Living in a box: gamer to travel a very Long way stuck in a crate

Some may call him crazy but US artist Jordan Long is on mission to highlight post traumatic stress disorder by living in a crate on the back of a flat-bed trailer for seven days straight while playing the video game Lord of the Rings Online on his way to an art exhibition.
Long will begin his 3500-kilometre journey on July 1, travelling from his home town of Bald Knob, Arkansas to Portland in Oregon where he'll go on public display as he plays games inside the crate at the Fourteen30Contemporary art exhibition.
Speaking with Fairfax Media via telephone, the 28-year-old who recently graduated at the Cranberry Academy of Art said he suffered from PTSD and that this project was his way of highlighting how he coped with it.

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Jordan in the box. Photo: Supplied

"This is something that means a lot to me but I'm just bringing up the subject," Long said. "I'm not setting a positive or a negative light on it; that's not what I'm going for in what I'm doing. I'm just interested in that dialogue getting out there and, sure, you could call it awareness, but for me it's just putting it out there to allow people to think in a different way."
Long supports himself by selling art and doing landscape work and has been designing the crate he plans to live in during the trip for some time now. "I have outfitted the crate with everything I need and as the journey unfolds ... I'll be reporting [about it and] I'll have two bloggers that will be blogging about everything the entire way."
Inside the crate Long will be accompanied by a computer with a mobile broadband internet connection to play Lord of the Rings Online. The computer will have a solid-state drive, of which is "more road-worthy" for bumpy terrain, allowing for the computer to run smoothly while on the back of the trailer.

Jordan Long. Photo: Supplied

As to how he'll go to the toilet? "That will kind of become evident throughout the journey ... it's something that the audience will follow on the way to the gallery. It is all located within the crate. But exactly what it looks like and how it functions is something that everybody will find out as it unfolds."
Being claustrophobic himself, he said he'd done a similar experiment in the box before. "So I did a test where I sat the crate in a communal area and no one really knew I was in there and I just played an online game," he said. "... I did that for four days just to kind of test whether it was physically possible and that's kind of how the idea came about."
As part of the journey, Long said he was keeping himself "in the best condition" he could. "Obviously a big concern is laying in one place for that amount of time". Because of this he said he had been practising what exercises he could do when "moments of internet" were unavailable. "Of course we know that that is going to happen while I'm driving across the country".

Jordan doing another performance with boxes. Photo: Supplied

He said that playing the video game allowed him to take his mind off of the fact that he was in a confined space. "... It curbed that [claustrophobic] feeling and allowed me to stay in that box. In that way it definitely works."
Research suggesting that playing the game Tetris could curb PTSD symptoms is what Long said got him thinking about giving his project a go. "I started ... finding research about how scientists [were] using Tetris ... because Tetris activates the same side of the brain as where traumatic images come from. So when you’re playing a game like Tetris it tends to block and curb those feelings; so it doesn’t make them as intense."
Already some comments on news sites and internet forums have begun labelling Long "crazy" for conducting his experiment. "I enjoy that," Long said. "Of course I couldn't have expected anything like this as far as people picking this up and being interested in it.
"Whether or not people were interested it was going to happen. But for me, I enjoy that there is that dialogue out there. I mean 'crazy'? I grew up in a very small town and I have an interesting personality so I'm sure I've been called that my entire life but this is what I do. I prep for these things and I research and I test and ... these things are just my normal for me. I don't feel crazy."
Long will blog about his journey at jordanwaynelong.com.