From a Bus in Iceland to a Journey of a Lifetime

On location: the lava fields of north Iceland, in the weather that is usually there (November, 2025)

Last November I was on a bus on the Icelandic ring road, somewhere between two places I could not pronounce, with a camera bag at my feet and a week of shooting behind me, with no idea I was about to start building what would become the Voyant app.

I registered a business name from that seat. Voyant. There was no plan attached to it — no product, no market, no idea how any of it would work. There was one sentence I had written down, and it is the only thing about this project that never changed:

One day, one person, for a moment. Some relief from stress, anxiety, pain. The human condition.

Ten months later that sentence is the Voyant app on the App Store.

What it actually is

Voyant is a guided audio session built around a photograph.

You open it, you choose a place — a fjord in Iceland, a ridge on Mt. Hood, a lavender field in Provence — and it composes a session for you. Not a canned track with the photo as wallpaper. The voice, the pacing, the ambient bed underneath it, and the words themselves are assembled for that place, for that length, and for how you feel when you sit down.

Then you sit still for a few minutes and listen.

That is the whole product. Everything else — the scoring, the history, the biometrics — is in service of that, and I have spent a fair amount of this year learning that the order matters.

Why the photographs are mine

Every image in the app is one I took.

Iceland first, last November. Then New Zealand. Then Mt. Hood, then Utah, and this past summer Tuscany and Provence. Seventy-four finished works, six series, and the reason they are mine is not romance about authorship — it is that I cannot build what I am building on top of stock imagery.

A session composed for a place requires knowing the place. The light, the weather it usually has, what it sounds like, how long you would actually want to stand there. I have that for these locations because I stood in them, in bad weather, at hours nobody sensible is awake. Nobody licensing a photo library has it, and no amount of clever software substitutes for it.

It also means the catalogue grows at the speed of travel rather than the speed of engineering, which is a real constraint and I have made my peace with it. The curation, the location selections, the planning — that is the heart and soul of the product. British Virgin Islands in December. Japan in April.

How a session gets made

Underneath each photograph sits a prescription: what this place is for. Some are for settling down. Some are for coming back up. They are not interchangeable, and the app does not pretend they are.

When you start a session, it takes that prescription and your own state — what you tell it, and what your watch or ring already knows if you have connected one — and composes from there. Voyant chooses a voice from seven. It chooses an ambient bed, which is a specific colour of noise rather than a mood word. It writes and renders the spoken guidance. Some sessions are sung.

The catalogue behind that is a little over eleven hundred audio tracks, which is what it costs to have a real choice at every fork rather than three options and a shuffle.

What it does not do

It is not a medical device and it does not diagnose or treat anything. If you connect a wearable it reads what you allow it to read, and that data is never used for advertising and never sold. Location, if you allow it, is coarse and used only for the weather.

I mention these not as legal boilerplate but because this is a category with a lot of confident claims in it, and I would rather be the one making fewer.

How to get in

The app is on the App Store and it is free.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/voyant-presence/id6767328267

I did no marketing for ten months. Deliberately, and I still think correctly — but it means that today, the day it goes live, the audience is people who already know me. Which is what this piece is. I would rather learn what is wrong with it from forty people who will tell me the truth than from four thousand who will delete it and never say why.

One thing worth knowing when your access comes through: sign up with the address you asked from, or with Google. If you choose Apple’s “Hide My Email,” I cannot match it to you, and the app will not open.

And one more thing

Some of the Mt. Hood work is hanging in a Portland gallery for the month of October — In the Hood: An Artful Tribute to Mt. Hood, at Artistic Portland on NE Fremont, October 1 through 31. It is my first show.

If you are in town, come find me at the opening on the first. I would love to see you in person, and to mark a small victory — a product taken end to end, alone.

Eric