The Art of Walking Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust Roughly three and three-quarter million years ago, a volcano erupted in what is now northern Tanzania, blanketing the landscape with volcanic ash. Rain fell, causing the ashy surface to take on the properties of plaster, and across this ground numerous animals walked, leaving their footprints in the wet volcanic ash to be preserved as it turned into a hard cement. One of the creatures that passed across this landscape 3.6 million years ago was a member of the early human species Australopithecus afarensis. The importance of the fossil footprints at Laetoli cannot be overstated. They demonstrate incontrovertibly that 3.6 million years ago, early humans were bipedal (walking upright on two legs). Their big toes hardly diverged from the rest of the foot, this can be seen in the photograph at the top right of the imprint. In comparison, a chimpanzee has a highly diverged big toe, and is able to use it like a thumb. Additionally, it is possible to tell that the gait of these early humans was "heel-strike" (the heel of the foot hit first) followed by "toe-off" (the toes push off at the end of the stride); the way modern humans walk. Thus, bipedality was essentially developed by this time. Yet from other fossil finds we know that the morphology of the skull, particularly the brain, remained little changed from our ape ancestors. The history of walkers and walking is long and varied and includes the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece, the melancholy Romantic poets, religious pilgrimages, protest marches, the solitary flneur of the city, and the hiker communing in the wilderness. I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in. John Muir Francis Als The Modern Procession, organized by artist Francis Als and presented by the Public Art Fund in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art, was modeled after a traditional ritual procession. Beginning in front of MoMA at 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue at 9 am, the procession paraded through midtown Manhattan, crossed the Queensboro Bridge into Long Island City, marched along Queens Boulevard, and ended at the door of MoMA in Queens. Both festive and ceremonial, the procession made the museum's historic transition both visible and public, linking the two boroughs in a spectacular and memorable way. A 12-member Peruvian brass band, Banda de Santa Cecilia, set the pace for the procession. Over 150 uniformed participants carried reproductions of MoMA's most famous works--by artists Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Alberto Giacometti--on hand-held wooden carriages. The presence of these reproductions, like Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, paid homage to the history of MoMA while celebrating the new cultural and economic potential of bringing art into the streets. Artist Kiki Smith served as a representative of contemporary art. Carried by fellow participants, Smith lead a spectacle of people who marched holding banners and dogs and scattering rose petals. Participants marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in 1965Participants marching in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in Peter Pettus. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress RICHARD LONG A Line in the Himalayas sahara A line made by walking Feeling My Way waterlines This was one of Long's first works made of slate, which came from Delabole in Cornwall. The sculpture is an example of the artist bringing objects connected with his walks into a gallery. Unlike many of his works which are made outdoors and exist only in photographs, this piece is permanent. The line is a central image in Long's work. It recalls a path or a journey. It echoes the walks that Long has made all over the world. What is the relationship between emotions and physical space? This question has been a concern of many theorists from many disciplines but was perhaps most directly addressed by the Situationists in the late 1960s with their notion of psychogeography and their conceptual tool, the urban drift through the city. Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as the "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." Psychogeography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape." The most important of these strategies is the drive. In a drive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there But the drive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. The Bio Mapping device was invented by the artist Christian Nold. It combines a finger cuff sensor, which records the wearers Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) an index of emotional response in conjunction with a Global Positioning System (GPS) which locates the wearers position on earth. The finger cuff sensor was derived from the Polygraph, where it is used by law enforcement agencies to identify the physiological symptoms of stress induced by lying. Bio Mapping uses this technology very differently. Instead of handing over ones own biometric data to an authority for judging, Bio Mapping empowers the participants to interpret their bodys metrics in a more subtle way for themselves. At a basic level the map shows a sensory space of embodied experience where personal response appears to be caused