Marco Polo by William Boling

When a man is riding through this desert by night and for some reason -falling asleep or anything else -he gets separated from his companions and wants to rejoin them, he hears spirit voices talking to him as if they were his companions, sometimes even calling him by name. Often these voices lure him away from the path and he never finds it again
-Marco Polo, Travels

William Boling’s Marco Polo is a long duration project, where the US photographer invites participants to post snapshots, memories and moments in image or text form which are responded to: embracing, compiling or reacting against their input to form his own.

Boling often opens dialogues with his work. In Southern Places of Arts and Letters he documented the estates and landmarks of his heroes, conversing with the ghosts of famous literary icons, while for You Ain’t Wrong he juxtaposed bizarre and banal items from New Zealand’s well-known TradeMe auction site with it’s sister eBay, mining the sites for found photography before interacting with users by auctioning off the paired images. In Marco Polo he initiates a simultaneously direct and ambiguous conversation with participants in which their contributions form part of the ongoing project stream, and are responded to - in some way - by Boling.

Screens.org.nz welcomes contributions of photographs or text snippets - a unique opportunity to dialogue with a renowned photographer and artist, and to influence the path of this long-duration, archived internet project.

To play, simply tweet or e-mail:

Twitter:
Simply address a tweet to the artist, by beginning it with @williamboling.
For images, please use the http://www.twitpic.com service. Images posted to other services will not appear.

Email:
Simply send an email to [email protected], with @williamboling in the subject line.
Any attached image is automatically posted to twitpic.

For the current project stream and curator's introduction, please see
http://www.screens.org.nz/william-boling-marco-polo/