a small price to pay in return for access to new knowledge, connections, and experiences. In contrast to IRL-travel, which involves the dea of a body in motion, traveling through the platform’s architecture puts the body in a state of immobility. A voluntary hyperimmobility that goes against notions of progress and freedom and tortured us during the pandemic lockdown. Realizing that screen windows were the closest to the outside world we could get, motivated many to simulate travel. Jeroen Gortworst, a Dutch NOS News reporter, replicated an airplane flight with the help of his washing machine. ³⁷

FIGURE 17. Gortworst, Jeroen. Stills from TikTok video of an "airplane flight" recreated in the laundry room. 2020.
From Dailymail.com.

If we so desperately rejected being stuck at home, why do we choose to be stuck on the platform? Even if movements like European offline romanticism ³⁸ entered the discussion, we need to acknowledge that traveling and being on the platform became inseparable. Tourism shapes platform activity, and platforms dictate touristic appeal. Platforms such as Instagram and Facebook replaced photo albums as spaces to store travel memories, while platform trends guide tourists to select destinations for specific experiences. Posting online validates our travels.

However, tourist mode, whether through physical travel or online exploration, opens up the opportunity for discovery with curiosity, free from fixed expectations. It doesn’t guarantee authenticity but serves as a navigational tool to help rediscover it.

Finally! The Avatour has reached its destination!

The destination, the Unknown (space), previously existed merely as assumptions that inhabited the tourist’s mind during the travel phase. Envisioning how we will feel and what we will do in new geographies plays a vital role in shaping the appetite for exploration. ³⁹ Upon arrival, we also realize that we step into an environment where most probably no one knows us. The destination acts as a reset button for our identity allowing us to consider how we would like to be perceived during our holiday. There is an interesting relationship between the secrecy we adopt to allow ourselves to form new connections and impressions (detached from what we’ve been molded into our whole life). The secrecy of being unknown on location, allows tourists to move into a state of openness.

Hiroki Azuma in Philosophy of the Tourist (2023) frames the tourist figure as a link between private lived sensations and public foreign affairs, all while remaining private. That means that the tourist exists outside of politics as an anonymous agent. Like a newborn that comes into the world, the tourist needs to learn everything about the new surroundings. Infatuated by the metaphorical rebirth, tourists enter exploration mode, during which the Unknown loses its prefix and becomes familiar. Exploration is the chance for enlightenment and the biggest attraction of tourism. We are likely to encounter things we wouldn't back in our home countries. Azuma gives the example of people going to an art gallery on holiday even though they don’t even like art. Or how in the 1900s guidebooks of the Paris Exposition recommended visiting sewers, morgues, and slaughterhouses as attractions. ⁴⁰ Trevor Noah's 2018 sketch, Son of Patricia, humorously highlighted how visiting the homes of locals (what he called poverty porn) was marketed to tourists as “an authentic Bali experience.” The tourist as a distinct consumer category cannot be delinked from the drive for capitalistic gains. It is not the link to capital itself that renders the tourist problematic, but rather the overdetermination by things like TX (tourist experience, much like UX and catering to the consumer category of platform users). The fabrication of authenticity in experiencing locations, and propagating polished and sanitized versions of the destination, not only generates unified impressions of places but contests the realism of the experience on-site altogether. The touristic illusion is glued onto the site's actual topography, and what remains is an exploration of synthetic nature.

Artist Lara Almarcegui, whose work focuses on the border between urban renewal and urban decay, unmasked this process by taking down a wall that used to separate the city of Tai Pei from a neglected house to reveal how city planners hid decaying architecture to boost the city's attractiveness for tourist. ⁴¹ Since mainstream tourist behavior is designed by marketing teams, who study their desires on day-to-day platform activity, it creates conditions of ultimate convenience for the tourist, who enters into a state of ultimate passivity. As Pawley writes: “Today we live in a part natural, part man-made environment that is swamped by fast-evolving intentions.” The latter includes the technology layer or tele-reality shaped by electronic awareness. This tele-reality does not blind us but changes the nature of what we think to have seen. ⁴² In turn, what is disseminated for the tourist to see are only staged images.