by a variety of visual, auditory, taste and smell stimuli. At another level, we seem to see the effects of the built environment represented by traffic crossings and comments about particular local features. But perhaps most striking is the prominence of a third level: that of peoples social interaction. This social space which might be seen as ephemeral and temporary, including as it does surprise meetings with friends, neighbours and strangers appears to be more important than the other levels. Rather than the continuous drifting through the city that the Situationists imagined, the Greenwich Emotion Map suggests an experience of the city as a series of distinct events, by which we mean moments of distinctive attention. The actual nature of these events varies from meeting people, taking a photo, crossing roads, to being annoyed by ones surroundings. What these events have in common is an element of novelty which has caused the persons attention to become focused. This vision of the environment as a stage for events suggests an active engagement not covered by the normal concept of the walk or drift. It suggests an embodied being within the environment actively interacting with people, objects and places. Martin Kersels, Tripping Photo 1(a-c), 1995 Mile Long Drawing By Walter de Maria, Mojave Desert, California Migration by Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas fuses the banal and often cinematic subject of walking on the beach with more complex issues of domination, transience, and personal boundaries. Armed with videocameras, the artists video-taped each other walking behind one another,alternately as pursuer and pursued. The resulting tapes are displayed as a diptych on two television monitors. The monitors have been turned on their sides, creating a horizontal direction to the artists walking and visually connecting the images. The distance between the monitors becomes a way of uniting the two different walks as one. The "follower" in each tape either steps into or over the footprints of the predecessor. Negotiations of male and female,and husband and wife (the artists are married) join with the romantic notions of walking on the beach we've inherited from film and television. Rudolf Stingel often presents large visual fields that carry traces of the body. In Untitled, he uses styrofoam as a ground on which to walk, wearing acetone- soaked boots that etch his footprints into the white surface. By doing so, Stingel creates a diagram of his movements, and seemingly becoming painter, brush, and paint all rolled into one. The resulting object, a blocky minimal "painting," reminds us of childhood walks in frozen snow. akira kanayama This Way Brouwn consists of drawings made by passers-by that serve as directions for the artist to get from one place to another. In 1985, Canadian artist Franois Morelli embarked on Transatlantic Walk, which commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II. Carrying what appears to be a burned figure on his back, Morelli trekked from Philadelphia (via New York, Paris, Amsterdam, and Cologne) to Berlin, documenting his pilgrimage with notebook drawings, writings, and photographs. The figure, made of fiberglass and plastic tubing, also served as a vessel for storing water, and was regularly filled or emptied by the artist at lakes, rivers, and public fountains. It is as if the artist was providing nourishment to this body, keeping it alive along with the memory of the horror its real-life counterparts endured. Sophie Calle, Suite Vnitienne ( ): For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them. At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in a crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. Suite Vnitienne opens with the above text, and proceeds to document Calles pursuit of a man through a seemingly labyrinthine Venice, in a detailed photographic and written report that captures and orders the full range of feelings the endeavour provokes in her. At times, she loses trace of the man altogether, or conversely, or finds herself face-to-face with him; Calle likens the excitement of the chase to the thrill of being in love. Angst-producing from the onset, Rape opens without titles: The camera zeroes in on an attractive, long-haired woman wandering through a picturesque London cemetery (suggestive of the park in Blow Up ), meets her head-on, and then tags along behind. It soon becomes evident that its prey, identified in auxiliary material as a 21-year-old Austrian named Eva Majlath, doesnt speak English. But shes basically amiable and makes numerous attempts to establish contact with the filmmakers in German and Italian. They are, of course, totally non-communicative, ignoring even her request for a match, while shifting the camera to keep her always in frame.The movie approximates real time. Whenever a roll of film runs out, the crew falls behind the subject, so that each new sequence begins with the exciting spectacle of their catching up to, and startling, her anew. After the third roll, Majlaths composure gives way to annoyance. By the time the crew has followed her out of the park and into the street, shes angry and frightened - so spooked that she walks into a post and, at one point, nearly steps out in front of an oncoming truck. (No one in the street appears to pay the slightest attention to her