walking as knowing as making

INTRODUCTION / PARTICIPANTS / EXCHANGE MODELS
FOOD FOR THOUGHT / SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY / WKM SYMPOSIUM

INTRODUCTION

The WALKING EXCHANGE is an online discussion that parallels the WALKING AS KNOWING AS MAKING symposium. The exchange is intended specifically to engage contemporary artists and groups who employ walking (and, more generally, touring) as a critical tool to investigate and destabilize essentialized notions of place and landscape. Our hope is that this dialogue will both inform and be informed by the symposium as it unfolds here at the University of Illinois. The symposium and the online exchange are both experimental by nature - attempts to creatively bridge a multitude of divergent contexts in a way that blends and recombines theoretical and practiced approaches to walking as a subject.

Walking as art, as writing, as pilgrimage, as protest / Walking as spiritual, as mundane / Walking as constituting boundaries, as transgressing boundaries / Walking as deeply personal, as emphatically public / Walking as touring, as witnessing / Walking as practical, as impractical / Walking as compliance, as defiance / Walking as seeing, as being seen / Walking as traditional, as revolutionary / Walking as wild, as mediated, as constructed / Walking as an interpretive act, a generative act, an embodied act / Walking as differentiating space, as consolidating space / Walking in space and time, connecting space, connecting time....

The Tour / By e-Xplo

It is a difficult assignment, to trace how one arrives at a particular strategy or medium, and the task is made more difficult because of the collaborative nature of our work.

Touring is more than just a metaphor for the "society of the spectacle" or for the increasing industrialization and mobilization of culture for economic purposes.

The tour conjures more than tourism; it implicates and puts into play numerous forms of movement, across and between borders, not just of people but of images, of sounds, of resources, of capital, of labor, of cultures.

The tour can be a pointed critique or a reflexive method of involving/implicating ourselves within the physical and discursive terrain of frames such as public art, site specificity, sound art, mobility, land art, sculpture, architecture, film, music or performance.

It can also be seen as a tactical response to the increased policing of "public" space, in which walking or wandering gets redressed as trespassing or loitering.

It can also be said that the tour is linked to previous politically motivated artists who have taken to the streets, such as Andre Breton (Surrealists) with his strategy of objective chance or Guy Debord (Situationists), who proposed derive ("a technique of transient passage through varied ambiences") as a method for studying terrain, emotionally disorienting oneself, as well as an intermediate step toward the realization of a larger field of study of psycho-geography, fostering among other things the creation of maps in which specific regions of the city would be noted for arousing particular affective or aesthetic responses (not to forget the ultimate goal of social revolution).

The tour could also be a useful technique for confronting critical and timely questions raised by Paul Virilio, Elizabeth Grosz and other thinkers addressing issues (e.g., movement, architecture, cities, technology, virtuality, space, time, duration, transformation, and memory) related to our work.

Touring can be seen as a proposal for a way of exploring cities, tourist sites, and off-sites or, for that matter, the site of tourism.

The tour is also more than all of the latter points; it is a context, a situation, a form, a techne, a tool, an architectural proposal, a quasi-memorial to duration, passage, the present, transformation.

Touring may not even be touring. At times it can be more akin to Barthesian cruising: not swaddled in the stereotypes of monuments, the cruiser is more aware of the world around her/him or at the very least more aware of the very process or act of moving.

From > The Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life / MASS MoCA

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.

From > PLATFORM / Freedom in The City

James Marriott (PLATFORM): Increasingly we’ve tried to utilize walking as a means by which other people can also embody the critical process. I think a good example is Gog and Magog. Gog and Magog is about trying to explore the nature of a contemporary corporation. What is this thing? What does it do? What is its impact on the world? How are we already inside it? One of the ways in which the work manifests itself is through a day-long event. People arrive here at ten o’clock in the morning. They view a presentation that explores the various impacts of BP and Shell on ecology, democracy, and justice. We also explore the companies’ structures, and point out how the members of the audience are already members of the structure, even though they may not be part of BP and Shell. Then we go out into the city and walk to buildings for three hours. Through that process, they physically get to see how all these different organizations fit together. Through the traffic and the heat on the soles of their feet, they embody the nature of corporate reality, and I think that’s incredibly important.

From > A Conversation with Platform: The Political is Personal / Terri Cohn

Today it is possible to construct a history of walking as a form of urban intervention that inherently contains the symbolic meanings of the primal creative act: roaming as architecture of the landscape, where the term landscape indicates the action of symbolic as well as physical transformation of anthropic space.... The aim is to indicate walking as an aesthetic tool capable of describing and modifying those metropolitan space that often have a nature still demanding comprehension, to be filled with meanings rather than designed and filled with things. Walking then turns out to be a tool which, precisely due to the simultaneous reading and writing of space intrinsic to it, lends itself to attending to and interacting with the mutability of those spaces, so as to intervene in their continuous becoming by acting in the field, in the here and now of their transformation, sharing from the inside in the mutations of these spaces that defy the conventional tools of contemporary design.

From > Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice / Francesco Careri

I learn so much that day. Not just facts about the Thames, but a new way of relating to this city. Walking to the Thames along the Fleet offers a particular sense of ‘being in the world’, an ecological view that connects us to a networked environment that is both natural and cultural. Unlike reading a book or watching television, I am walking the river as I find out about it. Ley lines, song lines, story lines, some lines only speak as you walk them. The stories I was told that day are intimately connected with the places in which I first heard them.... These walks - actual and imagined - are storytelling in motion. In some cases, the work takes the form of a narrative unfolding through space, in others the events discovered on the way are enough to create the story. The spatial element of storytelling is stressed in French sociologist Michel de Certeau’s notion of ‘spatial stories’. Stories take place, asserts de Certeau. The ‘spatial story’ is a device that allows connections to be made between people and places. Through the act of walking, these connections are continually made and re-made, physically and conceptually over time and through space. Public concerns and private fantasies, past events and future imaginings are brought into the here and now, into a relationship that is both sequential and simultaneous. Walking is a way of at once discovering and creating the city.

From > Imagination is the root of all change / Jane Rendell (Bridge: The Architecture of Connection / Lucy Blakstad)

PARTICIPANTS > Alex Villar / Andrea Phillips / Boris Sieverts / Brett Stalbaum / Center for Land Use Interpretation / Champaign - Urbana / Chicago / Chris Taylor & Bill Gilbert / Christina Ray / Emily Scott / Erika Block & Hilary Ramsden / e-Xplo / Francesco Careri / kanarinka / Katherine Bash & Lilian Amaral / Lara Almarcegui / Laura Ruggeri / Lize Mogel / Michelle Teran / Mike Pearson / Nato Thompson / neuroTRANSMITTER / Platform / Ryan Griffis / Sarah Lewison / Simon Pope / SPURSE / Stalker / Stephanie Rothenberg / subROSA / Surveillance Camera Players / Teri Rueb / Tim Brennan / Trevor Paglen / Valerie Tevere / Wilfried Hou Je Bek / Wrights & Sites

Alex Villar (USA) / http://www.de-tour.org / http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/dawseybrookhart.htm / http://www.16beavergroup.org/radioactive/alex.htm / http://www.iniva.org/archive/person/524 / http://www.re-title.com/artists/alex-villar.asp

Drawing from interdisciplinary theoretical sources and employing video-performance, installation and photography, I have developed a practice that concentrates on matters of social space. My interventions are done primarily in public spaces. They consist in positioning the body of the performer in situations where the codes that regulate everyday activity can be made explicit. The body is made to conform to the limitations of claustrophobic spaces, therefore accentuating arbitrary boundaries and possibly subverting them. A sense of absurdity permeates the work, counterposing irrational behavior to the instrumental logic of the city's design. Theoretical references cover the extensive work done on the problematic of space, especially the works of Foucault and de Certeau, which describe panopticon and heterotopic spaces as well as the potentialities for everyday re-writings of urban space. Aesthetic traditions foregrounding my work go from the sixties and seventies performative-based sculpture and installations by Helio Oiticica, Ligia Clark and Cildo Meirelles to the urban strategies of the Situationists and the anarchitecture of Gordon Matta-Clark. Like the in-between activities it seeks to investigate, my work lives between various fields: part nomadic architecture, part intangible sculpture and part performance without spectacle.

