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imomus
What do these have in common? A battered VHS tape of a 1988 documentary about the artist Richard Long entitled Stones and Flies: Richard Long in the Sahara, a double DVD of Andrew Kotting’s film Gallivant, the fictional documentary Robinson in Space by Patrick Keiller, and the book Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice by Francesco Careri?Well, apart from the fact that they've all passed across my shelves and through my video projector recently, these books, tapes and films have a common theme, a common flavour and feel, which is something to do with the aesthetics of walking.
The way, in particular, walking gives you a certain perspective on landscape -- a kind of alienation from alienation. Walking, in these films and books, might be an adventure, an exploration, a way of making art and architecture, an "intervention", a way to approach urban planning, a situation, even a sort of politics. In Careri's case, we get a complete history of subversive forms of walking as well as an aesthetics of perambulation: "From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city".
Yesterday's entry on pervasive urban gaming prompted two emails about walking. One was from designer Jan Lindenberg, who alerted me to a talk by Martin Schmitz being held here in Berlin next Monday entitled "Why is a landscape beautiful? The strollology of Lucius Burckhardt". German Wikipedia tells me that strollology is a perfectly serious science founded by the late political economist, sociologist, art historian and planning theorist Lucius Burckhardt in the 1980s at the University of Kassel. Also called Spaziergangswissenschaft (knowledge about moving through space), it deals with human perception and its feedback into planning and building.
"We are conducting a new science," Burckhardt explained to Hans-Ulrich Obrist in the preface to his book Why is Landscape Beautiful? "It's founded on the idea that the environment is normally not perceived, and if it is, it tends to be in terms of the observer's preconceived ideas. The classic walk goes to the city limits, the hills, the lake, the cliffs. But walkers also traverse parking lots, suburbs, settlements, factories, wastelands, highway intersections on their way to meadows, moors, farms. Coming home, when the walker tells what he has seen he tends to speak only of the forest and the lake, the things he set out to see, the things he read about, had geographical knowledge of, or saw in brochures and pictures. He leaves out the factory and the dump. Strollology deals not only with these prefabricated ideal images, but with the reality they eliminate."
A blend of sociology and urbanism, strollology attempts to correct the way technical progress, from trains through cars to GPS, has alienated our perception of the landscapes we move through. It does this by asking people to make "purely scientific descriptions" of walks they've made, leaving nothing out. Which brings us back to Richard Long and Patrick Keiller. Their work is so startling because it's so rare, in film or in art, to find people actually looking at landscapes as they are -- landscapes all too often made for cars and therefore somewhat incoherent to someone passing through them at walking speed, with full attention. Which brings us back to the paradox that not being alienated, in many contemporary environments, is being alienated. Most modern landscapes weren't designed to be seen, and seen slowly. They were designed to be read, half-consciously, as a traffic system glimpsed through a windscreen, and passed through quickly and carelessly.
It's people in the art world -- people who look on behalf of the rest of us -- who've taken it upon themselves to see what landscape has become -- landscape as recorded by modern versions of Rousseau's Solitary Walker. But Rousseau didn't have locative media.
The other mail I received yesterday was from Nick Slater, director of arts at Loughborough University. "After reading today's post on your blog," he said, "I thought you might be interested to see that gaming / walking
activity has reached Loughborough. It is interesting to see how walking practice has taken on a new life with the advent of locative media. Roam: A Weekend of Walking (March 15th to 17th) has tried to combine the two and have feet in both camps".It does the heart good to see all this walking happening -- all this attention to walking, and to the things that walking shows us, and all these events and talks about walking, and new words for that old, old thing of just putting one foot in front of the other. It seems to be in the air at the moment. And it's good that it does the heart good, because they've just found out that car exhaust fumes, which are also in the air, damage your heart. Let's go for a walk.
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Über die Leitplanke und los
Date: 2008-02-20 01:01 am (UTC)He organises trips through the boundaries of cities, the suburbs and wastelands, which sometimes last several days.
