User:Angeliki/Grad-Abstracts & Synopsis

Karen O`rourke. Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers

Abstract

The book is an approach to make a differentiated map. It is a collection of artistic practices focusing on walking. The writer combines these examples of works that he personally experienced zooming in and out the concept of walking and mapping as an artistic practice since 70s. These approaches are blurring the borders between the fields of art and others.
In the first chapter he starts by describing a contemporary walking project and then generalize the process by referring to the terms psychogeography and drifting, as explained by Debord. He describes then more walking projects till the time of 90s in which artists, and not only, are using algorithms, GPS, low-tech media technologies, political strategies, their own bodies and most importantly are interacting with the public. By walking and giving scores and instructions to themselves they reveal hidden narratives, re-claim the streets with the motivation of understanding their surroundings. Some awkwardness and playfulness characterizes these projects, that reveals the city’s underlying structure and re-appropriates the language.
In the second chapter the author emphasizes the process of walking as a fundamental biological action. She refers to examples of artists who experimented with the practice of walking as a ‘mechanic of everyday movement’. Gradually artists moved to the listening of everyday outside sounds. After this historical recall the author comes back to the present by describing her personal experience as a participant to an augmented walking created by Janet Cardiff. O’ Rourke analyses the project and relates it to art works from the past like surrealist novels and land art. According to her, these artistic experiences, in contrast to past binaural sound works, trigger the audience to move through the space while listening. She concludes that walking as an art practice may resemble to architectural practices.

Synopsis
2nd chapter:

In this chapter the author emphasizes the process of walking as a fundamental biological action that depends on the body networks as an attempt for balancing with surroundings. She refers to examples of artists and especially dancers who experimented with the practice of walking as a ‘mechanic of everyday movement’. Artists like Yvonne Rainer tended to perceive body and movement as abstract terms disconnected from their context and were exploring their mechanism by creating scores for movement. He refers then to the involvement of repetition in that process that was intensively used by many different fields in 60s. The repetitive walking explored by dancers was opening up the space and time of action. The studio was becoming a space for an eternal repetitive movement. Such activities expanded in the realm of theatre with Beckett creating a piece were actors were moving repetitively following the same pattern on stage. Gradually the author moves in the next step of these attempts which was the involvement of everyday outside sounds. The art was blending with life. After that artists started to explore movement while listening sounds outside. “(R)eceptivity is not passivity”(O’ Rourke, pg. 34) as Dewey said for the audience who was just walking and listening its surrounding. After this historical recall the author comes back to present by describing her personal experience as a participant to the project Her Long Black Hair of Janet Cardiff. The project is about an augmented walking in the streets of New York. Cardiff created an audio consisted of her spoken words while walking a path, describing events from the past, history, fiction and mythology, sound samples from the spot and music. Together with the headphones and sound device also photos of past events were given to the participants. O’ Rourke analyses the project and relates it to similar narratives created by surrealists in the past where the images, as the sounds for Cardiff, “replace verbal desrciptions” (O’ Rourke, pg. 43). She talks about the dialectical landscape and the relation of her art with land art of Robert Smithson: the multiple layers of narratives reveal the “endless maze of relations and interconnections” of the landscape. According to her even though these artistic experiences resemble binaural sound and Théâtrophone from the past, they have a big difference: the audience doesn’t stay still listening the piece.

She concludes that walking, perceived as an art form first by Richard Long, “may be a form of architecture” as “we shape space as we go”(O’ Rourke, pg. 43). She gives an example of the project Here While We Walk in which a group of participants were walking silently inside an elastic band forming a mobile architecture of individuals focusing on perceiving themselves being in the present.

My opinion is that these contemporary examples of psychogeography keep a continuous line with the attention on insignificant and daily events as artistic process, on the base of the concept of Michel de Charteau in The Practice of Everyday Life. On the other hand I am wondering what these abstract entities and events represent today as they are related to a mental perception developed by the Western art spheres. Their indirect connection with political, cultural and social connotations provoke interestingly different perspectives of the surrounding and our bodies. But how this can be translated in our multicultural and multilayered environments?