Born in Brazil '62, based in New York, MFA from Hunter College '98 and Whitney ISP fellow 2000. His work draws from interdisciplinary theoretical sources and employs video, installation and photography. His individual and collaborative projects are part of a long-term investigation and articulation of potential spaces of dissent in the urban landscape that has often taken the form of an exploration of negative spaces in architecture. Villar's work has been shown abroad at the Institute of International Visual Arts in London, Museu de Arte Moderna in Sao Paulo, Galleri Tommy Lund and Overgaden in Copenhagen, Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, the Goteborg Konstmuseum in Sweeden, Galerie Joanna Kamm in Berlin, Signal in Malmo, Galeria Arsenal in Poland, Lichthaus in Bremen and Halle für Kunst in Luneburg. Past US exhibitions include shows at the New Museum, Mass MoCA, Drawing Center, Exit Art, Stux Gallery, Art Container, Dorsky Gallery, Brewster Project, Highbridge Park and Vacancy Gallery in New York, Bona Fide Gallery in Chicago, the New Art Center in Boston and the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art. Published articles and reviews range from theoretical art journals like ReMarx in Massachusetts and Text zur Kunst in Berlin to newspapers like the New York Times to specialized magazines like Tema Celeste.

Andrea Phillips (England) / http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cath/congress/2004/programme/abs/10.shtml / http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/lwpf/seminars/walking.html / http://www.republicart.net/cal/symboliccalendar.htm#phil

Andrea Phillips is a writer and art historian, and currently Assistant Director of MA Curating at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

"Walking into Trouble: Ethics and Aesthetics in the Contemporary Pedestrian"

Abstract > Walking seems to promise something to the contemporary artist and architect: a technique of overcoming the problems of representation that have amassed in art practice and criticism at the end of modernity, in which the politics of identity formation and, especially, location have filtered away any resplendent space for art, any place where art might simply sit. The promise of walking is that it might provide an alternative technology for art and architecture, in which space, seemingly social, gets moved through rather than settled upon. Immediate migrancy, avoidance of occupancy - these are attractive states within a contemporary political countenance as they seem to offer an obverse to more phenomenologically inspired modes of object contemplation.

But can walking-as-art hold to this promise, particularly as it is acted out across a contemporary landscape? This paper could examine the work of a number of artists and architectural practices, including Guy Debord, Richard Long, Archigram, Bruce Nauman, Constant, Bas Jan Ader, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rachel Whiteread, Francis Alÿs, Muf, Kate Davis, Tacita Dean and Tim Brennan, to test out the politics of some walking assumptions. The result would hope to prove that walking is one marker of an economy in which the desire for process-based, participatory, embedded experience has replaced ideals of abstracted contemplation for reasons that might seem ethical but are in actual fact always already aestheticised.

The paper would contrast the way in which various social theorists and philosophers approach the idea of urban space and encounters between people (citizens, artists, architects) within it. At the heart of the idea is a critique of Michel de Certeau's blinded and autistic walker, whose celebrated creativity is only available through a lack of political agency. This is compared with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's equally ambivalent concept of nomadology, in which the moving figure is willed to become a productive but non-assimilable force, riding through a rejected political landscape, outside the bounds of citizenly recuperation.

Boris Sieverts (Germany) / http://www.neueraeume.de / http://www.raumfuerprojektion.de/projektion/raum_05/travel.html / http://www.sonig.com/entenpfuhl/alben/fuehrung_1.html / http://www.baeing.de/foto/3_tage_ruhrgebiet/index.htm / http://www.archined.nl/archined/Hetanderegezichtv.html / http://www.neueraeume.de/diashow/diashow01.htm / http://www.shrinkingcities.com/wettbewerb.0.html / http://www.sfarchi.org/publications/visiteur/viso8.htm / http://www.entenpfuhl.com

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 / http://www.archilab.org/public/2004/en/ft2004.html

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.

Brett Stalbaum (USA) / http://www.paintersflat.net / http://www.c5corp.com/index.shtml / http://www.paintersflat.net/landform_interpret.html / http://www.c5corp.com/research/landscapeculture.shtml / http://jevbratt.com/switch/v5n1/lt.html / http://www.c5corp.com/research/databaselogic.shtml / http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/bstalbau.htm / http://www.obn.org/reading_room/interviews/html/disturbance.html

Brett Stalbaum is a C5 research theorist specializing in information theory, database, and software development. A serial collaborator, he was a co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater in 1998, for which he co-developed software called FloodNet, which has been used on behalf of the Zapatista movement against the websites of the Presidents of Mexico and the United States, as well as the Pentagon. As Forbes Magazine put it "Perhaps the first electronic attack against a target on American soil was the result of an art project." For EDT, this was all learned behavior taught by the example of the Zapatistas.

Stalbaum has been part of many other individual and collaborative projects, written on net art and its context/aesthetics, and is a past editor of Switch, the new media journal of the CADRE digital media lab. Current projects revolve around landscape experimentation and theory, in collaboration with C5 (http://www.c5corp.com). Recent work includes Remote Location 1:100,000, a performance/installation/walking work with Paula Poole in the Great Salt Lake Desert. Past projects include Landscape Painting as Counter-Surveillance of Area 51, a collaborative site-specific performance at the border of the well known secret air base. As part of that performance, he instigated an investigation of his activities by the Department of Defense and the FBI after he spammed a large number of unpublished email addresses at Nellis Air Force Base.

Stalbaum holds an MFA in fine art from CADRE at San Jose State University, and a BA in Film Studies from San Francisco State University. He has taught art at San Jose State University, and Computers and Information Technology at Evergreen Valley College, where he specialized in teaching programming languages through web-based distance education. Currently, he is full-time lecturer and coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts Major (ICAM) at UCSD.

Center for Land Use Interpretation (USA) / 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.

CLUI Tours / http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/pro_pro/tours/index.html

The Center conducts guided tours for public and private groups. Usually these tours are led by the CLUI on video-equipped buses, as part of a CLUI Exhibition Program. The Center can be commissioned to conduct specialized tours for educational organizations, if scheduling permits.

