In this VII Interactive Book Club, record­ed live on May 9, Stefano De Luigi retraced the gen­e­sis of his iDyssey book project. In the spring of 2012, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er, armed only with two iPhone 3s to doc­u­ment his trav­els, set out to retrace the Mediterranean voy­age of Homer’s Odysseus, con­sid­ered one of the great­est mas­ter­pieces of Western lit­er­a­ture. It was com­posed in the late 8th cen­tu­ry B.C. and togeth­er with the Iliad, it is one of the old­est and most influ­en­tial poems in Western cul­ture. Traveling through Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, and Italy, De Luigi took Hipstamatic pho­tos, record­ed nois­es from streets and seas, filmed cities and ships, and asked peo­ple he met along the way to read excerpts from the Odyssey in their moth­er tongue. “The epic has its roots in an oral tra­di­tion, trans­mit­ted by itin­er­ant poets, singers, and sto­ry­tellers,” De Luigi writes. “In con­tem­po­rary soci­ety, the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion has dras­ti­cal­ly changed the trans­mis­sion of knowl­edge and infor­ma­tion. Everyone can now be a sto­ry­teller.”

This lec­ture was orig­i­nal­ly host­ed at VII Interactive, a new resource for shar­ing insights and infor­ma­tion on the craft of visu­al sto­ry­telling. We are build­ing dif­fer­ent plat­forms with­in the VII ecosys­tem, where the pub­lic can engage direct­ly, online with a live instruc­tor. VII Interactive offers pro­gram­ming that is free and avail­able to every­one, in addi­tion to paid class­es and indi­vid­ual men­tor­ing that can be fash­ioned to your needs.