Most maps are designed to be efficient. They help us find a route, estimate a distance, locate a point, or decide where to go next. They are instruments of orientation.
During one class discussion, Prof. Frederik Truyen looked at my Via Francigena project and raised a question that has stayed with me. I mentioned that, during the 2017 journey, I was carrying a bulky Canon 40D DSLR with a Canon EF 17-40mm USM lens…
Before this project became an archive, it was first a road, a bicycle, a camera, and a body moving through heat, fatigue, uncertainty, and distance.
YIN Renlong, Roadside Bicycle near the Via Cassia, 2017
YIN Renlong, Alternative Path on the Via Francigena, 2017
Spatial Auto-Ethnography Engine
A 2026 AI-Augmented Retrospective charting a 1,000-kilometer bicycle expedition from Rome to Milan.
The bicycle became not only a vehicle, but also a method of observation.
To revisit a journey after many years is to discover that memory also has coordinates.
A road is never only a line. It is a sequence of permissions, refusals, weather, fatigue, and encounters.
A bicycle is usually understood as a vehicle. It carries a person from one place to another. But during a long-distance ...
Long-distance travel often appears as independence. A person leaves alone, carries what is necessary, follows a route, a...
The Via Francigena is an old route, but I did not encounter it in an old way. I encountered it through GPS tracks, digit...
A 2017 bicycle journey along the Via Francigena, rebuilt in 2026 as an interactive archive of photographs, GPS traces, diary memory, and AI-assisted interpretation.
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