Champaign-Urbana (USA) > Nicholas Brown / Kevin Hamilton

http://www.walkinginplace.org / http://www.synchronaut.net

Chicago (USA) > Melinda Fries / Dan Wang / Brett Bloom / Ava Bromberg / Bonnie Fortune / Mike Wolf / Sarah Kanouse / Daniel Tucker / Emily Forman

http://www.ausgang.com/travel/walking.html / http://www.ausgang.com/travel/walking/danW.html / http://www.yougenics.net/traveloffice / http://www.ausgang.com/travel/walking/bonnie2.html / http://www.ausgang.com/travel/walking/mikeW.html / http://www.inthefield.info/doublebook.html / http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/3/bloombromberg.htm / http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/DISCUSSIONS/EXCHANGES/BB_N55_EXCH.html / http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_2_62/ai_103415707/print / http://www.ausgang.com/collect/read/dan.html / http://www.temporaryservices.org/2004.html#downtime / http://www.messhall.org/ / http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/3389.html / http://www.newcitychicago.com/chicago/3477.html / http://www.inthefield.info/ / http://www.surplusculture.net/issue4/temporary-services.php / http://www.readysubjects.org/ / http://www.stopgostop.com/nca/ / http://www.artic.edu/saic/art/vap/fall04.html / http://bikecartinfoshop.blogspot.com / http://www.counterproductiveindustries.com/gbgc/

Chris Taylor & Bill Gilbert (USA) / http://design2.art.utexas.edu/land_arts/ / http://www.unm.edu/~quantum/quantum_2003/landarts.html / http://www.utexas.edu/features/archive/2003/landarts.html / http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/a_ah/peo/faculty/des/taylorcv.html / http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes1/research/papers/wpades/vol3/ctfull.html / http://glowlab.blogs.com/psygeocon/2004/02/participant_31.html / http://www.unm.edu/~artdept2/land_arts/ / http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/a_ah/peo/faculty/des/taylor.html

LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST is a studio-based, field study program that investigates land arts from pre-contact Native American to contemporary Euro-American cultures. It is a program that views place as a continuum across time and cultures, a program that demonstrates the potential of situating questions between disciplines and definitions, between the land, art, and design. Land arts practices can include everything from constructing a road, to taking a walk, building a monument, or leaving a mark in the sand. We learn from the fact that Donald Judd surrounded himself with both contemporary sculpture and Navajo rugs; that Chaco Canyon and Roden Crater function as celestial instruments; and that the Very Large Array is a scientific research center with a powerful aesthetic presence on the land.

Land Arts is a collaboration between Studio Art at the University of New Mexico and Design at the University of Texas at Austin. The program is co-directed by Bill Gilbert (UNM) and Chris Taylor (UT). Fourteen students and two faculty, spend a semester living and working in the southwestern landscape with guest scholars in disciplines including archeology, art history, architecture, ceramics, criticism, writing, design, and studio art. Occupying the land for weeks at a time, living as a nomadic group and working directly in the environment, students navigate issues of culture, site, community and self. They develop skills of perception and analysis unattainable in a standard classroom setting. LAND ARTS is an interdisciplinary model of education that hinges on the relation between place and human interventions in the land.

The desert provides an amazing laboratory to read the lines of force that exist in the world. It is a pedagogic landscape that exposes itself in ways that are both unforgiving and highly focused. Creating a situation where students are exposed to and engaged by the realities of the land; the marks left by past inhabitants—water, wind, animal, human, industry, carelessness, willful conquest, and hopeful coexistence. We strive not to differentiate the value of traces left by humans, animals, or environmental factors. Instead we ask what can be learned from reading those traces, those marks, and what is the particular nature of that reading. Unlike a model that seeks to explain or deduce a truth from a set of conditions, here we are seeking to re-invigorate invention (not in terms of opposition, but in terms of connection). The goal here is one of opening out and connecting work to conditions beyond oneself. LAND ARTS transposes the studio and classroom into the environment. Set apart from the Grand Tour, a tradition of collecting and consuming, LAND ARTS is about making. As artists and designers, we move away from issues of interpretation towards the possibilities of what we can make.

LAND ARTS hopes to confirm the idea that if you bring students out into the world instead of the world into the classroom, you can fundamentally change how we learn, create, and view our surroundings. In this context we strive to make deeper and more precise connections within our work and be inspired to create work that makes broader connections outside of ourselves.

Christina Ray (USA) / http://www.glowlab.com / http://www.psygeocon.org / http://glowlab.blogs.com/ray/instructionsgames/index.html / http://glowlab.blogs.com/1_100/2004/04/information.html / http://www.oneblockradius.org /

Christina Ray is the founder of Glowlab, a creative lab exploring psychogeography as it relates to contemporary art. Her work sets an appreciation of chance and randomness against a need to integrate aesthetic/electronic documentation into daily life through the creation of rules, systems and instructions. Ray's projects take the form of street photography, documentary projects, collaborative and participatory walks and games as well as drawings and web-based works. Through Glowlab, Ray produces events and lectures, organizes projects and exhibitions, and publishes Glowlab's web-based magazine. Glowlab has worked with organizations including Creative Time, Parsons School of Design, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Art In General and Intel’s Berkeley Research Lab. Glowlab projects have been featured extensively online and in publications such as the New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, Time Out, New York Press, and Utne, PDN and Flash Art magazines. Ray's work is represented by DCKT Contemporary in New York.

Emily Scott (USA) / http://www.thorn01.com/urban_rangers/ / http://www.fieldworks.org / http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/gardenlabshow/participants/scott_text.html

Emily Scott is a Ph.D. student in Art History at UCLA. Her work addresses visual culture and nature, with an emphasis on post-1945 art, media, and architecture that critically engages landscape and/or ecology. In 2004, she created Los Angeles Urban Rangers, an event-based art project exploring local inner-city ecologies, which was exhibited at Art Center College of Design and will reappear at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in April. This summer, she will begin a dissertation on land art and wasteland aesthetics.

Erika Block / Hilary Ramsden (USA & South Africa) / http://walksquawk.blogs.com/about_the_walking_project/ / http://walksquawk.blogs.com/newsroom/ / http://www.walksquawk.org/home.asp / http://walksquawk.blogs.com/mapping/ / http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=748

The Walking Project is an interdisciplinary performance and cultural exchange project collaboratively developed with US and South Africa-based artists during a series of residencies in Detroit and KwaZulu-Natal from 2003 through 2006. The project explores the ‘desire lines’ or paths made by people who walk across fields in South Africa and across vacant lots in Detroit – and what connects them. By examining how changing patterns of movement can alter attitudes and perceptions; how people make their own paths; and the influences of culture, geography, language, economics and love, The Walking Project asks how and why people’s paths cross and how taking a different path might alter a life.

e-Xplo (USA) / http://www.e-xplo.org / http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/000569.php / http://audiolab.villa-arson.org/logs/erin.html

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

Short Note About the Bus Tour / http://www.e-xplo.org/busnotes.htm

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.

e-Xplo uses the "public space" of the tour as the ground to engage with questions related to social identity and the urban landscape (by physically traversing the performance through chosen places).

e-Xplo's agenda is to examine manifestation(s) of global forces in specific social and cultural settings as opportunities for modes of urban experience and material configurations of (within) the urban environment. With each tour the group (shall) investigate(s) a distinct but related research topic, thus focusing on specific issues for concrete places and problems, while also searching for broader insights. In turn each topic examines a crucial dynamic of contemporary public life. These include the public spectacle of information, the transformation of land into property, population and mobility, identity, extreme environmental conditions and changes. Each tour independently explores the relationship between organizational methods and phenomena - from the electronic to the environmental - the spatial and material configurations of the built environment - from the infrastructural to the intimate. Moreover, each topic investigates how these relationships alter through space and how these dynamic scans become a source for a new criteria of performance and social reciprocity.

We like walking as much as we do swimming in the sea / Publics - Modes - Exchange / http://www.e-xplo.org/walking.htm

The acceleration 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 dilemma 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.

For practical reasons larger realized public projects offer useful research deadlines, a chance to share ideas and concepts and critiques, at best some extra production money-and at worst, a damaging distraction. Putting that in calculation we had to create parallel and alternative circuits of production, distribution and experimentation.

