• Background

The winter of 2015, I travelled alone in Europe for 2 months. Time spent on trains composed a major part of my memory of that experience. Each trip I sat within a moving cabin waiting for the next destination approaching. The space is a heterotopia grouping people taking an inevitable pause in between two sites, the “is” and “alt” in life.

• Design Details

The size follows the size of TRAVELER'S notebook, and the binding using multiple elastic strings indicating "tracks", creates the potential to add more book pages, just like our memories work.

• Content & Structure

The book overlays the trajectory of my life and the trains. OFF TRACK, meaning that I was on track, but off track in my life (foreign languages, off-campus, major-changing, away from friends and family, ...). I want to show the confusion, the feeling of being outsiders not only in where I traveled to but also where I belong, the "off" timing and space physically and metaphysically, and the energy I gain from the trip in this book. Therefore, I organize the things I want to include in these four major parts: Off Track, On Track (facts of the journey, pictures I took, ...), Lose Track (of time, space, limitation, ...), Keep Track (of things I wrote down, new words I like, words from people I encountered...). These parts are not listed in the book. They are instead meshed together and following the sequence of my journey.