Walking in Place

Henri Lefebvre / The Production of Space

http://www.notbored.org/space.html

Henri Lefebvre is a name that will be familiar to our readers. (We have reviewed his superb book Introduction to Modernity and have posted an interview with him.) One of the most important French thinkers of the twentieth century, Lefebvre -- in particular, his 1947 book The Critique of Everyday Life -- exerted a profound influence on, among others, the members of the Situationist International; Lefebvre even became associated with the situationists personally in the years immediately following 1958, when he was excluded from the French Communist Party. Lefebvre's close association with the situationists lasted until 1962, when there was a nasty falling-out; their respective paths did not cross again after that. Though the situationists never regretted the bitterness and permanence of their separation from Lefebvre, he clearly did. The Production of Space was originally published in French in 1974, and translated into English by the ex-situationist Donald Nicholson-Smith in 1991. In it, the situationists are located in a certain space; their existence and contributions to the revolutionary movement are neither ignored nor over-emphasized. The very fact that The Production of Space is able to handle the situationists in such an even-handed way is a sure measure of the intellectual honesty and integrity of both the book and its author.

http://www.notbored.org/index.html
http://www.notbored.org/SI.html

Apexart / Walking

Walking in the City: Spatial Practices in Art, from the Mid-1960s to the Present
curated by Melissa Brookhart Beyer & Jill Dawsey

Walking in the City examines the work of Valerie Tevere, Alex Villar, Simon Leung, and Kim Soo-ja and highlights the way they engage with the historic strategies of resisting and negotiating regulated space developed by Valie Export, Yayoi Kusama, Adrian Piper and David Wojnarowicz.
 
In the late 1970s, cultural theorist Michel de Certeau wrote an essay, "Walking in the City," that begins with the author standing at the top of the World Trade Center looking out over Manhattan. From this vantage point, the city is offered up as a whole, graspable image, in contrast with the messy, meandering city that one moves through down below."Down below" is the realm of lived experience, inhabited by walkers, Wandersmanner, who use and transform space, defying the geometrical discipline imposed by urban development, of which the World Trade Center stood as the most monumental of figures.

This is an exhibition about walking in the city. But not all of the artists included here engage in walking; some squat, some stand still, one awkwardly attempts to scale buildings. "Walking" is an ordinary but transformative way of using space, for which we might substitute any number of other spatial practices. The works gathered here are first and foremost acts of spatial appropriation. For de Certeau, walking is a form of enunciation, akin to a speech act. Like figurative language, which strays from literal meaning, walking, squatting, or scaling stray from proper places, introducing new significations, ambiguities, and voices into an existing spatial system.

The spatial practices represented here reference a long legacy of avant-garde wandering, from that paradig- matically modern figure, the 19th-century flaneur, to the aleatory drifting of the Surrealists and Situationists. But if these earlier moments in the (art) history of walking evince an easy spatial and social mobility or a sense of touristic privilege, the more contemporary works point to the heterogeneity of lived experience, a global unevenness articulated locally through the stubborn insistence of the body.

A. Laurie Palmer / 3 Acres on the Lake

http://www.artic.edu/~apalme/
http://www.artic.edu/~apalme/origin.htm
http://www.artic.edu/~apalme/descrip.htm

A. Laurie Palmer's interdisciplinary art practice includes sculpture, writing, public art, and collaborative projects. She has worked with the artists' collective Haha for fifteen years, creating installations and interventions in everyday sites and social spaces. In recent projects, she has focused on real and potential uses for vacant urban land. In 3 Acres on the Lake, she collected speculative proposals for a small, publicly owned lakefront lot in Chicago, a site complicated by political corruption, racial histories, and radioactive substances.

http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/papers/palmer1.html

Openness

Past projects like “3 Acres on the Lake: DuSable Park Proposal Project” (2000-03) and “Flood” (with Haha, 1993-95) were built as open-ended structures – a certain conceptual autonomy accompanied by indeterminacy as to how, and to some extent if, each project would develop. With Flood, a hydroponic community garden in a storefront space in Chicago growing vegetables for people with AIDS, the question was how (and whether) participants might use the garden space beyond its initial intentions, how they/we might extend its initial timeframe by finding new energy (and resources) to keep it going, and/or invent new structures from it. All of this happened, partially, – though the garden as initially conceived no longer exists.

With “3 Acres…” (public art project calling for proposals for an undeveloped plot of public land) the question was how (and whether) the exhibition and publication might influence the trajectory of the land's actual development, without having to be sucked dry by the deadening city politics involved in promoting any one specific proposal. The 65 speculative proposals remained autonomous, free and clear of constraints based on safety or maintenance, while the project overall has accompanied, and amplified, efforts by activists to draw attention to the city's abnegation of its promise to develop the land and to commemorate a black historical figure. The project has intercepted and changed the situation that provided its initial platform, while retaining a degree of the volatile virtual – or whatever you want to call it – a mote unhampered by the logic of “sense.”

Time

A primary goal (along with insisting on the value of doing things that don't make sense in an era of rationalized efficiency) is to create situations with multiple points of access – theoretical, social, material, spatial – that aim towards negotiation of very different conversations simultaneously. It takes time for indirect and qualitative projects to gather enough critical participation to contribute to their course; it takes time for potential to realize itself through indirection. Unsensational fragments accumulate insistence over time, allowing not just for “execution” but also for evolution, participation, growing wisdom, changing understandings, shifting participants – development, but not along a pre-determined narrative – and invention.

