Happy to be promoting Abraham Burickson and Ayden LeRoux’s Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One (Princeton Architectural Press, November 2016).

About the Book
Imagine finding yourself immersed in a performance that’s all about you. Since 2001, Odyssey Works has been customizing life-altering experiences for one person at a time. Their team of choreographers, musicians, dream analysts, computer hackers, writers, and artists study a person’s life and create an Odyssey for them: interwoven, meaningful performances lasting days, weeks, or months. Odyssey Works is proof that well-crafted art can be life-changing.

Central to Odyssey Works: Transformative Experiences for an Audience of One is Rick Moody’s four-month Odyssey, which featured an original Amy Hempel short story, a fake children’s book, a cello concert in a Saskatchewan prairie, and more. Along with Moody’s reflections about his Odyssey, this book contains a new theory of art-making and ephemera from performances reassembled and paired with the group’s deeper theories. This full-color, visually rich, beautifully-designed book’s color-coded system allows you to easily locate areas of focus: design, narrative, interactivity, form and craft, reality and performance, or intimacy.

Odyssey Works has been covered by The New York Times, Fast Company, Vulture, NPR’s Studio 360, and Marina Abramovic’s Immaterial, among others.

Praise for Odyssey Works

“My experience was numinous, strange, important, depressing, intense, annihilating, powerful, hard on my relationship, and frequently very, very moving.”

—Rick Moody, author of Ice Storm, Hotels in North America, and many other books

“A deeply engaged exploration of the aesthetic experience as it exists in our lives today. Odyssey Works breaks it down and then breaks it down more. These theories are not always easy to digest, and I found myself arguing out loud with this amazing book (which is a good thing). In addition, on center stage is Rick Moody, one of the most nuanced and brave authors of his generation. Our new ‘digital’ lifestyle requires a creative response. This might be it.”

—Eric Bogosian, actor and author of Operation Nemesis

About the Authors

Abraham Burickson is the cofounder and artistic director of Odyssey Works. Trained in architecture, Burickson’s work spans writing, design, and performance. Ayden LeRoux is the Assistant Director of Odyssey Works, as well as an artist, writer, and educator.