http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~ira/illich/texts/energy_and_equity/energy_and_equity.html
"In his book 'Energy and Equity', Ivan Illich ... examines the efficiency of the American automobile. His conclusions are both amusing and horrifying. The average American male, he finds, spends approximately four of his sixteen working hours either driving his car, parking it and searching for it, or earning the money to make the payments on it, maintain it, and replace worn parts, buy gasoline and oil, and defray the costs of a driver's license, vehicle registration, and insurance. These sixteen hundred hours spent annually on behalf of the car enable to owner to drive an average of 7,500 miles, which works out to 4.7 miles per hour, regardless of individual driving speeds. The ramifications of this end-product analysis would fill a dozen books, but one thing is clear: the fast, luxurious, personal style of transportation offered by the automobile does not really liberate anyone from the true costs of travel. It merely provides an elaborate way of concealing some of the heavy payments that we make to maintain the illusion of an effortless life-style."
from "The Arrogance of Humanism" by David Ehrenfeld, 1978, pp. 60-61.
ENERGY AND EQUITY > IVAN ILLICH
I. THE ENERGY CRISIS
II. THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF TRAFFIC
III. SPEED-STUNNED IMAGINATION
IV. NET TRANSFER OF LIFE-TIME
V. THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF ACCELERATION
VI. THE RADICAL MONOPOLY OF INDUSTRY
VII. THE ELUSIVE THRESHOLD
VIII. DEGREES OF SELF-POWERED MOBILITY
IX. DOMINANT VERSUS SUBSIDIARY MOTORS
X. UNDEREQUIPMENT, OVERDEVELOPMENT, AND MATURE TECHNOLOGY
http://www.liveartmagazine.com/core/columns.php?action=show&key=1
An Interview with Anna Best > By Carl Lavery
Live Art Magazine > Thu 27 May 2004
Anna Best is a London based performance artist who has been making work since 1987. In that time, she has exhibited in a number of different spaces in Britain, Europe, South America and the United States, held several residencies and received numerous grants and awards. In addition, she has published widely and lectured extensively.
Carl Lavery is a lecturer in performance at de Montfort University, Leicester. He is also the artistic director of the performance collective Strange Currencies – whose most recent work is an exploration of mood through text, video and soundscape.
The interview below took place in South London in December 2003, and was commissioned by Live Art Magazine.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4380331-102280,00.html
"When Hamish Fulton goes for a walk, he really goes for a walk - typically for hundreds of miles. He takes nothing with him and brings nothing back, but his sparse field reports spur us on our own journeys..."
Laura Cumming
Sunday March 24, 2002
The Observer
TP (http://www.paglen.com/) is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Forging a hybrid practice between contemporary art, social science, and investigative journalism, his work in “experimental lecture,” installation, photography, sound, and video has shown at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art (2003), U.C. San Diego (2004), the California College of the Arts (2002), and numerous other arts venues, universities, conferences, and public spaces. He is a contributing editor to the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, directs the Center for Experimental Geography at U.C. Berkeley, and develops tactical media projects with the prison-abolitionist group Critical Resistance.
I. RESEARCH PROJECTS / EXPERIMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
These projects couple intense research into their respective subject-matters with display and presentation forms usually associated with visual and performing arts. Their final forms are suitable for either gallery/museum or social science exhibition. For example, my “experimental lecture” entitled “Listening to Pelican Bay” is performed the same way at geographer’s conferences, universities, museums, and art galleries.
Recording Carceral Landscapes / Remnants of California
II. TACTICAL MEDIA / PUBLIC INTERVENTIONS
Organized around the loose idea of “reclaiming public space,” these projects use public space in the service of protest, critique, and fun. I am not particularly interested in showing these projects in art galleries or other venues: I work on these projects because I would like to live in a world where these sorts of things happened all the time.
Bechtel Predator Drones / Pioneer Renewal Trust
III. SITUATED MEDIA / MEDIA ACTIVISM
These projects are designed to directly intervene in politics. They represent media components of larger political strategies. When Walter Benjamin asked how one might create works of art that were “useless to fascism” he perhaps did not foresee the answer that these media suggest: making art that is “useless to fascism” might mean making art that is “useless to art.”
http://angermann2.com/category/walking/
Exploratory Movements
Feelings
Stillman’s wanderings
Walk-out
Pedestrianistic round trip
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues04/nov04/walkusa.html
Twenty-six-year-old Aaron Huey took his dog, his camera and an open mind on a journey from California to New York. Along the way he learned a lot about his country—and himself
Smithsonian Magazine > 11.04
http://www.ausgang.com/travel/walking.html
Some musings on walking from the Free Walking Zine:
Dan Gleason +
Julia Marsh +
Vivian Yu +
Dan S. Wang +
Becca Taylor +
Bonnie Fortune +
Mike Wolf +
On a walk around Grand - Bonnie Fortune
Frederico Martini Crotti
Coyote walks from mountain - Phil Ceretto
Have directions, will travel - Melissa Sullivan
When I was 5 - Dave Whitman
Milford - Paul Theriault
Roads To Nowhere - Melinda Fries
Stuff on the side of the road - Melinda and Deborah
We Went For Another Walk - Melinda and Ben
Boston Walk - Julianne Coleman
5 minute radius - Deborah Stratman
A walk to Indiana - Thymme Jones
http://www.ausgang.com/travel/walking/fieldtrip1.html
one lovely june afternoon, my junk friend celio helped me "find" a shopping cart and get it to my house. that weekend, i filled the shopping cart with soil and planted it with six kernels of "golden bantam" organic heirloom 1902 sweet corn. two months later, the shopping cart was equipped with a travel accessories : radio, raincoat, journal, thermos and homemade seed packets and the corn hit the road.
folks volunteered to be pushers/farmers and traveled the streets and alleyways of chicago with the corn and their own interpretations and agendas. the corn cart has visited community gardens, toured supermarkets, politicized a street fair, gone out to coffee and rested in many backyards. the corn has been attacked by hail, squirrels, cucumber beetles and idle curious hands. it has been a long and circuitous field trip.
nk