Society & Space

http://www.envplan.com/epd/epd_current.html

Environment and Planning D is an interdisciplinary journal that leads internationally in discussions of the relations between Society and Space. Space is broadly conceived: from landscapes of the body to global geographies; from cyberspace to old growth forests; as metaphorical and material; as theoretical construct and empirical fact. Interpretations move across theoretical spectrums, from psychoanalysis to political economy. The journal editors are equally committed to the nitty gritty of practical politics and the abstractions of social theory. We believe that this commitment is best achieved by keeping a balance between, and placing into creative tension, economic, political, and cultural analyses, as well as theoretical discussions and a range of empirical research.

The Brooklyn Rail

Walk, Run, Amble, Saunter— Everyday Movement is not so Everyday
by Vanessa Manko

Six figures, placed equidistant apart, walk in unison down a street. Another figure emerges from behind to cut a diagonal across the formation. More "bodies" enter this streetscape, joining the flow of motion. Others pause, standing still to check the time, before moving on again. When it rains, as it does here, umbrellas bloom open. This is not, as it seems, your ordinary street scene, though it could be. Rather, it is the work of digital artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar whose motion-capture installation Pedestrian— created using technology that literally "captures" human movement— is part of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s (LMCC) Motion Studies, a 3-month multidisciplinary exhibition that aims to explore the larger concept of the body in urban space. Through a series of programming that incorporates ideas about dance, movement, and urban space, Motion Studies is dedicated to pondering our corporeal reality amidst the urban landscape.

Urban living requires a constant negotiation of space— a practice that is quite subconscious and goes unnoticed in our hasty efforts to run down the subway stairs for the train, dash across a busy crosswalk, or weave in and out of the congestion of a crowd. Postmodern choreographers of the 1960s were drawn to this kind of everyday movement and incorporated such seemingly ubiquitous, pedestrian movement as walking and running into their dances. They subsequently revolutionized the art form and challenged audiences by redefining what was traditionally constituted as dance. Yvonne Rainer’s "no manifesto," which called for a "no to spectacle no to virtuosity no to transformation and magic and make-believe," among other things, helped codify the ideas and ideals of postmodern dance— tenets that reverberate throughout the dance community to this day.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

On The Aesthetics of Urban Walking and Writing by Phillip Lopate

For all but the disabled, walking is a basic human activity, just below eating and sleeping. Consequently, peripatetic literature is vast: rarely does a novel or poetry volume lack some walk. But it's a strange sub-genre: a writer can't help wondering how to put a leash on the infinite. How do you begin to impose a structure on what could easily degenerate into shapeless listing? How do you distribute your attention between nature, passersby, architecture, social issues? What needs does the literary walk fulfill for the writer?

Most written-down walks are undertaken alone. The walk becomes a technique to deal with, act out, dramatize, defend, or deplore one's solitude. With solitude, of course, comes a danger: self-preoccupation. The literary walk inscribes the struggle between self-absorption and self-forgetting, between the poison of ego-brooding and the healing parade of sensory stimuli. One of the classic preoccupations of peripatetic literature is how a mood changes in the process of traversing a city on foot. In the meantime, perception is sharpened, by charting the precise movement between interior monologue ("the daily fodder of my mind" is how Rousseau put it in The Reveries of the Solitary Walker) and outward attentiveness, like the rack focus in movies that pulls first the foreground, then the background into clarity.

http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/

Since its founding in the Spring of 2000, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood has published nearly seven hundred pieces of writing, been nominated for a 2002 Webby Award in the Print and Zine catagory, and published a book, Before and After: Stories from New York.

The site combines a magazine with a map. It uses the external, familiar landscape of New York City as a way of organizing the wildly internal, often unfamiliar emotional landscapes of the city dweller.

It is about a specific place - New York - and it is about the many different consciousness that thrive and wilt and rage and reminisce here. We publish reportage, personal essays, urban sketches-- any piece of writing that might illuminate a corner of life in the city. By and large everything you read on the site is true. The events of 9/11 were the site's focus for a while, but this is a site about a place, not a disaster, and we're open to all kinds of topics.

The front page of the site is a map of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. It's been divided into sections, each representing a neighborhood. If you click on one of these sections you zoom into that neighborhood.

On the neighborhood maps, the red dots link to articles. The green dots let you know where in the city you are.

Like any neighborhood, or city, or person, Mr.Beller's Neighborhood is a work in progress.

Pearson / Brookes

http://www.mikebrookes.com/ambivalence/pearsonbrookes/works.htm

the first five miles

Between 9.00pm and 10.15pm on Sunday 23rd August 1998, Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson performed the first five miles across the hill top and high ground of Mynydd Bach above the village of Trefenter in West Wales. The event; the structure of which marked a key shift within both the intentions and formal development of Brookes' recent performance work; was realised in collaboration with local inhabitants and land owners, the local independent radio station Radio Ceredigion, and BBC resources.

Pearson and Brookes walked a specifically linear five miles journey among peat bog, high pasture and wind-farm turbines carrying portable two way radio equipment. The texts performed by Mike Pearson were combined, via a live satellite link, with pre-recorded material simultaneously broadcast by Radio Ceredigion; to create a complex bilingual stereo radio work transmitted and openly available over an area up to fifty miles in radius from Mynydd Bach.

