The Voyage resulted from decades of Jan Sawka’s collaborations with the performing arts as a set designer, creator of installation art, and multimedia artist. From the outset of his career in the late 1960’s and 70’s, he created innovative sets and worked as a graphic artist with theaters and jazz and rock music groups. After his exile, he continued such work with New York City theaters.

In 1989, Sawka created a10-story tall art installation for The Grateful Dead’s 25th Anniversar Concert Tour. Jerry Garcia had been looking for an artist with whom to collaborate to “humanize the stadium environment” and he gave Sawka complete creative freedom. The installation consisted of 52 vibrantly colored banners that Sawka designed to be lit in various ways that “animated” the installation. Millions of concert-goers from June 1989 through all of 1990 attended the concerts with the installation. During Sawka’s later meetings with Garcia, the idea came up to develop a performance that would be even more visually enhanced than the 1989 collaboration. This was the beginning of the concept for The Voyage. 

As Sawka started to conceive The Voyage, he developed a broader projection-based multimedia practice. In 1993, he created and produced The Eyes, a 57-minute multimedia performance based on artworks and projections at the MITO Art Tower center in Japan, which was under the artistic direction of Tadashi Suzuki. Sawka used slow-dissolving projections of his artworks in a unified, visionary theatrical spectacle that incorporated three-dimensional artworks and one actor.  The Eyes used an original score by Polish jazz virtuoso, Adam Makowicz. Sawka won the Japanese Cultural Agency Award in 1994 for this accomplishment. In 1994, Sawka created artworks that were back-projected for the Steve Winwood/Traffic Reunion concert tour in the United States, again utilizing the slow dissolving of artwork in analog projections (these projects predate video projection technology by many years). 

Jan Sawka created an initial, 5-minute video demo showing the concept for The Voyage projections in 1995 for Jerry Garcia, however, Garcia passed away before he could see it. In 1996, Sawka created a longer demo of 13 minutes. In 1999, Sawka returned to large-scale projections with artworks he created that were projected on Houston skyscrapers during the 40th anniversary celebration of NASA called Skypower. Inspired by this, together with Józef Skrzek, Sawka proposed a project to the city of Warsaw involving projections of his art onto the huge, communist-era Palace of Culture skyscraper, which was to be accompanied by the music of Skrzek. The project was never realized. 

In 2003, Sawka won a Gold Medal in the Multimedia category for a fragment of “The Voyage” at the 2003 International Florence Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy. After a hiatus, Sawka returned to work on The Voyage with his daughter Hanna Maria Sawka. In 2010, Sawka entered talks with Mickey Hart concerning The Voyage, however, this collaboration never came to be, as Jan Sawka passed away unexpectedly in August 2012. Just 5 days before his passing, Sawka had completed the last images for The Voyage, leaving the project ready for production.

In the summer of 2023, Hanna Maria Sawka connected with Jozef Skrzek after attending the premiere of his suite dedicated to his late wife Alina Skrzek, Odyssey of Love at NOSPR in Katowice, Poland. After introducing him to The Voyage, collaboration on the project has been ongoing since.