“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. Drifting was part of a larger quest against the “banalization” of life, a reaction to a world so obsessed with material comfort, people will choose a washing machine over love. The Situationists sought to experience experiences as a reaction against the “spectacularization” of life.
Other inspiring projects of note:
- Stanley Brouwn collected footprints of anonymous passers-by by putting sheets of paper on sidewalk. Later, Brouwn handed paper to pedestrians in different cities and asked them to draw a map showing how to get from where they were to the train station. The results showed how different people see and convey spatial relationships.
- Adrian Piper soaked her clothes in rotting vinegar and eggs, then took a crowded subway train. This act explored the reactions of passers-by to destabilizing situations while expressing dislocation and alienation.
- Taiwanese artists Tehching Hsieh (“art is not a career; it is my life”) embarked on a “One Year Performance,” where he spent one year outside. He described the experience as being, “trapped…in a kind of restless, internal exile.” The experience left him feeling stronger as a person, “you have to make the art stronger than life so people can feel it.”
Diana Freed and I are tackling this project together, which is great as Diana is a strong analytical thinker, so our team collaborations end up nicely balanced, my conceptual strengths complimented with her analytical ones.
“With our feet, we are continually writing the city, but can we read it?”
- Mapping and Walking, Karen O’Rourke
We will explore walking as a way to deconstruct routine and exist in the present moment more fully. For instance, we all walk across the street to grab coffee, but would never attempt this endeavor in a poetic zig-zag….until now! The idea is to create a continuous line drawing, the city our canvas, and to explore an alternative way of mapping that is purposeful. We will use a GPS shield and an Arduino to capture our location in the present moment, a go-pro to capture video of our experience, and I-phones to capture imagery of the things we notice in our surroundings. We are also thinking of playing with Google Glass and recording audio of our walks so anyone can experience the walk with us. We want to share these walks as a “personal geography map,” and to explore the concept of mapping private spaces as well as public spaces.