The broadcast, a layered bilingual docu-drama subtitled "Rhyfel y Sais Bach" [ the war of the little Englishman ], explored the story of Augustus Brackenbury, his purchase of 850 acres of common moorland and bog from the Enclosure Commissioners in 1820, the subsequent enclosure riots, and the frustration by local inhabitants of his repeated attempts to build houses on the land; a critical and resonant period in the history of the landscape and community of Mynydd Bach.

the first five miles attracted a transient community of some two hundred individuals to vantage points along the route; either out in the open with radios pressed to their ears, or grid-locked in cars: and a wider radio audience of over fifteen thousand.

the man who ate his boots

The man who are his boots marked the second studio base collaboration by Brookes and Pearson; and represented a direct response to issues arising within the recent act of the first five miles, and an exploration of possibilities for the re-examination and presentation of these issues within a studio context. It attempted to address issues of home, of the place we think we belong, of emigration and the impossibility of ever returning, through an examination of the exploits of four men from an area of Lincolnshire. Two who left for Wales, a third who grew sugar in Australia and a fourth who tried to walk to the north pole.

"Weaving together family history, geography, genealogy, memoir, autobiography, forensic data, quotations, lies and jokes; the man who are his boots creates contemporary stories - stories about stories -  which value the small narratives of individual lives, as a means of holding the past and the present together."

"Mike Pearson’s performance includes anecdotes, traveller’s tales, improvised asides, physical re-enactment, impersonations and intimate reflections on the nature of memory and personal loss. Mike Brookes’ design creates an innovative aural landscape which allows the spectator to experience performance in a totally new way."

Mike Pearson performed the text of this complex four part monologue among an informal gathering of spectators, contained within a space defined and lit simply by the physical and durational structure of four small back-projection screens. The screens detailed the route of their previous five mile journey, through Brookes' photographic documentation of the surrounding landscape at fifth of a mile intervals. The aural structure of Mike Brookes' design layered music and ambient material from multiple sources to construct a driving sound work that made it impossible to engage acoustically with the spoken text of Pearsons' performance, while enabling the delivery of his voice directly to each spectator individually via short range radio link and the individual headsets of an infra red translation loop. The headsets, simultaneously providing quality vocal relay and acting as ear plugs to dampen the room ambient, enabling: [1] the desired mix within the spectators head individually, [2] an experience of isolation from the collective audience group, and [3] a heightened sense of direct contact with the performer.

The man who are his boots was initially developed and  presented within the Centre of Performance Research : 'performance, places and pasts' conference, Aberystwyth, 1998.

Bill Brown / dreamwhipzine

http://geocities.com/dreamwhipzine/
http://www.peripheralproduce.com/catalog.php#nextbestplace
http://channel.creative-capital.org/project_417.html

Bill Brown creates idiosyncratic documentaries that explore the relationship between people and the places in which they live. His four films, including Roswell, Hub City, Confederation Park and Buffalo Common have won awards at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Kansas City Jubilee, and the Magnolia Independent Film Festival. In 1997-98 he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the Trans-Canada Highway.

You can take Bill Brown out of Texas, but you can’t take the Texas out of Bill Brown. His films are vast and expansive and take you on a road trip across the back roads of forgotten places. From his award winning Confederation Park, which carefully depicts an aimless American kid setting out across the Trans-Canada Highway, to Buffalo Common, which observes the dismantling of nuclear missile silos across North Dakota, Bill’s films blur the difference between documentary and personal filmmaking and create a time-capsule of the subtle changes of the North American landscape. His films have won many awards and screened at nearly every film festival on the planet, he has received both Rockefeller and Creative Capital grants, and in November 2003, the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of his work. His ‘turn-ons’ include blimps, elevated trains, and vegan bratwurst, but the steady tug of time passing and Hummers leave him less excited.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest / The Baffler

http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/

The Journal of Aesthetics and Protests flies in the airs of the present, gathering up words like sticks shaking in the breeze. The journal sits at a discursive juncture between art and (often anarchist) activism with the knowledge that a knowledge and discourse are one tool to change the world.

The Journal, aware of the possibilities of the boundless moment, searches for ways to think through the cultural and political ramifications of representation. In word and aspiration, The Journal dreams toward a world that differs from "a celebration of the choice already made in the sphere of production, and the consummate result of that choice." Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, New York 1994, p 13.

http://www.thebaffler.com/

The Baffler sprang into this world back in 1988 from a very simple idea. Thanks to the forces of academic professionalization, it seemed to us, cultural criticism had become specialized and intentionally obscure. The authority of high culture may have collapsed, but the high-culture critics had no intention of allowing their authority to collapse with it. Instead they abandoned the mundane project of enlightenment and aimed for bafflement, for a style that made much of its own radicalism but had astonishingly little to say about the conditions of life in late twentieth-century America. We set out to puncture their pretensions and to beat them at their own game ...

