Location,location,location

Abstract

The binary opposition of authenticity and artificiality, complete with a narrative of artifice’s conquest of the authentic, haunts much of Tourism Studies. Tourists, as modern figures, seek the authentic in order to escape from their own world, increasingly dictated by simulacra, or the Post-Tourist, as postmodern figure, revels in the consumption of sign worlds, delighting in the buoyancy of unanchored referents. Continuing this trajectory leaves us, and the tourist, with nowhere to go.

The Manhattan TV Tour, a tour of New York City according to television locations, suggests another relationship between these conflicted poles. Rather than offering a simulated, seamless entry into the fictive, the tour drags representational, cultural and historical files into each site and thus performs the spatial incongruities (‘bloopers’) of each site. This performance requires a constant negotiation of space for the tourist, a negotiation not entirely unlike that demanded in the very act of watching television. The spatial dissonance complicates the presumptions of a core authenticity and of pure simulacra, encouraging what Chris Rojek has termed ‘restless movement’, a movement that provides the destination for the TV tourist and an alternative way of configuring the relationship between actual and virtual worlds.