The development of tourism and photography went hand-in-hand with 19th-century France as its cradle. Developments in the field of photography and the growing popularity of its digital form established the dependence of the tourists' existence on the camera. First, photographs/videos of the host community formed the impulse to travel. On location, it allowed us to capture moments precious to the exploration. The photo became proof of the tourist activity, and tourist’s existence as a whole. Recording anything that seems different from home resulted in a compulsive photo-taking habit and the freezing of bodies in selfie-pose. It also made evident that the photograph became more important than the lived experience. Susan Sontag wrote how consumption is fundamental to the medium of photography. In the introduction of photographer Peter Hujar’s book, Portraits in Life and Death (1976), she wrote that: “Photography converts the world itself into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation.” Instagram led us to become 24/7 flâneurs stuck in this department store at all hours of the day. The platform became defined by online performativity and aggravated the society of the spectacle, in which capitalism has led people to become more obsessed with aesthetic value rather than experiences. ⁴³

Photographs became a requirement for users to communicate. While in the early stages of the platform, photographs seemed genuine, tools like Photoshop, FaceTune, (face)filters, and other photo-altering tools reframed it as a performed illusion. Jennifer in Paradise was the first digital image demonstrating that software could be the promise of a more perfect world. Jennifer, who like a real tourist main character gazes into the turquoise waters of Bora Bora, is the last person to inhabit a world where the camera never lied. ⁴⁴ Dutch artist, Constant Dullaart, celebrated Jennifer’s 25th birthday by recovering the photograph in his exhibition with the same title. In a series of distorted paintings, while contemplating the impact of technology on society and memory, he steganographically concealed a message to Jennifer Knoll (the woman in the picture) in which he acknowledges how this image played a significant role in shaping digital culture and wonders about Jennifer's thoughts on its unintended fame. ^{45 46} Jennifer herself became a muse for contemporary image-making standards, proving reality to be moldable. She reminds of times when the authenticity of the photograph upload could be trusted.

FIGURE 18. Knoll, John. Jennifer in Paradise. 1987. From The Guardian.

The platform further blurred the distinction between real and fake, and AI carries on its legacy. Regardless of blue-check validations, the lack of authenticity radiates through each pixel of the screen. The backend of digital platforms relies on the classification and discrimination of data tracking our activity. Online, the time we spend marveling at a piece of content gets tracked and informs the content that will be fed to us in the future. The architecture of the platform makes true exploration impossible. The Explore Page is a lie. While users appreciate the way the platform knows them and helps them to make decisions, when scrolling in the way the platform intended there is nothing authentic about their presence online. The spectacle was exacerbated with the introduction of the algorithmic feed.

In March 2016, Instagram started transforming its feed from chronological order to algorithmic meaning that rather than seeing posts how they were posted we now see posts would be displayed first based on like- and comment-based performance. Kyle Chayka explains algorithm impact in his book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (2024): “The byword was engagement: whatever was popular would be pushed to become more popular; whatever didn’t get immediate attention was deemed undeserving and allowed to slip quickly into the void. Algorithms sought to “personalize” feeds, but the effect was that social media began to feel less personal.” ⁴⁷

Why do we then still choose to be stuck on the platform? The answer to this question might lie in the word user suggesting the addictive nature of social media. Just like cigarettes, they are hard to quit. Quoting Geert Lovink: “Bored with social media but with nowhere else to go, you're damn sure you've lost interest in everything you were once passionate about.” ⁴⁸ Julia Roberts in “Eat Pray Love” (2010) described this feeling by saying “I used to have this appetite for food, for my life and now it's just gone. I wanna go someplace and marvel at something.”

An updated tourist mode might be a solution to it. Aware of the seasonal tourist floodings, people increasingly try to plan their holidays around them. Tired of the artificial experience offered by tour guides and travel agencies during organized trips, self-organized trips start to take over. Resisting TripAdvisor recommendations and letting the destination guide you. What if you consciously include randomness into your exploration, get on a random bus, leave at a random stop, walk for a few hours. Then repeat.

Off-the-beaten-track alternatives might be the promise for incorporating a more responsible exploration into the platform. Tourist mode could offer what Tiqqun called new cartographies, new navigating maps, and new orientation tools. ⁴⁹ Instead of rejecting the existence of technology, the Avatourist should go through it and accelerate into a mode of unstuckness. Accelerate into total tourist to detach yourself from experiences prefabricated by platform architects. This particular form of detachment creates a lot of blank space for the tourist to navigate, inviting the Unknown back in.

We should make it our goal to resist automation, which through making decisions for us goes against evolutionary progress. We need to resist passivity. We need to find ways to get obsessed with our lives again rather than surrender to rotting-scrolling. Instead of brainless engagement design your Avatour with a series of hashtags. Join platforms outside of the mainstream. Turn off autopilot, skip the instructions, and allow yourself to explore its mechanisms. Figure out ways to glitch the platforms you inhabit already. Allow yourself to holistically take in the provided content, this time experiencing emotions and being affected by it, rather than brainlessly scrolling.