... More importantly, The Baffler was our attempt to restore a sense of outrage and urgency to the literature of the Left and simultaneously to unmask the pretensions of the lifestyle liberals. The cultural crisis of our time cannot be understood without reference to the fact that the modes of cultural dissidence that arose in the sixties are today indistinguishable from management theory. The distance between the new species of business thinkers and the rebel stars who populate our national firmament is almost zero. Our society is blessed with a great profusion of self-proclaimed subversives, few of which have any problem with the terrifying economic-cultural order into which we are blithely stepping on the eve of the millennium.

But to describe The Baffler in terms of the books we read or the records we listened to or the writers we admired overlooks what was, until quite recently, the central, unassuagable fact that dictated the way we did things. To put it simply, we believed in small magazines and in self-publishing because we had to. Until a certain species of cynicism became acceptable in mainstream press a few years ago, almost nobody else would publish us. We have been outsiders to the mainstream of our time not merely as a matter of choice, but because as recently as 1994 the way we thought and wrote about culture was not something encouraged warmly by editors.

It is also important to point out where The Baffler's critique stops. We make no grand claims about what art or culture can do to transform politics. We confess that we admire certain old avant-gardes, that we like the early writing of John Dos Passos and Edmund Wilson, that we are always looking for a cartoonist like Art Young. But we realize that political change is going to require actual politics. What we are absolutely sure about is that contemporary capitalism has marshalled the forces of culture, whatever they are, to ensconce itself in power and to insulate itself from criticism to an almost entirely unprecedented extent.

http://www.tcfrank.com/

Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks

http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/~mshanks/theatrearchaeology/

Theatre / Archaeology

Theatre/Archaeology is a brilliant and provocative challenge to disciplinary practice and intellectual boundaries. It brings together radical proposals in both archaeological and performance theory to generate a startlingly original and intriguing methodological framework. It facilitates a new way of investigating landscape and cityscape, and notions of physicality, encounter, site and context.

The book takes scholarly innovation to new levels. It is the result of a long-term, unique collaboration between a renowned archaeological theorist and a leading theatre artist. The result is a vibrant dialogic writing that bridges the scholarly/poetic divide. In its unique integration of theory, narrative, and autobiography, Theatre/Archaeology brings a new dimension to two burgeoning fields of inquiry.

http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/weblog/

http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/projects/deep-mapping.html

http://www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/mp.shtml

N55

http://www.n55.dk/

N55 works with art as a part of everyday life.

N55 numbers four persons, Rikke Luther, Ion Sørvin, Cecilia Wendt and Ingvil Hareide Aarbakke, who work together, share places to live, economy, and means of production.

N55 is based both in the N55 SPACEFRAME situated in Copenhagen, and in LAND.

N55 TEXTS:

ART AND REALITY by N55
ABOUT ownership of land by N55
ABOUT ownership of knowledge by N55
ABOUT ideologies by N55

N55 EXCHANGES:

Lars Bang Larsen and N55 exchanging
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt and N55 exchanging
Brett Bloom and N55 exchanging
Stina Teilmann and N55 exchanging
Terje Traavik and N55 exchanging
Will Bradley and N55 exchanging
2000 YEARS OF FALLACIES Peter Zinkernagel interviewed by N55
WHO IS LAND FOR? N55 interviewed by Brett Bloom
THE RITUAL OF LIVING N55 interviewed by Craig Martin

PLATFORM / London

http://www.platformlondon.org/

PLATFORM has been described as many things - an arts group, a forum for political dialogue, an environmental campaign - but, in essence, it is an idea, a vision of using creativity to transform the society we live in; a belief in every individual's innate power to contribute to this process.

PLATFORM - promoting creative processes of democratic engagement to advance social and ecological justice

through...

Catalysts for Change > harnessing the power of art, the commitment of campaigning, and the imagination of education to unleash citizens’ creative and democratic potential.

Individuals not Representatives > creating unique spaces where people from different backgrounds and perspectives come together in an atmosphere of trust to discuss complex issues - ‘communities of interest’.

Practical and Poetic > using a variety of strategies from research to performances, from walks to renewable energy systems, from publications to discussion-feasts.

Interdisciplinary Creativity > creating the work by consistently combining the skills and experience of people from many different disciplines - economists to artists, psychologists to environmentalists.

Here & Elsewhere > evolving long-term projects which embody a deep commitment to London’s ecology and peoples while also exploring the nature of the city’s impacts on the wider world.

Infectious Visions > feeding innovative ideas into the bloodstream of society like a benevolent virus.

Freedom in The City

PLATFORM has long used the walk as an important form for public space work. We have explored walking as a research tool, as a ritual, as performance, as intervention, as a political tool, and as a tool for sharing insights and information. Our walks have been devised by artists, historians, community activists, psychologists, and environmentalists in collaboration, and as solo ventures.

Since 1983 PLATFORM has established itself as one of Europe’s leading exponents of social practice art, combining the talents of artists, social scientists, activists and environmentalists to work across disciplines on issues of social and environmental justice. PLATFORM works in London and the Thames Valley, but its methodologies and strategies travel far beyond Britain’s capital. PLATFORM’s projects have been recognised for their innovation and imagination both in Britain and internationally - over recent years it has been invited to make major presentations of its work in Germany, Yugoslavia, Canada, Bulgaria, Ireland and the U.S.A.

