• 1  Michel Butor, Mobile. Étude pour une représentation des Etats-Unis, Paris, Gallimard, 1962.
• 2  Daniel Canty, “Patrick Beaulieu. Petite fabrique de l’âme,” esse arts + opinion, no. 75, Spring-su (...)
• 3  Karleen Groupierre, “Le transmédia: un dépassement du médium ?,” Appareil, vol. 18, 2017, p. 75. [ (...)
• 4  Attributed to Henry Jenkins due to his seminal work on the culture of convergence and the definiti (...)
• 5  Corresponding to what Karleen Groupierre refers to as “cross-media”: “A range of media that are al (...)

1Take over a territory, let geography be your guide, seek the unknown. These profoundly American motivations imbued the colonisation of a land that once was mapped out by the First Nations: however, today, these impulses seem to be out of date, overdone. It takes a certain naivety and a particular appetite for risk to attempt this type of travel experiment in the U.S. It also calls for an unprecedented aptitude to tell the story in a way that differs from a travelogue—a genre that had its codes smashed fifty years ago by Michel Butor’s Mobile,1 his astonishing “study for a representation of the United States.” To set off on a similar adventure in today’s world, requires an attitude of ownership and a light touch, and this is where Daniel Canty and Patrick Beaulieu come in.  What they refer to as their “transborder odyssey,” which takes them from Canada to the United States, is guided by three separate indicators: the migration patterns of the Monarch butterfly, the direction of the wind, and luck. These projects, they say, are part of a naive science experiment,2 where the odyssey materialises along the produced and recorded tracks of an actual experience and journey—but also through the multiple, quirky and polymorphous versions of the account. This is the aspect that interests us most in this article. Contrary to current transmedia trends, where the constant renewal of narrative and creative forms caused by the “changes in our society and the use of new media”3 means that while fiction is easily dispersed over complementary delivery channels,4 literature remains frozen around the idea that fiction is stable and comes in one, everlasting form—once a novel is published, there are very few other versions in terms of format (hardback to paperback). Popular fiction does manage to spread out over other media, but for the most part, this happens in stages (a series based on one character, for example) and in the rollout of a specific universe. Popular series such as the Harry Potter books and the Millennium trilogy, are good examples of the current trend for making fiction available in a number of media—novels, comic books, films, television series, video games, fanfiction, mobile applications, etc.—according to a carefully orchestrated and coordinated plan.5 In general, this type of popular culture, transmedia literary incarnations are not associated with the more limited field of literature.

• 6  Without necessarily being limited to digital media.
• 7  A book that brought all three projects together in one work was published: Patrick Beaulieu and Da (...)

2The multidisciplinary author and artist from Quebec, Daniel Canty, is somewhat of an exception in this area, as his literary projects reinvent themselves according to whatever channel he chooses, without submitting to the same “imperialist” coordination of other transmedia works,6 Canty manages to combine literary fiction and art exhibitions, cultural mediation projects and videos, websites and books. In recent years, Canty has paired up with the visual artist Patrick Beaulieu on three unique travel projects: Vector Monarca (2007), a journey that saw the pair follow Monarch butterflies from Quebec to Mexico; Ventury (2010), an expedition which involved travelling in the same direction as the wind from Chicago to the south east of the United States; and Vegas (2013), a trip where luck played the (arbitrary) role of navigator. The multiple perspectives of the experience, the sampling methods, but above all the but also the scattered appropriation of the various tracks seem to us, to exemplify the main feature of what we refer to as fluid fictions within these odysseys—as, despite the fact that actual material artefacts are produced, it is the narratives, the invented and the fabulous, that come to the fore and appear in different formats and media. The Internet plays the decisive role of a bridge, like a space for transmission and transformation, and not merely a drop point. We choose V number two from the triple V,7 Ventury, in order to examine the way in which the journey was recorded, which will lead us to explore the issues of writing and representation through the trans-mediation of the traces of this journey.

• 8  Patrick Beaulieu and Daniel Canty, VVV. Trois odyssées transfrontalières, Montréal, Éditions du pa (...)
• 9  As Canty and Beaulieu’s presentation entitled “Jours de chance : trois odyssées transfrontières à (...)
• 10  Rachel Bouvet and Myriam Marcil-Bergeron, “Pour une approche géopoétique du récit de voyage,” Arbo (...)
• 11  “Is it not time to think of placing literature in relation to space, to promote a poetic géocritiq (...)

