Walking as Art

Walking relates to art in a number of ways:

  • Walking as the making strange of typically urban social space (the classic form of the derive) – affective inclination and alienating protocols
  • Walking as ephemeral practice – issues of documentation and non-objective, non-commodifiable form (Richard Long, Hamish Fulton)
  • Walking as a form of socially engaged practice – experiential participation/conversation, exploration of an issue, a social field (SquatSpace, Simon Pope) versus walking as solitary aesthetic mode (Rousseau, Thoreau, etc.)
  • Walking in relation to the abstraction of terrain via maps and GPS

Informal means (casual, just walking) versus imposed, artificial schemas (algorithmic psychogeography)

Walking’s relation to the aesthetic as an embodied experience of freedom. There is no need, in this sense, that it take expressive form, that it become an objectified and communicative art form. Rather it short circuits the need for art as such – for any form of mediating artistic agency; the aesthetic is constituted within the experience of walking itself (at least potentially). Walking is less an artistic medium than a medium of aesthetic experience.

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