In 1992 PLATFORM won the Time Out Award for ‘Still Waters’ which looked at London as a water city and proposed the recovery of its buried rivers. Growing out of the success of ‘Still Waters’ the ‘Delta’ project, involved sculpture, music, performance and the installation of a micro-hydro turbine in London’s river Wandle, and has in turn led to the creation of the urban renewable energy scheme - RENUE. Another strand of PLATFORM’s work began in 1993 with ‘Homeland’, a commission from London International Festival of Theatre, which investigated Londoners’ links to producers through international trade systems. Since 1996 it has been working on its most ambitious and multi-faceted project to date - ‘90% CRUDE’ - a long-term enquiry into the culture and impact of transnational corporations, with particular reference to the oil industry. Since 1999, as part of this overall project, ‘killing us softly’ and ‘Unravelling the Carbon Web’ have been acclaimed for raising critical questions regarding individual responsibility in the context of corporate impacts on human rights and climate change.

The work of PLATFORM has been featured in numerous books and articles, among these the recent essay ‘Imagination is the root of all change’ by Jane Rendell in ‘Bridge, The Architecture of Connection’, Lucy Blakstad, August Birkhauser, (2002); Phaidon’s publication ‘Land And Environmental Art’, Jeffrey Kastner (1998); and Routledge’s ‘Art, Space and the City’, Malcolm Miles (1997). PLATFORM members are on the advisory board for Corporate Watch and on the management committee for Black Environment Network.

In 1997 the Environment Foundation (UK) recognised PLATFORM’s project ‘Carbon Generations’ with a travelling scholarship. PLATFORM subsequently received Britain’s most prestigious environmental prize, the Schumacher Award in 2000, the first artist-led organisation to be honoured in the history of the award. In 2001, having been selected for a Bridge Program award, the group undertook a successful residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francisco.

Wrights & Sites / mis-GUIDE

Wrights & Sites is a group of artist-researchers with a special relationship to place

http://www.mis-guide.com/ws.html

Wrights & Sites is a group of four artist-researchers committed to producing experimental, site-specific work. Formalised in 1997 and based in Exeter (UK), the four Core Members (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith & Cathy Turner) have been working together, in various permutations, for many years. Collectively, we aim to explore and celebrate site (domestic, landscape, public and forbidden) in many forms, through site-specific performance, mis-guided walks & published Mis-Guides, 'drifts', mythogeographic mapping and public presentations & articles.

Mis-GUIDE

Mis-Guides are like no other guides you have ever used before. Rather than telling you where to go and what to see, a Mis-Guide gives you the ways to see your town or city that no one else has found yet. A Mis-Guide is both a forged passport to your 'other' city and a new way of travelling a very familiar one. An essential part of the toolkit of any 21st Century urban survivor.

A Mis-Guide takes the form of a guide book. It suggests a series of walks and points of observation and contemplation within a particular town or city. It is no ordinary guide book. It is guided by the practice of mytho-geography, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal on equal terms with 'factual', municipal history. Author and walker become partners in ascribing significance to place.

Mis-Guide's are produced by Exeter-based, site-specific artists Wrights & Sites, working with visual artist Tony Weaver.

The core members of Wrights & Sites (Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner) explore and celebrate site in many forms (domestic, landscape, public and forbidden) through site-specific performance, mis-guided walks, 'drifts', mythogeographic mapping and published Mis-Guides. Wrights & Sites was formed in 1997.

Exeter Mis-Guide / Courtauld / A Mis-Guide To Anywhere

Papers & Articles

Mis-guiding the City Walker

Dread, Route and Time: An Autobiographical Walking of Everything Else by Phil Smith

A Short History of the Future of Walking by Phil Smith

LINKS I | LINKS II

SPURSE

http://www.spurse.org/

spurse is an international hybrid architectural collective composed of individuals with expertise in a wide variety of fields - statistics, urbanism, dance, architecture, metalsmithing, computer programming, biology, geography, philosophy, bmx, cultural practices etc. spurse operates in a manner that recognizes no pre-existing entities, hierarchy or centers - it is composed solely of decentered mutating cells coming into being to disappear or reform otherwise. Thus spurse is an organization that has no (fixed) content or members — it is rather a viral multiplicity that is continuously reforming itself as it becomes new projects and new events. spurse is open to change, contradiction, multiplicity, inversions, tangents, hybrids, illness, infection, betrayal — spurse is a affirmation of, and an experimentation with, the unknowable becoming of the givenness of reality.

spurse is interested in the reconstruction of the commons, experimenting with ideas that are immanent and emergent from the materiality of things, and fostering the unfolding of spaces of new visceral sensations beyond subjectivity. We embrace, and are subject to, an architecture of openness. Our identity inherits the multiplicity each project produces — and each project inherits the multiplicities of our identities.

sans terre

a   temporary   institution   for   the   investigation   of   urbanism

sans terre is a temporary research institution and archive set up for the rethinking of urbanism. The majority of our work is centered on comparative research in both Mexico City and North Adams. This comparative methodology is based upon our central contention that since currently more than half of the world's population lives in an urban context we have crossed a threshold and entered into a global condition of a new and radically urban geography. North Adams and its seeming small town quality situated in the middle of forests becomes an ideal test site for such a hypothesis. For us crossing this threshold presents an opportunity to re-conceptualize many of our most basic ways to understand place, agency, forms of incorporation, and our place in the world – in sort the very idea of intervention itself.