plight). Rape s second half has the crew invade the small apartment where Majlath is staying. She paced like a caged animal, the cameras tight, hand-held close-ups mirroring her agitated movements as she compulsively combs her hair, babbles hysterically in German (tears of frustration streaking her elaborate eye makeup), and repeatedly attempts to open the apartments locked front door. All the more violent for its sunbursts and whiteouts, this section often becomes pure kinesis. Although Majlath hides her face or halfheartedly blocks the lens, the camera shows no restraint, swarming around her opportunistically coming in closer whenever she appears most vulnerable. As the movie ends, she makes a phone call; the sounds of her distress continue over the credits. For a simple movie, Rape raises a multitude of questions. Although Onos score indicates that the films subject should be chosen at random, this hardly seems the case. The film is clearly some sort of setup, although its difficult to ascertain what kind. Majlath was obviously selected for her good looks, lack of English, and unfamiliarity with London; according to various accounts, the filmmakers obtained the key to her apartment from either her sister (whom she frequently invokes) or the building owner, then locked her in. Although Majlath never completely panics or appears to imagine herself in physical danger, she doesnt seem complicit in her victimizationher anger and confusion are absolutely convincing. This, of course, is much of the fascination. In one sense, Rape is a particularly brutal dramatization of the Warholian discovery that the cameras implacable stare disrupts "ordinary" behavior to enforce its own regime. In another, the film is a graphic metaphor for the ruthless surveillance that can theoretically attach itself to any citizen of the modern world.Indeed, although Ono has denied that this was her intent, it is hard not to see Rape as a reaction to the media coverage that she and Lennon had alternately courted and been victimized by at various stages of their careers. But Rape is more than just a hyperbolic representation of blanket media coverage; it radically challenges the viewers privileged position. Basically, Rape presents a beautiful, extremely feminine woman in peril, her situation overtly sexualized by the very title. (The opening graveyard provides a suitably gothic location.) Although this scenario is a movie staple, arguably the movie staple, the absence of a narrative strongly invites the audience to identify with the cameras (unmistakably male) look and recognize this controlling gaze as its own. Yoko Ono: Rape walking women solnit Karl Emilio Pircher and Fidel Peugeot: Walking Chair MICRONAUTICAL DESIGN Walkabout is an Australian term referring to the commonly-held belief that Australian Aborigines would "go walkabout" at the age of thirteen in the wilderness for six months as a rite of passage. In this practice they would trace the paths (the so-called songlines) that their people's ceremonial ancestors took, and imitate, in a fashion, their heroic deeds. The Songlines Bruce Chatwin Bennell: Bunuru Songlines Based on a true story, Rabbit-Proof Fence moves with dignified grace from its joyful opening scenes to a conclusion that's moving beyond words. The title refers to a 1,500-mile fence separating outback desert from the farmlands of Western Australia. It is here, in 1931, that three aboriginal girls are separated from their mothers and transported to a distant training school, where they are prepared for assimilation into white society by a racist government policy. Gracie, Daisy, and Molly belong to Australia's "stolen generations," and this riveting film (based on the book by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington Garimara) follows their escape and tenacious journey homeward, while a stubborn policy enforcer (Kenneth Branagh) demands their recapture. Director Phillip Noyce chronicles their ordeal with gentle compassion, guiding his untrained, aboriginal child actors with a keen eye for meaningful expressions. Their performances evoke powerful emotions (subtly enhanced by Peter Gabriel's excellent score), illuminating a shameful chapter of Australian history while conveying our universal need for a true and proper home. - The distance covered was likely the longest walk in Australian history. - Jeff Shannon What did you learn on the way to school today? Saunter Stroll Drift/Drive Flanerie Paseo Promenading Sound And Spirit A Manifesto for a New Walking Culture: 'dealing with the city Wrights and Sites 'Our intent is to show walking not only as a directed movement from one place to another, but a wandering, an odyssey of sight and sound, a quest for knowledge and stimulation, a grand roaming expedition, and a living breathing work of art in its own right.' To cross To recognize To discover To descend To climb To trace To tread To inhabit To visit To narrate To traverse To perceive To guide oneself To observe To listen to To navigate To meet To measure To grasp To find To take To tail To track To enter To interact with To investigate To follow To leave To err To get oriented To submerge To wander To penetrate To go forward To to retrace To get lost To construct Clever Interesting Conceptual Significant All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking Friedrich Nietzsche