3The Ventury project is the brainchild of visual artist Patrick Beaulieu. The original, ambitious objective was to follow the direction of the wind using Chicago, the “Windy City,” as a starting point. In a blue, Ford Ranger truck nicknamed the “Blue Rider” with a weathervane and a windsock, Beaulieu, and a few companions, took off along the roads of America, wherever the wind took them. The expedition took place in Autumn 2010 and lasted 25 days. Three other artists took part: the architect and landscaper Alexis Pernet, the artist and writer Daniel Canty and the writer Dauphin Vincent. They each took it in turns as co-pilot beside Beaulieu, recording their own experiences, in their own way in a travel diary and on a roadmap. The immortalisation of their trip was for them a reflection, “the description or interpretation of the winds that blew, combined with the intensity of their emotions.”8 The Ventury project was a risk—Beaulieu claimed, after the fact, that he would have been ready to abandon the Blue Rider offshore had the wind dictated.9 In addition to the logistical risk of an expedition that depended on factors that could not be controlled (the flight paths of butterflies, the wind, luck…), there was also the issue of the odyssey’s cost-effectiveness, and that of the artistic project that depended on it directly. The objective of the experiment went beyond a simple road trip around the U.S. and gathering anecdotes to tell later on. The integration of a resolutely artistic dimension to the adventure requires a triple experiment associated with a geo-poetic perspective, that “looks at the travelogue from three perspectives at once, scientific, philosophical and poetic.”10 A writer that adopts this creative position is particularly sensitive to the geographical elements of the journey (landscapes, architecture, climate, etc.), which creates a more intense connection to the world. Geography remains but a human projection on space, and as Bertrand Westphal so rightly tells us, all geocriticism requires that we examine the interactions between human spaces and their literary representation—to uncover the cultural basis to this seizure of space by humans.11 Rather than objectively retracing the journey, instead it becomes a source of reflection and creativity that the artist can capture using a range of devices and tools such as a camera, a pencil, a paintbrush. For the writer experimenting with geopoetics, writing never corresponds to a faithful account of the journey (nor is it intended to), instead, it is always coloured with the author’s own subjectivity, transposing their experience and keeping it alive through words. Geopoetics thus requires fluidity, fulfilling a need to account for the journey’s unpredictable twists and turns rather than the end result, of a singular, rather than factual experience.

• 12  Daniel Canty, Les États-Unis du vent, Chicoutimi, La Peuplade, 2014, p. 11.

4This vision is absolutely faithful to the spirit that has guided the creators of VVV, and the way they are explicitly open to the poetization of the experience and the world. In addition, letting go is crucial for the protagonists—a large part of Ventury comes from invention, unpredictability and dreaming: “Let the wind carry you. Give in to a higher force. Obey a reason that reason does not know.”12 The emphasis was obviously not on the destination, but on the journey, the chance events, the traces, the effect it had on the companions of the odyssey. In order to keep a record of their adventure, the artists undertook a sampling exercise: they selected a range of isolated elements that would bear witness to all they had seen, heard and experienced. They recorded numerous remnants of their adventure, traces of the name of a hotel, of a conversation with such and such, of the taste of a certain meal. A number of methods of capturing real events were used in order to record these samples, in the same way that this rich source of material was used and transmitted in different ways.

• 13  Patrick Beaulieu et Daniel Canty, VVV. Trois odyssées transfrontalières, Montréal, Éditions du pas (...)

6Video, the favoured medium that combines sound, image and movement, was used on all three odysseys. Patrick Beaulieu filmed scenes that were evocative of the theme chosen for each expedition. For example, in the case of Ventury, he filmed the billowing movement of a curtain through an apartment window or quivering electric cables. These images were added to by still photography—taken with a Polaroid (in Vector Monarca) or a shared camera where the artists would take photographs of the elements of the landscape they encountered. The travellers also wished to keep a written account of their adventure. Each trip was an opportunity for Canty or his companions to keep a travel diary or a notebook in which they recorded their experiences. They wrote about the weather conditions, places they ate and slept, people they met, their geographical location. At times, these notebooks were also used for drawing diagrams or sketches of the places they went to. The “orientation table,” a combination of a sketch and a map, made by Pernet and Canty, shows all of the city names and the places of reference (“Mississippi,” “Cincinnati,” “Louisville”), with, from time to time, notes: “Where we went. / What we saw. / Who we talked to. / What we ate. / The weather. / The books we found.”; “When does a road start to look like a river? You need to start by losing the line of a lake.”13

• 14  Grégory Chatonsky , “Esthétique du flux,” Rue Descartes, vol. 1, no. 55, 2007, p. 86.
• 15  Grégory Chatonsky, “Esthétique du flux,” Rue Descartes, vol. 1, no. 55, 2007, p. 95.