Over the duration of The Interventionists exhibition members of our research group will be coming to work, meet and continue our archival and conceptual research. Work is also being done in other locations and being periodically sent to this site. You are invited to use the available resources, including the collections, maps, diagrams, books, and digital equipment to collaborate in the ongoing investigation on urbanism. As well, more elaborate questions, thoughts, and research proposals can be initiated and a collaborative working methodology can be developed.

sustaining what: after nature

Sustainability, in its current understanding relies on the western concept of Nature, which is often linked to the idea of balance and harmony, which also underlies the concept of sustainability. This conceptual tradition stretches back to the Greeks, who imagined nature linked to the ideal and the timeless. But this conception seems far from the reality of actual natural systems, e.g., a meteorite crashes and everything changes, volcanoes erupt, species appear and disappear. The science of nonequalibrial systems seems to suggest a model closer to reality in which stable states arise within fluctuating systems far from balance.

Most theories of nature imagine the position of the human as an artificial element outside of and in contrast to nature. But this produces inexplicable paradoxes of the natural versus the artificial, nature versus culture, man versus the world. Yet it seems there is only one world – a world of mutation, change, transformation, emergence, quasi-stabilization, and rupture where there is no clear demarcation between any species, event, or territory. The relations between the “natural” and the “cultural” form a complex web of interaction and alliances where agency is distributed across the field of becoming.

Before imagining a politics of sustainability, we need to first understand what exactly is the possibility of the sustainable whatsoever. How do events emerge, stabalize, and then transform, mutate, or rupture towards other distinct events. To understand the radicalness of possibility inherent in the sustainable, we propose to produce an experimental zone of investigation that traces out the complex interweavings of agencies involved in specific contested terrains.

e-Xplo

http://www.e-xplo.org/

e-Xplo develops maps, routes, sound and film materials as reflections of a multifaceted investigation into location, context, social identity, landscape, and the public space of information.

Each work proposes distinct but related topics, thus focusing on specific issues for concrete places while searching for broader insights.

e-Xplo could possibly provide the scenario in which the articulation of individual narratives and their approaches to larger references becomes a highly charged site

e-Xplo takes on the part of a topographical agent by developing projects which engage a space and the people who inhabit it.

e-Xplo is the framework for the collaboration between Erin McGonigle, Heimo Lattner, and Rene Gabri

Project: Roundabout - Love at Leisure : Help me Stranger

The tour was divided into two parts.
Inhabitants of the two towns of North Adams and Williamstown explore in interviews the overlapping themes of property, local politics and desire in part1: Love at Leisure. (going from North Adams to Williamstown)

Part 2 (comming from Williamstown to North Adams): Help Me Stranger is more of a fictional film, based on a screenplay.

Location: MASS MoCA / The Interventionists

A Short Note About the Bus Tour

In Fall of 2000, e-Xplo began to work on a public art project that manifested itself as part bus tour, part electro-acoustic music performance and part public talks.  e-Xplo started to build on that original project/idea by creating tours for different sites.

We like walking as much as we do swimming in the sea

Publics . Modes . And Exchange

The accelertion of the last few years has been mesmerizing for all of us. Today the accumulated knowledge and databases of realized projects and the possibilities of a networked collaboration through the use of a computer-program we have developed (KORIN; see Hidden Track) make it possible to envision more strategically focused mapping projects. The dillema of the relationship to institutions, galleries, museums, festivals or any other forms of financially supportative structures did not fade to insignificance.  Rather gained significance. So did the time dedicated to our collaboration.

Center for Land Use Interpretation

http://www.clui.org/

Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nations lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth's surface. The Center embraces a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling the stated mission, employing conventional research and information processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools.

The organization was founded in 1994, and since that time it has produced over 30 exhibits on land use themes and regions, for public institutions all over the United States, as well as overseas. Public tours have been conducted in several states, and over ten books have been published by the CLUI. CLUI Archive photographs illustrate journals, popular magazines, and books by other publishers, and have been used in non-CLUI exhibitions, and acquired by art collectors.

The CLUI exists to stimulate discussion, thought, and general interest in the contemporary landscape. Neither an environmental group nor an industry affiliated organization, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use - the many perspectives of the landscape - into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in "land use" debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.

On Foot: A History of Walking

by Joseph A. Amato

http://www.nyupress.org/product_info.php?cPath=28&products_id=3629

Walking has been a mode of locomotion for humans from the very beginning of recorded time. Whether traveling, hunting, gathering food, or even dancing, human beings have lived their lives on foot. In his new book On Foot: A History of Walking, Joseph A. Amato explores the history of walking and its impact on society. In particular, he examines how changes in the conditions of walking—advances like paved roads, carriages, and cars—have altered lives and societies.

Following in the footsteps of his highly-acclaimed history Dust, Amato explores how the history of a small act—walking—can reveal societal changes over centuries of human history. Some of the intriguing facts about walking revealed by On Foot include:

Bipedal walking consumes about 35% less energy than ape-like knuckle walking—scientists speculate that the extra energy gave early humans increased brain function—as well as freeing human hands to use tools!

In an attempt to manage traffic, Julius Caesar banned wheeled vehicles from the center of Rome during the day.

The city streets of Medieval Europe could be so dangerous that Oxford University punished students twice as harshly for night walking as for shooting an arrow at a teacher.

