Tracing the Apparatus: The Technological Mediation of Experience in Los autonautas de la cosmopista, o un viaje atemporal París-Marsella By Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop

Abstract

In 1982, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop commenced a thirty-three-day journey from Paris to Marseille in which they promised to never leave the autoroute and to stop at every single rest stop. The journey, four years in the making, was designed as a game that would allow the two to side-step, or interrupt, their regular lives. Los autonautas de la cosmopista, a book made up of the compilation of a typewritten travel log, photographs, a narrative account of the experience, fictional letters, newspaper clippings, and hand-drawn maps, was published in 1983 as a means of documenting this experience. The collection and presentation of these various archival materials and repeated references to technology – the road, van, typewriter, and camera in particular – make visible the materiality of textual production and the intertwined work of the human body and the apparatus. As such, this article examines the photographs within the book and argues that the apparatuses and their photographic representations create a poetics of collaborative creation and playful interruptions, thus revealing an explicit relationship between technology and memory for Cortázar and Dunlop.