10Connected to Gregory Chatonsky’s aesthetic of flux, the notion of incident refers to a “feeling that something is overflowing in the field of perception and never stops, it flows indefinitely as if nothing was ever autonomous again.”14 This aesthetic tends to provoke incidents, to come up against uncontrollable events, dictated by outside forces, a state of mind in which Canty and his acolytes found themselves. The outside participation was thus crucial to the attempt to grasp the flux that constitutes the framework of their expeditions. The objects collected (butterfly wings, stickers…) were a means to extract a piece of the flux, in fragments, and the act of collecting these scraps was a way to preserve a trace. So, it was by using these scrappy elements, torn from their experience—“the cutting was an integral part of the digital flux”15—, stuck here and there on various documents and devices, that the artists attempted to give a shape and a body to a journey that was fundamentally unpredictable.

• 16  Italo Calvino, Palomar, Paris, Seuil, 1985.  
• 17  For Philippe Ortel, the device is “a matrix of potential interaction, an interactional matrix,” re (...)

11To give shape, choose the angle, the frame, the lens. These are all things a photographer, sculptor, painter, writer does. We just mentioned the attitudes taken on by the travellers—we are a stone’s throw from the three approaches to reality experimented by Italo Calvino in his collection of stories entitled Palomar,16 where the writing is in turn, descriptive, narrative and philosophical. We easily grasp the effect of the device, a theme that features prominently in this collection of articles, that works on two levels: the act of doing on the material; and the series effect, the temporality of the process.17 Shaping the real, approaching it with a given attitude or perspective (whether chosen, forced or imposed by chance), is one of the founding movements of Beaulieu and Canty’s odysseys, but it is also a recurring movement, one that is reiterated, expressing the fiction generated by the journey in different ways.

• 18  Patrick Beaulieu, Vector Monarca, 2007. [Online] http://vectormonarca.com/fr/index.php; Vegas, 201 (...)
• 19  Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation. Understanding new media, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1 (...)

13Distance and detachment set in when the odysseys are presented with a time shift. Of course, the three websites18 associated with the project, available in and out of step with the expeditions, contribute greatly to the longevity of these artistic events—the proof being that we still consult them today, as the role they play for us is informative. Nevertheless, their role is unequal, as the Vector Monarca site is the most detailed and elaborate addition to the odyssey of the three (while the structure and reach of Ventury and Vegas, mean they work as trailers for a film that we can’t even imagine). In addition, beyond these variations, the shift in medium takes over, in as much as it changes the transmission and the experience—that of the reader, or, in this case of the viewer. While an informational or factual approach means we see websites as a means of stabilising material that would otherwise have been forgotten about, if we look closer at the media used we can see the progressive dilution of the sampling process. As second-level traces purposely put together using the traces collected by the travellers, the websites are more about remediation (as in Bolter and Grusin19), with a relationship of distance and homage, of rivalry and re-appropriation of the previous medium, to the original one.

• 20  A copy can also be seen in VVV, on pages 62 sq., with the legend Carnet de science naïve. [Online] (...)

14On the website of the first expedition,20 the page by page reproduction of one of the Vector Monarca notebooks, denies the material nature of the object as it elevates it to trace status, but its digital avatar can be understood aesthetically—the way the pages are presented, the visual effects and browsing from one image to the next reduce the informational character of the archive, which is replaced by a distant perception of the experience—with five degrees of distance: subjective perception, drafted in words and images, the use of a material medium, the digitisation as pictures of the notebook and the insertion of the pictures into the architecture of a website. This clash between proximity and distance is at its height when browsing the websites, as the consultation adjusts itself according to specific expectations of digital culture (which refuses any temporal distance or shift from the get go), and a consultation that is also affected by the huge appetite for archive material that is constantly being fed by the same digital culture.

• 21  See the blurb for the book on the Éditions du passage website. [Online] http://www.editionsdupassa (...)