Modern ballet was invented in the court of Louis XIV, where the king himself took dance lessons each day, and all courtiers were taught the “proper” way to stand, walk and dance in order to reflect their social standing.

Henry David Thoreau once walked eighteen miles—from Concord to Boston—to hear Emerson speak, walking home again after the lecture was over.

When London opened the world’s first underground urban railway in 1863—transforming city life for pedestrians—30,000 passengers traveled on the very first day. In 1890, London was again a pioneer of public transportation, introducing the world’s first electric tube railway.

Throughout the 20th century, machines like airplanes and automobiles gradually supplanted walking as a mode of transportation. On Foot shows how mechanical innovations have led to a society where few people need to walk, and those who do are often walking by choice, either for exercise or recreation. Beginning with one everyday act, Amato traces a history of human society from its very origins to the present day.

Joseph A. Amato is the author of fifteen books, including Dust: A History of the Small and Invisible. He is professor emeritus of history and rural and regional studies at Southwest Minnesota State University. He lives in Marshall, MN.

Table of Contents (.PDF)

Introduction (.PDF)

Journals

Space and Culture / International Journal of Social Spaces 
http://www.carleton.ca/space/
http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=287
http://www.spaceandculture.org/

Body & Society
http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=56
http://bod.sagepub.com/

Theory, Culture & Society
http://www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=106
http://tcs.sagepub.com/

New Formations
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/contents.html

Soundings
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/contents.html

Potawatomi "Trail of Death"

Excerpts from Trail of Death 1838 DIARY

The 3rd Week

Monday 17th - Wednesday 19th Sept. 6 mi., Sandusky's Point, Illinois. Remained in camp due to illness. The sick left behind yesterday caught up, had new baby. 3 children & 2 adults died. A child was born. Dr. Jerolaman assisted by Dr. James Buell of Williamsport.

Thursday 20th Sept. 10 mi., Davis' Point. Most volunteers discharged, 16 retained. Gen. Tipton left, Wm. Polke is now in charge.

Friday 21st Sept. 12 mi., Sidney, Ill. chief Muk-kose & a child died.

Saturday 22nd Sept. 16 mi., Sidoris' Grove. Heavy rain, exceedingly cold. A wagoneer discharged for drunkeness. 2 intoxicated Indians locked up.

Sunday 23rd Sept. 15 mi., Pyatt's Point on Sangamon river. Father Petit performed service before journey started. A child died early this morning. 29 sick persons left in camp.

The 4th Week

Monday 24th - Tuesday 25th Sept. 15 mi., Sangamon Crossing in Illinois. 2 children and 1 adult died. Indian men permitted to go hunting. Sick left in camp yesterday caught up.

Trail of Death MAP

Fulton County Historical Society

Photographs of the Bridge Street TD Marker in Monticello, Illinois (11/06/04)

A Generative Grammar of the Legs: a Mobile Conference on Walking

Proposal by Kahve-Society, currently at a research and development stage.

http://www.kahve-house.com/society/walking/

The aim of this conference is to address the historical and current interest in walking, with particular attention to projects that involve walking as critical and creative activity. The event is timely in reflecting considerable recent attention and interest in walking through urban space (from the popular work of Janet Cardiff in the Whitechapel area to current 'generative psychogeography' practices organised over the web) and thus aims to provide an understanding of its historical context and to represent current debate on walking as embodied, analytical and aesthetic practice, beyond its function as means of getting from A to B. Walking is not addressed as a mode of transport but as a continuous process of the renewal of ideas (hence the title). Walking animates the production of text, hence Christophe Bailly refers to walking as 'grammaire generative de jambes' (generative grammar of the legs). Walking is an expansive metaphor.

It aims to draw together a range of ideas from this emerging inter-disciplinary field of inquiry: perhaps those particularly from architecture, social anthropology, cultural geography and history, urban sociology, tourism and the visual and performance arts. Participants will be required to become active agents in this process in a reflexive manner that dissolves the hard distinction between theory and practice in the spirit of the walking methodologist (evoking the work of Walter Benjamin). The tracing and making of urban text through walking inadvertently unsettles the notion of non-space (shopping malls, underpasses, airport lounges), and shifts the reading of these places into an economic geography, analysing the relationship between capitalism and space.

WALKING REFERENCES - working notes on texts/artists

Wilfried Hou Je Bek & Stalker

Archilab 2004 > 6th Orléans International Architectural Conference
from 16 October to 30 December 2004

ArchiLab has been introduced, and is produced, by the City of Orléans, in partnership with the Centre Regional Council, and backing of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (Heritage and Architecture Office, Centre Regional Current Affairs Office), in collaboration with the FRAC Centre (Centre Regional Contemporary Art Fund).