I'm planing to attend one of his walks (http://www.baeing.de/foto/3_tage_ruhrgebiet/pages/002_essen_west_krupp.htm) in spring/summer, maybe through the Ruhr Area (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhrgebiet), as a kind of vacation trip.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 01:12 am (UTC)Hisao
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Date: 2008-02-20 01:13 am (UTC)At the dock
Date: 2008-02-20 01:20 am (UTC)If one adds 'light railway' to the transport options, these words seem perfectly to fit the developments now occurring in the Docklands area of London, where i live in what seems a Ballardian dystopia.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 01:51 am (UTC)- NON, JE ME PROMENE. PRINCIPALEMENT JE ME PROMENE
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 02:54 am (UTC)Walk on By
Date: 2008-02-20 03:00 am (UTC)We had the Walk21 conference in Toronto this past fall. One of the ideas put forth was the "naked" or shared street idea. According to Spacing Magazine, "the concept is based on removing most of the signs, signals and curbs that direct traffic (both vehicles and pedestrians), leaving just street furniture, the texture of the environment, and the other people who occupy the space to shape people’s traffic behaviour. It was pioneered by Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman, who bases it on the principle that people will take less risks if their environment is more uncertain (and will move more slowly if their environment is attractive)."
I'm wondering in your travels, especially in the Netherlands, if you have seen this put into practice. I worry that if you are more focused on the traffic you share the street with, you may miss the landscapes mentioned in the post.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 03:39 am (UTC)the principle that people will take less risks if their environment is more uncertain
Date: 2008-02-20 05:56 am (UTC)this certainly is the case when riding a fixed gear bike with no (hand)brakes and have to rely on back-pedaling - which is a rather organic form of slowing-down - and not on the supposedly safe mechanical device. it ultimately feels safer because you're more connected (both to yr vehicle and to the traffic).
>I worry that if you are more focused on the traffic you share the street with, you may miss the landscapes mentioned in the post.
the result in terms of what one perceives might be a blurring of the line between traffic and landscape.
Re: the principle that people will take less risks if their environment is more uncertain
Date: 2008-02-20 06:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 06:20 am (UTC)Will we get a link to that? Youtube? Or the mailing list?
Can I get it too?
Ed
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 07:42 am (UTC)Possibly too mainstream for you to appreciate, but Will Self has been banging on about the same themes for a long while now. Here is some of his celebrated walk to New York (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/psychogeography-will-self-and-ralph-steadman-take-manhattan-394644.html). He is particularly interested in the idea of urban walking. Many of his recent talks have been on exactly the same lines as your post above. Iain Sinclair has been exploring the same themes for a while too.
A rather nervous and strangely humourless Self can also be seen below, in a talk given to the evidently under-socialised and attention deficit brains at Google ('close your laptops during the talk")?
As ever, there must be something in the air...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 07:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 08:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 08:27 am (UTC)Have come to the conclusion, after about 20 years of pain, that the pain doesn't matter very much as the pleasure outlives it.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 08:29 am (UTC)You are much more of an off-roader than me, I'm more of a highways & byeways kind of walker.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 08:45 am (UTC)Maybe he's exaggerating for effect, but I find it interesting how Self has "got walking religion" and gone from someone so trapped in his microworlds to someone so liberated from them. I think it may be something to do with his former drug addiction. The kind of book tours he describes (in which he'd arrive in a city, check into the hotel, do the reading, get fucked up on drink and drugs, return to the hotel then leave for the airport) are like rock tours. But my anti-rock stance has always made me try to avoid that dynamic. I've always had rules:
1. Don't arrive in the city and play the same night. This means that promoters have to pay for two nights in a hotel rather than just one, which they're not happy about.
2. Do some non-rock things, see some sights, walk around, take photos. You'd be surprised how little musicians do this. They sleep late, travel all day, soundcheck, eat and score drugs, play the show, crash out, sleep late again, and so on. Zero interest in the cities they're playing.