15This type of remediation is all the more surprising when we see the aesthetic shift in the samples and materials associated with Beaulieu and Canty’s odysseys. The VVV book is the sum of three Vs, a “geopoetic atlas,”21 according to the authors, that brings together, by comparing and distinguishing, the adventures of Patrick Beaulieu and his acolytes. The book is both an initial contact with the experiences, and a meta take on the artistic approach, and it pushes the representation of the real even further. From the aestheticization of the archives, the explanation of the attitudes and the appearance of the tools (in the end, the maps were not useable), the intermedia relationship, from the book to the different media that contain the content represented in the book, might lead to confusion among some readers. This is not necessarily the case, and we make sense of the proposition when we understand it as a rewrite, as a shift. Through all of its occurrences, the odyssey goes beyond the iterative character of its forms of expression to enter into a recursive loop but with a constant shift factor—from one time to the next, an extra distance is imposed, leaving room for greater subjectivity, aesthetic manipulation and fiction. It is only when we situate the overall VVV project, and all of its spinoffs, in its own specific media dynamic that we can grasp this logic, which is fluid because it is based on fluctuation, at its deepest level.

• 22  Daniel Canty, Wigrum, Chicoutimi, La Peuplade, 2011.

16On this level, Daniel Canty seems to us to be an artist that excels in transmedia variation. Well-informed readers know that his unusual novel Wigrum,22 and encyclopaedic work of crumbling fiction came into being from fictional material that was originally used to fill up a website of a multimedia company. Canty’s fictions are fluid in nature, they migrate and transfuse, crystallising into distinct, connected but clearly autonomous manifestations. Ventury is a great example of this fluidity. Canty kept a travel diary on his wind-following trip through Eastern America. The VVV book, that covers all three trips, includes a version of the notebook over nine pages.

• 23  Victoria Stanton, “Trajectoires performatives. VVV : une trilogie d’odyssées transfrontières,” Int (...)
• 24  Patrick Beaulieu and Daniel Canty, VVV. Trois odyssées transfrontalières, Montréal, Éditions du pa (...)
• 25  Read Canty’s  remarks on fiction and reality to Anne Klein (Daniel Canty and Anne Klein, “Entretie (...)

19Strangely, the road itself is given very little space in this study. However, as Victoria Stanton reminds us: “The road of multiple possibilities [...] becomes [for Beaulieu] an in-between place where performative demonstrations of intuition, necessity and serendipity take place. Attentive considerations to an evanescent present thrive within this performative attitude.”23 By taking to the road, a non-place that is nevertheless extremely busy, an eminently concrete incarnation of the digital flux we speak of in this article, the transmedia odysseys of Beaulieu and Canty manage to load this recursive movement with meaning. The occurrences of these narratives that testify to the traces of the sampling of the American flux all converge toward an idea of an impressionistic but nevertheless convincing grasp, of a society on the way down—in fact, Canty describes these adventures, in the end, as a sort of a “chronicle of disappearances.”24 We could easily see Les États-Unis du vent as a sort of extrapolation of the travel diary he kept during his time aboard the Blue Rider (because the issue of remaining faithful to the experience as it happened is no longer on the table). This relationship to fiction is a consequence of the relationship Canty has with the real, seeing that the very path of the odysseys led to the creation of a parallel reality.25 As the artist has harnessed a range of media using multiple voices and appealing to multiple audiences, in the end, a long-term view is the only thing that will allow distance, a shift, a rewrite and a new, singular re-appropriation of material that belongs as much to the protagonists’ reality as it does to their imagination.

• 26  Daniel Canty , Les États-Unis du vent, Chicoutimi, La Peuplade, 2014, p. 257-258.

21In such projects, there is a fundamental tension that illustrates the extent to which technical imaginary worlds are intertwined with one another in digital culture. On the one hand, they feature the armada of mechanisms of predictability and inclusion of images the technology allows—heavy machinery that obeys an implacable physical logic. Rules, constraints, genres allow the mediation of a previously formless reality. This is what the triple V travellers used to give meaning to their journey, a manner to grasp the America they covered, mapped and described. The notion of flow was also present, the original meaning that we associated with liquid, water and rivers is given a new slant that has yet to be categorised, but that evokes the uncontrolled overabundance of data. Wind and luck alike, manage to escape our grasp, but, as Canty concludes in États-Unis du vent, “however, the wind, as the expression goes, the wind was with us. Perhaps, the fact that we had trusted it meant we could now control it?”26 The constant question of our, hoped or suspected, ability to control the real through our art, forms the basis of much of contemporary aesthetics.