We have experimented with a practice outside the bus tour-format. Such is: Walking. Alone, as a pair of people or in small groups. The Walks can be social as well as individual. At their best they create a sensation through the elements that constitute the visited or walked through space.

The paths we follow through the "inbetween spaces"( see interview with Stephen Morton) do not need to be only on the outskirts of the city they can be in its center, but still remain distinct. Timeless reality? Witch lines? (..that sweep thought along in the wake of the movement of things?; N.N)

We consider the walk of the "flanuer", the Lettrist "derive"and the surrealist "deambulations". Playfull city (versus bourgeois city). Shrinking City. The urban ready made. Field expansions, Psychogeography. John Cage, Free Jazz and Music concrete. Landart, Cinema, Theatre, Painting and Sculpture. What we take from these spaces, or rather: what they offer, are mainly fragments. At times maybe entire stories. We put emphasis on oral history, discussions and the maintenance of an audio archive.

Francesco Careri (Italy) / http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/tarko.html / http://www.osservatorionomade.net / http://www.booklounge.com/books/landscape-architecture/theory-history/

Francesco Careri (Rome, 1966) graduated in architecture in 1993 in Rome. His doctoral research began in Naples in 1996, resulting in a thesis entitled “The Journey". He is a member of the Stalker urban art workshop, an open interdisciplinary structure that conducts research on the city through experiences of transurbance in open spaces and in interaction with the inhabitants. He has taught at the Institut d'Arts Visuels d’Orléans and the Schools of Architecture of Reggio Calabria and Roma Tre, experimenting together with the students on methods of reappropriation and direct intervention in public space. He has recently published a book on Constant and the Situationist city Constant imagined in the late 1950s and early 1960s ((Constant / New Babylon, una città nomade, Testo & Immagine, Turin 2001), and participated with Stalker in many international exhibitions of contemporary art and architecture.

Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice > Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the "negotiated" space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.

kanarinka (USA) / http://www.infinitelysmallthings.net / http://glowlab.blogs.com/1_100/2004/04/kanarinka.html / http://www.funeralsforamoment.net / http://www.turbulence.org/studios/kanarinka/

kanarinka (Catherine D'Ignazio) is a new media artist who creates collaborative experiments in public space online and offline using old texts, techniques from cartography, and the participation of the general public. kanarinka's current project is The Institute for Infinitely Small Things, a research organization that supports various ways of going on expeditions in the world to find and create infinitely small things.

kanarinka is also the Co-Director of iKatun , a collaborative group of artists and technologists, and the Associate Director of Art Interactive, Boston's premier new media arts space. kanarinka's work has been shown at MASSMoCA and the DCKT Contemporary Gallery in NYC among other locations. She is a 2005 candidate for an MFA degree in Studio Art from the Maine College of Art.

Katherine Bash / Lilian Amaral (Brazil)

Lara Almarcegui / http://www.braakliggendterrein.nl/home.html / http://www.biennial.com/artists/Lara%20Almarcegui/bg.htm / http://www.uem.es/web/arq/profesores/invitados/Almarcegui.htm / http://www.smba.nl/shows/43/43.htm / http://www.indexfoundation.nu/Default.asp?id=3&a=77

Lara Almarcegui seeks to explore the relationship between architecture and urbanism, between a specific space and its social context. The result is often performance-based, limiting an action or observation to a specific time-frame. Through her projects Almarcegui makes a study of a certain situation or location. She concentrates on public spaces that do not correspond to any construction or planning. These places become non-places, in continual transformation, and can cease to exist at all.

Rotterdam Investigation or The Artist as a Site Researcher / a project with Lara Almarcegui / October-December 2003 > http://pzwart.wdka.hro.nl/fama/programme2/archive/2003-2004/RotterdamInvestigation/view

Researching a location is the first step necessary in the development of a project. Such an investigation opens up many questions that inevitably produce a critical attitude towards a city. Most of the questions that will be generated are related to how the city is displayed and how this display affects citizens: What possibilities have inhabitants of a city to escape this urban display? Can they transform it? Is there any site available? Which actions may citizens take to resists the given space?

This project was based on the idea of Guided Tour. Each participant carried out an investigation of a location in Rotterdam, finding a way to present this site and explain what is happening there. The site could be presented with a guided tour, but also with an event, a tourist folder, a guide or a map, etc.

Laura Ruggeri (China) / http://www.spacing.org/abstract.html / http://www.spacing.org/writing_abstract.html / http://www.spacing.org/index.html

Abstract Tours / Berlin 1997 / It would be better to disclose the confinement rather than make illusions of freedom

For a month, I operated a ‘tour agency’ from a Portakabin placed in Schlossplatz, next to the Stadtforum, where projects for the corporate reshaping of the German capital were exhibited to the public. These tours took their form from random geometric figures that participants were invited to draw on a map of Berlin with the help of Perspex stencils. Those embarking on a tour tried to “stick to the line” as far as possible, which often entailed jumping over fences, trespassing, climbing over walls, crossing railway lines etc. The gesture of drawing a geometrical pattern on the map mimicked the conceptual abstractions that inform the configuration of spatial practices, such as architecture and city planning, the design of routes, the schematic grid of property lines and ultimately, the construction of the Berlin Wall. Gordon Matta-Clark's work can be regarded as the closest reference for Abstract Tours - his cuts through buildings revealed the constructional imposition, one could actually penetrate the facades and read general schematic structures. My project evolved around the question of whether it was possible to socialize that practice by inviting people to cut through their city and read how physical and spatial contexts, socially-constructed boundaries, and architectural representations intervene in processes of production and reproduction. By following the lines traced on paper, rather than realizing them on the ground with a wrecking ball and reinforced concrete, abstract tourism aimed to expose the code, rather than imitate it, an inverse, rather than a symmetrical practice. The closing exhibition, held in the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien, included all participants who had documented their urban explorations by taking photographs, making videos, audio-recordings, collecting found objects, keeping journals etc. The polyphony of voices and redistribution of representational authority raised both political and epistemological questions about ‘who’ is authorized to “represent the city”. 'The chorus of idle steps’ fragmented totalizing representations of the city, and opened up a plurality of perspectives, which in turn produced provisional, transient, partial perceptions and representations. Once these representations were assembled, the spaces of the city were incorporated into something closer to a fictional narrative than an objective record.

Born in Milan, since 1997 she has been living in Hong Kong where she teaches Aesthetics and Semantics of Product Design, Globalization & Design, Research Methods for Designers in the MA Design program at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her academic work, critical analysis and research interests converge with her art practice. For the past ten years she has been realizing videos, installations, and urban scale art projects across Europe, investigating the relationship between body and architecture and promoting attention to meaning construction and its articulations. Co-curator of a film retrospective of Gordon Matta-Clark in Milan, panelist at the 1997 Film+Arch festival in Graz, and artist-in-residence at the Kuenstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, reviews of her projects have . featured in Artforum, Flash Art, TAZ, Tema Celeste, Art Monthly, Die Presse, etc. She has published in Wiley Academy Architectural Design, Interni, Journal of Mundane Behavior, Circa, Nummer, Springer, Opening, Flash Art International and has contributed essays to 'Here, There, Elsewhere: Dialogues on Location and Mobility’, London: Open Editions, 2001, ‘Geografie del Lontano Vicino’, Turin: Masoero, 2000, ‘Hier, Da und Dort’, Darmstadt: Häusser-Media, 2000, ‘HK Lab’, Map Book Publishers: Hong Kong 2002. She is co-editor of ‘HK Lab2’ (forthcoming).

