A roll of the dice : experimentalism, space and emergent forms of touristic practice in The Diceman

Through the fleeting action of rolling dice, a space – any space – can be momentarily transformed. While creativity is entwined in aspects of the everyday, the potentiality opened up by tourism--‐based experimentalism, as an expression of this creativity, is yet to attract academic attention. This paper will explore representations of chance and experimentalism in the television series The Diceman, contextualising creativity and improvisation as inherent in touristic encounters. Rolling a die is framed as experimental, a behaviour enacted to infuse an encounter with chance, randomness and uniqueness. These performances transform spaces of the mundane into places that are specifically – though only momentarily – touristic: a transformation symptomatic of the centrality of the everyday in touristic encounters. I will thus delineate how creativity and improvisation can reveal shifts in the ways in which individuals are engaging with/in space and how experimentalism and chance, as deliberately creative performances, can contribute to a more nuanced story of contemporary tourism practice.