I remember my first visit to Berlin, in 1987 on a Primal Scream tour. We came from Hamburg, where I'd tried to interest Bobby in a confrontation between squatters and the police at the docks, not far from our hotel in the red light district. He didn't care. Despite his professed interest in radical politics, he preferred to sleep in than witness an actual political battle going on at his doorstep. In Berlin he got so drunk that the tour manager put me in charge of his well-being during a bar crawl we did after our show. Bobby literally didn't know where he was -- that was my job. The next day the van was driving back to Britain. I quit the tour and used my tour fees to book four more days in Berlin. I didn't want to leave. I had a girl to show me around, but mainly I had the city to explore. The pre-wall-fall Berlin. I'm so glad I did that now, so glad I got a day pass to see the East -- a nation which vanished off the face of the earth four years later.
Now, when I visit a city, I walk as much as I can. I take pictures, mostly, and try to guage the feel of the place. You can only do that by walking and being alert. I've started using Google Maps on my iPod to orient myself, a method which stops you getting totally lost, but doesn't stop the smaller mistakes which are essential to any coming-to-terms with a city, any learning. The kind of reports I do on cities like Vienna and Venice and Malmo and Copenhagen here on Click Opera could only be made by someone who not only asks a lot of questions of his hosts, but walks too. I didn't need to "get religion" about walking; it's something I've always done... although more when I travel than when I stay at home.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 09:20 am (UTC)While hardly 'rock' in outlook or profession I share much of your approach. I'm travelling up from Brighton to Newcastle this afternoon (train) for an all-day meeting tomorrow. I will then spend two nights there in order to give me time to walk about the city. I'll travel back to London first thing Friday morning for another meeting there. Most of my colleagues will rush in tomorrow morning, rush out straight after the meeting finishes and never even realise where they have been. I take pictures too, many of which may end up on the blog on the weekend. The feel of the place is the thing though, you have that right.
Incidentally, in a talk given in Lewes just before Christmas Will Self said some really interesting things to a particularly obtuse audience, one member of which asked, regarding the walk to New York, "but what do you do about luggage?" Self went on to describe the long list of alligator skinned suitcases he owned, the various special accoutrements for nasal depilation etc that he carried, and then fixed the dimwit with a stare, "I don't travel with any fucking luggage." He pointed out that New York, amongst other places, had things called 'shops' and 'dry cleaning' and that one could travel very light. I've experimented a little with this approach over the years and it is manageable, as long as one doesn't just buy stuff one wouldn't otherwise have bought, or used.
He does have the fervency of a convert, but he lives what he preaches, and looks a whole lot healthier as a result. There is virtue in that.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 09:43 am (UTC)I think we're seeing a polarisation, though, between the materialists and the post-materialists on this. Some people travel lighter and lighter, others heavier and heavier. Some airports give over more and more of their space (hello Heathrow!) to semi-compulsory Duty Free Bling areas. In other cities (Berlin, for instance) you can't buy anything at the airports. They're post-materialist places, pretty much shop-free.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 09:56 am (UTC)Consider. After the stick / carrot process of your passage from the TERRORISM ZONE to the CONSUMERISM ZONE (airport security to "luxury" shopping, or, if you prefer, the "they hate us because we're rich and free" to "we love us because we're rich and free", or "your shoes and your water may be a bomb" to "how about a new pair of shoes and some champagne?"), you're confronted with a sign saying the average walk-time to your gate is 20 minutes! But, laden with the tons of bling you've bought (because YOU LOVE FREEDOM), it's going to take you 40.
And that, framed in a post-Romantic way, is a cutting edge urban hike, my flaneur friend!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 10:29 am (UTC)terrorrism zone
Date: 2008-02-20 10:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-02-20 10:44 am (UTC)I walk more in New York than anywhere. It's a great walking town, as you might know if your IP address weren't in Texas. You've probably never even been there.
"Solvitur Ambulando" - It is solved by walking
Date: 2008-02-20 11:15 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Songlines
Thanks again
Jason
Re: "Solvitur Ambulando" - It is solved by walking
Date: 2008-02-20 11:18 am (UTC)