Lize Mogel (USA) / http://www.publicgreen.com/projects/ / http://www.laforum.org/issues/more.php?id=100_0_15_0_C / http://www.publicgreen.com / http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/monuments/index.html / http://www.farsited.org/features/geniusloci.html

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist and independent curator who works with issues of public space and cultural geography. Her recent public artwork, "Public Green", can be seen in transit shelters all over Los Angeles. This and other work suggests the transfer of land from private to public domain, and asks the viewer to take an active role in the production of public space. For the past 3 years, she has been an active member of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Mogel is also a founding member of Nomads + Residents_LA.

Public green space is an important factor in urban life- it is a respite from the concrete and asphalt environment of the city, and functions as a place to gather, relax, play, and experience a bit of nature. The Public Green project creates new meaning for these spaces, illustrating the complex and symbiotic relationship between the development of parkland and the growth of the city.

The View From There / Tour / http://www.publicgreen.com/projects/vft/vtf.html

"The View From There" problematizes the act of viewing as a purely aesthetic experience, by presenting multiple and simultaneous points of view. The piece involves two simultaneous guided tours of the administrative offices at CalArts with windows which have glass that is coated with one-way mirrored film. One tour takes place on the outside of the building, and the other tour takes place on the inside. Halfway through the tour, the groups switch from interior to exterior and vise versa, and experience the view from the other side. During this intersection, and again at the end of the tour, the groups can see and hear each other through the building's automatic doors.

Michelle Teran (Canada) > http://ubermatic.org/misha/ / http://www.ubermatic.org/life/ http://www.impaktonline.nl/box/life/ / http://www.transmediale.de/page/detail/detail.0.projects.242.2.html / http://www.year01.com/mteran.html / http://www.impaktonline.nl/life.html / http://www.year01.com/issue11/world.html

Michelle Teran uses live media in performances and installations that address issues such as social networks, intimacy over distance, presence and the interplay between (media) spaces. Her work covers live installations, lectures, online performances and connected events, temporary artistic labs, telepresence, live art and video. She has presented in North America, Europe, Japan and in virtual space. In 2002-2003 she was artist-in-residence at Waag Society for Old and New Media in Amsterdam.

'Life: a user's manual' is a series of public performances and online mappings that examine the hidden stories captured by private wireless CCTV streams and how they intersect with the visible world around us.

The title 'Life: a user's manual' is taken from a novel of the same name by Georges Perec. 100 chapters long, his novel tells the story of a ten story building in Paris, each chapter used to describe an apartment, its interior and the stories of its inhabitants, both present and past. As observers, we are led through a sequence of readings and views as we mentally navigate from one apartment to the next.

A tiny fraction of the radio spectrum has been allocated for public use, as if the air were not already public. Taking advantage of this unlicensed part of the spectrum, we have seen an increase in use of wireless devices that are transmitting on this narrow band. Private use of wireless internet, cordless phones, bluetooth and wireless surveillance cameras turns the average consumer into 'micro-broadcasters' transmitting personal fragments and [hi] stories, overlaid within the socially codified spaces of our urban environments. The culmination of these autonomous and synchronous acts contributes to an invisible ad-hoc network of media overlaid within the socially codified spaces of our urban environments, the café, the home, the apartment building, the office, the store, the bar, the hallway, the entrance, the parking lot and the street. Our navigation through urban space therefore becomes a series of intersections, hybrids of virtual and physical space, public and private, that we consciously or unconsciously move through and inhabit.

'Life: a user's manual' focuses on two distinct, yet intertwined forms of public interventions; walks and mappings through cities lasting about a week, and more focused and performative public walking actions that last about an hour. The results of the walks are documented as online maps of each city's hidden views.

For the walks lasting a week, a limited number of participants are given some scanning and recording devices and walk through the city with me. A small device is used to capture images from surveillance cameras in the neighborhood during the walk, images from shops, lobbies of flats, banks, restaurants, etc. Although the intention is to record the live video feeds for the purposes of plotting them on a map, there is equally very strong social component where participants share and discuss what effect these voyeuristic walks are having on them. These intimate experiences become catalysts for conversations about how we perceive and inhabit space, what is private, what is public, mapping, memory and issues of control.

Shorter and focused actions are created to publicly amplify the live video feeds of the city and ideas around them. In this case I put myself into a more fixed role of a performer, revealing, guiding audiences through a sequence of views. My role is not to explain what is happening but, by showing something that is normally not there, leaving it open to the observer to ask themselves what they are seeing. During these walking performances, the notion of 'audience' is also transient. People on the street and also people 'in on the secret' become participants in the experience.

Online maps created from the walks are collages, intersections of surveillance footage, images from the street, conversations and annotations.

Mike Pearson / Mike Brookes / Michael Shanks

http://www.mikebrookes.com/ambivalence/pearsonbrookes/works.htm / http://www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/mp.shtml / http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/~mshanks/theatrearchaeology/ / http://www.civiccentre.org/SPEAKERS/Scholars/M.Pearson.html / http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/projects/deep-mapping.html / http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/weblog/

Originally trained as an archaeologist, Mike Pearson has been devising performances since 1971 with a succession of companies including RAT Theatre, Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and most recently Welsh company Brith Gof which is best known for its site-specific work inspired by themes of Welsh history, literature and political and religious dissent. His is also working closely with artist/designer Mike Brookes on a series of performances which concern issues of personal narrative, biography, place and landscape and which use techniques as diverse as live radio broadcast and computer controlled multi-screen slide projection. This work examines the tensions and similarities between Wales' rural past and post-industrial present. He is also writing extensively on points of contact between the disciplines of performance and archaeology. Mike Pearson is currently a lecturer in performance studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

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.

Nato Thompson (USA) / http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/archives/000668.php / http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?sid=D0017BE5-B9E0-4368-BB79-4BD9FC908769&ttype=2&tid=10229 / http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_1_63/ai_114632849 / http://www.idincorporated.com/NAE%20site/marapril_nato.html

Nato Thompson is Assistant Curator at MASS MoCA and curator for the upcoming exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere a brief survey of interventionist political art practices of the 90s. He is a co-organizor at the Department of Space and Land Reclamation and strong believer in radical practice. His writings on art and politics have been published in tema celeste, Parkett, New Art Examiner, the College Art Association Art Journal and In These Times.

Contributions to a Resistant Visual Culture Glossary / The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #3 / http://journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/3/thompson.htm

It is apparent that the current art historical language is collapsing rather quickly. In the wake of this collapse, I am hoping that The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest can be a vehicle for developing a more resistant, useful set of terms. Not simply because creating something new is always fun, but to be frank, given the current political climate, it is important that we get our shit together.

At the suggestion of the wonderful editors, I would like to say a few things about why on earth a glossary of resistant visual culture should matter. Initially I figured such a thing was obvious, but come to think of it, it isn’t obvious at all. Resistant visual culture is not about art or traditional activism. It is a method for building a real, living culture. As opposed to a vocation or sentimental pursuit, I think of this field as a way to productively communicate amongst those who are dedicated to social change. It is not about further investigating art history nor about tactics for getting into galleries. If this sounds naively vague that is on purpose. I don’t think we need to be specific and I believe that even a simple analysis of capital and control should be enough to bind a lot of disparate people together. These terms are methods for finding more effective ways to do this.