Wilfried Hou Je Bek (1975) Netherlands

Wilfried Hou Je Bek left school at 16 to become both a writer and a squatter. Under the moniker of socialfiction.org he has organised countless of psychogeographical walks all over the world. Currently he is developing a “little language” for psychogeography that allows everybody to record & share experiences of urban space. Recent commissions include work for the city of Dordrecht, Psy Geo Conflux (New York), the PixelACHEfestival (Helsinki), RAM5 (Riga), Urban Festival (Zagreb), Urban Drift (Berlin). In 2004 he won the Transmediale software art prize for .walk, a futuristic project for open space that transforms cities into computers.

socialfiction.org

ON/Stalker > osservatorionomade > Italy
Francesco Careri (1966), Aldo Innocenzi (1964), Romolo Ottaviani (1967), Giovanna Ripepi (1965), Lorenzo Romito (1965), Valerio Romito (1971)

This hybrid collective, founded in Rome in 1995 is defined as an urban art laboratory. In 2000, Stalker presented Transborderline, a habitable structure made of barbless barbed wire symbolizing a three-dimensional frontier, shown in several exhibitions as the 7thVenice Biennal or Manifesta 3 in Lubljiana. In France, in 1997, the group exhibited at the Visual Arts Institute Gallery in Orleans, then at the Arc en Rêve Architectural Centre in Bordeaux in 2000. In 2001, Stalker took part in the exhibitions Paysages d’entre villes/Intercity Landscapes at the Zadkine Museum in Paris, Libérez Beaubourg/Free Beaubourg at the Pompidou Centre, and the GNS exhibition held at the Palais de Tokyo in 2003. In preferring “architectural actions”, Stalker focuses its interest on the city and everything that forms its abandoned and disused spaces and waste areas. It suggests to the public various walks through “urban voids”, and thus criss-crosses, Rennes, Milan, Miami or Berlin. Close to the theories of the Internationale Situationniste, Stalker creates a map based on residual places left over by galloping urbanism. By means of the above-mentioned methods, the collective proposes a reverse reading of a network which forms an architectural project: the urban mass turns into blocks separated by all the many channels of marginal zones devoid of all functionalism. Since May 1999, Stalker and the Kurdish community in Rome have been sharing a building called “Ararat”. The group is thus experimenting with a new form of public space based on accommodation and hospitality. Since 2001, Stalker promotes a research network called the Osservatorio Nomade. This contributes to the creative evolution of territories through crossed fields of planning, experimentation and educational programs in relation with local inhabitants.

osservatorio nomade
stalker

Boris Sieverts & Claude Willey

Boris Sieverts studied arts at Düsseldorf. After working as a shepherd in France, he worked with several architectural agencies in Germany before founding Büro für Städtereisen in 1997 in Cologne, where he lives. Buro für Städtereisen is a city travel agency where Boris Sieverts operates like a hikers’ guide, organizing walks in city outskirts. Through reports he writes up on city suburbs, and Cologne’s in particular, situated as they are on the right bank of the Rhine, Boris Sieverts notes every situation and encounter in great detail. He analyses the sensations brought about by these and tries to formulate the project underlying his excursions in this type of extremely complex territory: the project of “poetic densification” (Verdichten) of these territories by transforming the usual perception of them. Boris Sieverts focuses and concentrates on these “areas of wasteland” and “empty lots”, areas which are intrinsically strong, as is the whole landscape of the suburbs, in the expression of the absence of preconceived form and appropriation. A new way of looking at things arises by way of a selective itinerary through these “areas of wasteland”, where spaces follow on from spaces, and where the wild aspect, in the sense of a phenomenon without projects, which nobody has appropriated, is invariably juxtaposed with the preconceived and the appropriated. In 2002, Boris Sieverts became an expert member of the technical committee for e2 contest, an international competition on the urban condition, subsequently exhibited at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. His writings on sensitive walks have been published in particular in the magazine Site in Germany, and translated in the French magazine Le Visiteur.

"Urban journey with Boris Sieverts" > Archilab 2004
In his urban travel agency, Büro fur Städtereisen in Cologne, Boris Sieverts has been operating for the past five years as a walkers' guide for hikes which he organizes on the edges of cities. According to him, "the wild outskirts of large cities are one of the last adventures." For ArchiLab 2004, Boris Sieverts is introducing a programme of outings in the Argonne neighbourhood.

Archilab 2004 : The Naked City
Das Büro für Städtereisen
Boris Sieverts

Claude Willey is an L.A. artist/researcher whose activities focus on mildly sophisticated system design, construction, and analysis for both urban and rural environments. After a move from Chicago to SoCal in 1999, Willey abandoned working in sound-based mediums and began with experiments in water storage and retention. After a series of water-themed events: a symposium, a series of exhibitions, a radio piece (Hydro-Radio), and a year-long investigation of a watershed in Orange County, Willey turned his sights on the Mojave Desert to begin work with the MOISTURE collective. Becoming Willey’s main project since the beginning of 2002, the MOISTURE project has integrated itself into Harper Dry Lake Basin, working on functional land art built to interact with the region’s hydrologic cycle. In the past, Willey has been represented by the sound art labels Staalplaat (Holland), Katyn (Germany), and VUZ (Germany), but his current projects find him partnering with the Santa Rosa company DriWater and Greenmuseum.org, along with the funding agents: The Beall Center for Art and Technology and the LEF Foundation. He is currently an adjunct faculty in the Urban Studies and Planning Department at California State University Northridge and at Pasadena City College in the Visual Art and Media Division. Willey has also instructed at UC Irvine and USC. Willey lives in Los Angeles and does not own or regularly use an automobile. He commutes long distance via bicycle for work and has been documenting and writing about understanding movement and perceptions of time within a car-dominated transport system.

http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=105
http://moisture.greenmuseum.org/
http://www.quietamerican.org/related_qp.html
http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/pragmaticMultitudism/