SF0 / simone53 / A place you have never been.

25 + 99 points

A place you have never been. by anna one, Loki

February 7th, 2010 2:57 PM / Location: -43.40020,172.69944

INSTRUCTIONS: Go Here
Now copy the random word go to Google maps
Select find business and enter the random word in the left text field and your address in the right address field.

Go to the first business listed that you have never been to.

ADDENDUM: write the word permanently or semi-permanently outside the business.

Both of us had plans for this task long ago. anna one was poised to install a chalk mandala at the office of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, while Loki came very near to a completion which differed from Spidere's only in being a few days later and far less interesting.

Years later, we found ourselves with a few hours to kill and decided to actually complete it.

The original random word generating website is long gone. After spending far too long trying to find a replacement online, we cobbled together our own and generated the word disuse.

Google maps turned up a wikipedia article inspired location: The Waimakariri River.

Actually, the map sent us to a seemingly random spot in the middle of Charon street, a few blocks away from the river itself. In the time since we completed this task, the Google results have changed, and now appear much more reasonable. Our image capture of the original map was lost in a hard drive failure. (It is only thanks to the magic of photorec that we have any proof of the task completion.)

The rest is in captions.

- smaller

DISUSE

We set out in search of DISUSE, shortly before sunset.

Mythic streets

We crossed the Styx.

More mythic streets

We passed by Nirvana.

Our mythic street

Finally, we found Charon.

The spot

Google told us to go to the middle of this street, next to an abandoned lot in a small residential neighborhood, where we would find the Waimakariri River‎. Instead, we found a yellow triangle painted on the asphalt. (The map today points to somewhere more reasonable.)

The river

A couple blocks away, we found the river.

Mud

The tide was out, exposing a huge mud flat littered with small stones.

More mud

As we walked out onto - and, to a large extent, into - the mud, we realized the stones weren't stones at all.

Not a stone

They were snails. Tens of thousands of live snails.

Marking

Striving for impermanence, on the grounds that it's only two letters away from permanence and therefore close enough for tasking, we wrote our word in snails.

DISUSE

Our word complete, we stood back proudly in the pit of well-trod mud and tried not to fall over.

Disolving USE

And watched for the next twenty minutes as the snails began to move off in search of patches of mud better suited to their own goals and interests. The end.

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