What follows are a series of terms that I have found many “rads” using. I introduce them in the hopes they lead to more productive discussions.

Visual Culture // Criticality (Ambiguity) // Resistance/Tactics/Strategies // Infrastructures of Resonance // Material Consequences // Legitimation

neuroTRANSMITTER (USA) / http://www.neurotransmitter.fm

Founded in 2001, nT is a radio collaborative utilizing analog communication technologies. Working specifically with radio machinations, neuroTransmitter propels signals through urban membranes and cellular formations.

To complement their fixed and mobile frequency performances, nT creates radio sonic installations, produces music, and converts utilitarian objects into radio transmission and receiving devices. neuroTransmitter has created visual works, performed, and broadcasted live on local bandwiths in public spaces and galleries throughout New York City; Columbus, Ohio; Helsinki, Finland; Aarhus, Denmark; Madrid, Spain; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

nT were artist-in-residence with the research and development program at Eyebeam, NYC.

Platform (England) / http://www.platformlondon.org / http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/papers/platform1.html / http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ce/artsmanage/bodypolitic/platform.shtml / http://www.civiccentre.org/SPEAKERS/Artists/Platform.html / http://www.ashdendirectory.org.uk/featuresView.asp?

Critical Walks in The City / http://www.platformlondon.org/fitc.htm

Since 2002, PLATFORM has been running periodic and experimental walks around contemporary corporate culture. We have focused specifically on how the world‚s first and most enduring transnational corporation - the East India Company (1600-1858) - has much to teach us. "Loot! Reckoning with the East India Company" takes groups of 20 people around the sites of the Company in London's "Square Mile" (financial district) and East India Docks, making parellels with contemporary ethical issues in transnational corporate business. These walks have been done in the following contexts:

contributor to the events programme for the British Library's 2002 exhibition "Trading Places, The East India Company and Asia" (3 walks)
contributor to the Education and Access programme for the Museum in Docklands, London
contributor to the Victoria and Albert Museum‚s upcoming exhibition "Encounters: The Meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800" (23rd Sept - 5th Dec 2004)
specific group hires of the walk, such as South-Western University Abroad (USA), and American University in Richmond.

The public walks have been completely oversubscribed on each occasion, and it has become clear that the strategy of using a walk to learn from history about how we can address contemporary issues is really successful. The walks are run as rolling discussions, and always lead to a couple of hours more conversation in the pub afterwards with a core of participants... The experience has led into the founding of a second strand to Freedom in The City, Museum of the Corporation

We are currently exploring walks according to the following themes:

The City as if it had never been built, The City before memory. These walks will explore the land and water underneath The City, juxtaposing the current ‘given’ with its pre-history, thus opening the imagination to its future. The Roman City of Londinium was founded on two wooded hills with a fresh water stream - the Walbrook - running between them, the city's walls surrounded by marshland. What might re-seeing this tell us ? Guided walks along the rivers Walbrook and Fleet form part of this.

The City that erases itself, The City of Forgetting. These walks will explore the questions of visibility and invisibility of the impacts of commerce in The City and have commenced with the walk "Loot - Reckoning with the East India Company", devised by historian Nick Robins and PLATFORM core member Jane Trowell.

Ryan Griffis (USA) / http://www.yougenics.net/griffis/ / http://www.yougenics.net/traveloffice/chicago/ctp.html / http://www.futurefarmers.com/greatpark/artists.html / http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000269.html / http://art-design.smsu.edu/acm/contextin/ / http://www.yougenics.net/

The Temporary Travel Office produces a variety of services relating to tourism and technology aimed at exploring the non-rational connections existing between public and private spaces.

"Tourism is a primary ground for the production of new cultural forms on a global base"
-Dean MacCannell

A Tour of The Chicago Technology Park / http://www.yougenics.net/traveloffice/chicago/ctp.html

How is corporate biotechnology shaping the spaces we live in? The Travel Office's tour of the Chicago Technology Park is a guided audio experience that places the city's current investment in the "new economy" within the historical, and ongoing, practices of social engineering through urban planning. A story of spatial eugenics emerges out of the juxtaposition of texts and statements from disparate sources that include Official state and city press releases, corporate documents and activist archives.

Sarah Lewison (USA) / http://www.carbonfarm.us / http://www.carbonfarm.us/fat.html / http://www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/vegas/index.html / http://www.carbonfarm.us/border.html

I work in video, digital media, photography, performance and sculpture. My inquiries delve into the nature of citizenship, community, and the exchange of knowledge. My interest lies in finding ways to analyze and re-articulate spectatorship, by making the audience integral to the work, or by visually framing this dynamic in such a way as to catalyze discussion and agency.

Simon Pope (England) / http://www.ambulantscience.org / http://www.walesvenicebiennale.org/site/simon_pope.html / http://www.nesta.org.uk/ourawardees/profiles/2995/02_profile.html / http://www.ellipsis.com/catalogue/unpopular/1841660566.html / http://bak.spc.org/ice/ / http://travel.guardian.co.uk/cities/story/0,7450,465696,00.html

Simon Pope is an artist and NESTA Fellow. He lives in Cardiff and works in Brussels.

Born in Exeter in 1966.
Represented Wales at their inaugural appearance at the Venice Biennale of Fine Art 2003.
Awarded a NESTA Fellowship to investigate walking as a contemporary art practice, (2002-2005).
Runs the research methodologies course for the postgraduate Transmedia programme at Hogeschool Sint Lukas, Brussels.
Curated the touring exhibition, Art for Networks, (2001-3).
Author of London Walking (Ellipsis, 2000).
Former Course Director of the BA/BSc(hons) Design for Interactive Media programme at UWIC, 2002.
Previous work includes the collaborative, software project, IOD 4: The Web Stalker, winner of a Webby Award in San Francisco, (2000).

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 / http://www.spurse.org/sansterre.html

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.

Stalker / Osservatorio Nomad (Italy) / http://digilander.libero.it/stalkerlab/tarkowsky/tarko.html / http://www.osservatorionomade.net

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.

Stephanie Rothenberg (USA) / http://www.pan-o-matic.com/portfolio/index.html / http://www.pan-o-matic.com/portfolio/docs/projects_nadams1.html / http://www.art.buffalo.edu/people/rothenberg/bio.html / http://www.pan-o-matic.com/akirema/docs/bremen_intro.html

Stephanie Rothenberg uses performance, installation and digital media to create solicitous interactions that question the boundaries and social constructs of manufactured desires. Referencing corporate strategy, these situations merge popular forms of advertising and market research with participatory experiences involving role-playing and fantasy. Cultural conventions of time and efficiency, spirituality and tradition are fore-grounded through their juxtaposition with prescribed, streamlined systems. The convergence lends itself to a recoding of current perceptions of commodity culture, infusing the public-ness of both objects and sites with the unpredictable and the idiosyncratic.

Before arriving at her current position in the Communication Design program in the Department of Art, Stephanie worked as an art director and designer for several new media companies in New York City during the dot-com boom (but exited promptly during its bust.) As the field continues to shift, she is interested in expanding the vocabulary of communication design through collaborative projects with students and communities at large. Her research includes issues of access, translation and diversity.

Stephanie spent her formative years traveling between New York City and Atlanta. After abandoning ambitions to be a drummer in a new wave band, she decided to pursue a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art that eventually led to an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has lectured and exhibited nationally and internationally at various festivals and venues including the Knitting Factory in NYC, Studio XX in Montreal, Thealit in Bremen, Germany, Sarai in New Delhi, India and Now Design Club in Beijing, China.

