Literary License Blog

“The point of my work is my own physical engagement with the world in different ways, whether it’s walking, or making fingerprints, or throwing stones.” – Richard Long

In August of last year, I spent a week solo hiking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Near the end of my trip, I hiked 5 miles of boulder fields completely cloaked in fog. I felt as though a nomadic explorer, lost in some other-world because all I could see at any point in time was a wall of grey mist that occasionally parted to reveal a short glimpse of the trail, arm’s length in reach.

I have no idea what I hiked through that day, I imagine the experience is similar to Gianni Motti’s 6-hour long walk through the Large Hadron Collider, a 17-mile long underground particle accelerator tunnel:

“After 2 kilometers, I lost all notions of time and space. I don’t remember anything, I was elsewhere.” – Gianni Motti

Walking, it turns out, is beautiful. 

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“The world cannot be recorded, it can only be remade.”
-Walking and Mapping by Karen O’Rourke

While reviewing the readings for Data Art this past week, I was surprised to find myself feeling incredibly inspired. Many of the examples Jer Thorp showed in class included work I had seen before. Midway through the readings, I had a sudden, random thought (and idea!) What if I walked the streets of Manhattan in order to deliberately write a message on the city grid? What would I say that would be so important (or perhaps, not important at all?) Or, what if I just drew a deliberate pattern, my trail a continuous line drawing. Was there a point to such an exercise?

When I initially had this idea, I wasn’t sure if it was very good as I couldn’t explain in concrete terms why I wanted to undertake it. But when I shared the idea with fellow ITP-ers, everyone seemed to just instantly “get” the concept. It was exciting then to validate my idea, and discover a long history of walking as an art form, in Karen O’Rourke’s Walking and Mapping. 

Mapping is a way to locate ourselves, and our situation in the world, and act upon it. Walking is a personal yet universal experience. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that artists have long played with the concept of walking as an art form.

Traverse Me, Jeremy Wood, continuous GPS drawing

The first chapter explores “psychogeography” as an alternative way of reading the city. Psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways. Alternative ways of walking through a city are an attempt to de-familiarize one’s self to one’s environment:

“The stumbling block for people who are familiar with an area is a selective gaze that ignores everything but what is necessary for the task at hand. We see only what we expect to see.”
- Mapping and Walking, Karen O’Rourke

The Situationists, on the other hand, briefly embraced the concept of experiencing a city by “drifting” through it without aim.  → Read more