Her hobbies include bicycling, world travel, interpreting intangible theory and mastering the art of dowsing.

subROSA (USA) / http://www.cyberfeminism.net/index.html / http://www.cyberfeminism.net/biopower/index.html / http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fwild/faithwilding/

subRosa's name honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, science, and politics: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks and Rosie Franklin.

subRosa is a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women's bodies, lives, and work.

subRosa produces artworks, activist campaigns and projects, publications, media interventions, and public forums that make visible the effects of the interconnections of technology, gender, and difference; feminism and global capital; new bio and medical technologies and women's health; and the changed conditions of labor and reproduction for women in the integrated circuit.

subRosa practices a situational embodied feminist politics nourished by conviviality, self-determination, and the desire for affirmative alliances and coalitions.

Biopower Unlimited: Cultures of Technology Connections > http://www.cyberfeminism.net/biopower/bp_map.html

What do university students, knowledge workers, factory farmers and migrant workers have in common? How is a university like a factory farm? What is Biopower? Why should you give a moo about poo? This map traces connections between different cultures of technology that are part of the apparatus of Biopower. Biopower is a form of power that regulates "the production and reproduction of life itself."

Surveillance Camera Players (USA) / http://www.notbored.org/the-scp.html / http://www.notbored.org/scowt.html / http://www.columbiaspectator.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2003/09/29/3f77da3540cde / www.surveillance-and-society.org/ articles1(3)/interview.pdf (.pdf) / http://www.wired.com/news/ / http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/23/ctv.cameras/ / http://monkeyfist.com/Talk/SCP/ / http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/george-orwells-1984/

The group Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) was founded by Bill Brown, Susan Hull, and various other situationist-inspired activists in New York in November 1996 answering a call to "Guerilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment" by Michael Carter in 1995. The members of this media activist group manifest their opposition to the violation of protected rights to privacy by performing specially adapted plays directly in front of these cameras. The first work to be performed was Alfred Jarry’s "Ubu Roi". Later performances includes Orwell’s "1984" or Beckett’s "Waiting for Godot". Since then, the media activist group has given over 40 performances directly in front of surveillance cameras, mostly in New York City. But the group has also performed in other American cities, and there are now affiliate SCP groups in Tempe, Arizona and San Francisco, Bologna, Stockholm and in Lithuania.
They mention, however, that surveillance camera theater was invented by a comedy writer who in 1981 wrote the "On the Job" episode of the American TV sit-com "Taxi", where two security guards—when no one (else) was looking—were passing their time by performing in front of the cameras.

Surveillance Camera NYC Outdoor Walking Tours > http://www.notbored.org/scowt.html

Teri Rueb (USA) / http://www.terirueb.net / http://www.terirueb.net/trace/index.html / http://www.terirueb.net/drift/index.html

Rueb's large-scale responsive spaces and location-aware installations explore issues of architecture and urbanism, landscape and the body, and sonic and acoustic space. In 1999 she launched "Trace", an interactive GPS-based sound installation set along a network of hiking trails in the Canadian Rockies (funded by the Banff Centre for the Arts). She recently launched "Drift" an interactive sound installation set along the tidal flats of the Wadden Sea in Cuxhaven, Germany (www.ohne-schnur.de). She is currently working on an installation to be installed throughout Boston Common (commissioned by turbulence.org).

She lectures and exhibits world wide at venues including Transmediale (Berlin, 2004), SIGGRAPH (San Antonio, 2002), The International Symposium on Electronic Arts (Nagoya, 2002; Paris, 2000; Helsinki, 2004), Consciousness Reframed (Perth, 2002), The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), The Banff Centre for the Arts (Banff), Bell Laboratories (Holmdel), Interval Research Corporation (Palo Alto), and The Fraunhoefer Institute/GMD (IRCAM, Paris, 2002; Glasgow, 2001).

Rueb's work has been featured and reviewed in diverse publications including "Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology", edited by Stephen Wilson, MIT Press, 2001. She holds a B.F.A. in Art and Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University and a master's degree in Interactive Telecommunications from the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She is currently professor in the Graduate Department of Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Tim Brennan (England) / http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/index.jhtml / http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/page8.html / http://mysite.wanadoo-members.co.uk/manoeuvre/page6.html / http://www.cornerhouse.org/publications/browse.asp?pid=11&p=4 / http://www.cornerhouse.org/publications/browse.asp?pid=105 / http://newton.sunderland.ac.uk/~vardygallery/timbrennan.html / http://einscafe.eins.org/einscafe/angels.html

Tim Brennan was born in Sunderland in 1966 and studied fine art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London and Public History at Ruskin College, Oxford. He has exhibited and curated projects internationally and utilises a range of media, including writing, sculpture, new technologies, sound, photography and organised walking to explore discursive performance. His ongoing 'manoeuvres' include 'Crusade' at Bede Gallery, which involved a walk from Jarrow to the House of Commons in 1996, "My Sister's Record Collection" comprising over 2000 vinyl singles, which were shown at the Ikon gallery in Birmingham in 2000, "3 Manoeuvres" at Compton Verney in 2001. "The Republic of Atlantia" for the National Maritime Museum, London in 2002 and forthcoming work with the British Museum in 2003.

I have been working with the form of organised walking since 1993. I refer to these walks as manoeuvres. They exist in a region between traditions of performance art, the historical tour, loco-descriptive poetry, pilgrimage, expanded notions of sculpture, curating and plain old pedestrianism.

Manoeuvre started out as a collaborative organisation with fellow artists: Dean Brannagan and Gillian Dyson. Our initial aims and objectives being:

'to re-negotiate the given, inflexible and hierarchical institutional system which governs and commissions live activity by artists... to be an innovative, non-profit making organisation seeking to locate critical performance behaviour within the social fabric... to develop works on a bimonthly basis... to be located in its first stages in London... to evade seeking out a given 'audience' in favour of being approached by the viewer...'

Some of these have been maintained and realised, others have diminished in importance. Since 1995 I have developed Manoeuvre less as an organisation and more as a working methodology.

Trevor Paglen (USA) / http://www.paglen.com

Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer currently working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work encodes and decodes physical and cultural landscapes in ways that challenge the assumptions, proscriptions, and prohibitions built into human environments. Borrowing heavily from the physical and human sciences, Paglen uses a broad range of contemporary media to develop projects for cultural institutions, activist organizations, and urban landscapes.

TP Tours / http://www.paglen.com/pages/projects/nowhere/tours.htm

Secret Bases, Stealth, and Military Testing: On the Imperial Production of Nowhere is a series of works about classified military weapons research and spending. Involving both historical and contemporary components, the project documents the infrastructures, machines, spaces, and ongoing violence of secret military projects and wars in the United States and around the world.

Valerie Tevere / http://www.smartprojectspace.net/works/280.xml / http://www.16beavergroup.org/events/archives/000124.php / http://163.238.8.169/mediaculture/faculty9.html / http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/dawseybrookhart.htm / http://www.sparwasserhq.de/Index/HTMLjan4/CVvalerietevere.htm / http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/photography/routes/ / http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/past/traces.php

Valerie Tevere is a multidisciplinary artist working in New York City. In different forms – video, performance, collaboration, activism, micro-radio broadcasting – Tevere's practice has looked to the public sphere as a condition and framework for inquiry and discourse. Her work is driven by discursive practices and constructions of representation, site and the public sphere. Current projects permeate the urban environment as temporal public works and performances that rely upon structured yet spontaneous encounters with city inhabitants.

Tevere has exhibited and developed projects in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and throughout Europe and the US. Recent exhibitions include: Espacio de la Rebeca, Bogota, Colombia; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Centre de Cultura Contemporânia Barcelona, Spain; the Hoxton Distillery/Pandemonium Festival in London, England; the California Museum of Photography, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-ARC).

Valerie Tevere was an Artist-in-Residence at Smart Project Space in Amsterdam (2001), recipient of a Mellon Humanities fellowship at the CUNY Graduate Center (2002/2003), and an Artist-in-Residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC, 2002).

"When I Say" is one of many projects by Valerie Tevere that focuses on the active participation of inhabitants within the spatial framework of their city. Her work has consisted of direct involvement with the struggle of communities and residents to control and change the political and social conditions of their own living environments. "When I Say." Is conceived as an analytic response to contemporary ideas of urban and cultural theorists which focus on the public right to the city and the individual right to narrate one's own experiences within it. As a work that falls within what may be called the genre of public art performance, "When I Say" is created for two contexts. First, it exists as a public performance: video-taped interactions with individual pedestrians located at five sites throughout New York City. Secondly, it functions as a five channel video installation created for an art space. It is a performative video work that uses popular psychology - word association - to prompt dialogue around particular sites in New York City. The sites are systematically chosen based upon their geographic location, publicity, and contestation. Tevere addresses pedestrians with the question "When I Say .. Brooklyn Museum / City Hall /Times Square / The Subway/ South Bronx... "you say..." upon which people respond with their own experiences, feelings, or descriptive interpretations of that site.The irony and humor inherent in the construction of the work avoids the sometimes didactic elements of practices which combine aesthetics and documentation. Without any performative intervention of the artist, outside of the conceptual basis of the work, the word association acts as stimulus for each pedestrian's response. The five tapes reveal myriad feelings and relations of people within their city. Thus, a mental projection of inhabitants of all backgrounds and ages on their environment in which a multi-faceted city portrait is created.

Valerie Tevere's 'Two City Tour' (Video, 2002/2003) are two videos (excerpted from her work 'Palm Trees on Madison Avenue' and 'Vertical City on the 101') that explore projections of urbanity and how the formation of two US cities is shaped in the collective imaginary. 'Two City Tour' focuses on the locating of Los Angeles in New York and the situating of New York in Los Angeles. The 'bi-coastal' journey follows threads of travel through NYC and LA that complicate the myths of each city. Each video follows a distinct route produced by different mappings. In one video, the maps are set by the NYC and LA phonebooks. The artist searched these to interview NY businesses named after LA. Then, in LA, she did the opposite - set up interviews with businesses named after NYC. Through the operation of naming, these commercial entities function on nostalgia and dislocation, and from one place they refer to another whose imagined essence has been packaged for consumption. In the other video, the maps are produced by perceptions of NY and LA residents who have never visited the other city. Together (Tevere and interviewee) travel to locations in NYC and LA that, for each interviewed, reference a LA or NY only visited in the mediated imaginary.

Wilfried Hou Je Bek (Netherlands) / http://www.socialfiction.org

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.

Wrights & Sites / mis-GUIDE (England) / http://www.mis-guide.com/ws.html / http://www.mis-guide.com/mg.html

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

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-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.

EXCHANGE MODELS

16Beaver / http://www.16beavergroup.org
N55 / Manual for DISCUSSIONS / http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/DISCUSSIONS/DISCUSSIONS.html
34 NORTH 118 WEST FOCUS DISCUSSION / http://34n118w.net/UCHRI/
The Monongahela Conference: On Post Industrial Community Development / http://moncon.greenmuseum.org
Jordan Crandall / UNDER FIRE Archive / http://www.wdw.nl/underfire-archive/ / http://jordancrandall.com/underfire/
networks, art, & collaboration / http://www.freecooperation.org/ / http://molodiez.org/ocs/mailinglist/archive.html

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Cartography / Psychogeography / Locative Media / Criticism >

16 Beaver Group / Counter/Cartographies is a project initiated in collaboration with U.K. based collective c.cred / http://www.16beavergroup.org/links.htm / http://www.16beavergroup.org/w-l/projects.htm#A / http://www.ccred.org/

YPRODUCTIONS / Locative Media / http://www.yproductions.com/info/archives/000375.html

Questioning the Frame: Thoughts about maps and spatial logic in the global present / Coco Fusco / http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1750/ / http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000493.html

Re: <nettime> Questioning the Frame / kanarinka / http://www.mail-archive.com/nettime-l@bbs.thing.net/msg02395.html / http://www.rhizome.org/object.rhiz?30130

Drifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure / Brian Holmes / http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1523&lang=en / http://www.walkinginplace.org/weblog/archives/000070.html

Critical Cartography / Saul Albert / http://www.furthertxt.org/saulalbert.html / http://uo.space.frot.org/ / http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/ / http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/FacultyCartography? / http://twenteenthcentury.com/cv.php?mem_id=1 / http://twenteenthcentury.com/uo/index.php/CartographicLinks / http://del.icio.us/tag/mapping

[Locative] locative literacy - four locative micro-rants - preview from upcomin mute magazine #29 / Saul Albert / http://db.x-i.net/locative/2004/000368.html

FOCUS DISCUSSION exploring and defining the social and cultural implications of geographic information system tools and computerized mapping / http://34n118w.net/UCHRI/

The Shape of Locative Media / Simon Pope / http://www.ambulantscience.org/mute-lm-text/lm_text.html / http://visarts.ucsd.edu/~location/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=30&t=30

Minima Cartographia or The Patient Becomes the Agent / Marina Vishmidt / http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl

MISC / http://www.futurefarmers.com/ / http://www.futurefarmers.com/communectivity/info.html / http://culturebase.org/home/struppek/HomepageEnglisch/openlist.htm / http://la.advancedarchitecture.org/

Christian Philipp Muller / http://www.minettabrook.org/home.html / http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arts/visual_arts/vals/mueller.html

Trained in design and fine arts, Christian Philipp Müller frequently draws links between the fields of architecture, design, visual arts, culinary arts, and literature. Recent collaborative public projects include A world of its own in Vienna, The Campus as a Work of Art at the University of Lüneburg, and Projet Unité in Firmany, France; and About the desire to be in perfect tune with nature, in the Alois Lageder winery in Magreid, Italy. Christian Philipp Müller divides his time between the United States and Europe.

Detourism / Contemporary Art Center / North Adams, MA / http://www.thecac.org/index.html / http://www.pan-o-matic.com/portfolio/docs/projects_nadams1.html / http://la.advancedarchitecture.org/Projects/MassProjections / http://www.basekamp.com / http://www.k-sieben.de/l13/spacemakers/spacem_txt.html

Kahve-Society: A Generative Grammar of the Legs: a Mobile Conference on Walking / 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.

Malcolm Miles / http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/papers/miles1.html / http://www.plymouth.ac.uk/pages/dynamic.asp?page=staffdetails&id=mfmiles

My practice is theory; my work is text. This includes authored books, chapters in edited books, and journal essays. I also edit books and currently a European on-line journal. I regard all writing and editing as creative work, and all work and creation as political.

Perhaps I should begin there. I see two main difficulties in how the concept of an avant-garde has been formulated: firstly, it tends to rely on a privileged group, such as artists, who both foresee a new society and lead the mass public towards it. This assumes that the masses cannot foresee that change for themselves, but must have the world interpreted. This does not interrupt the structure of power that, presumably, a new society would bring into question. Secondly, the concept tends to assume a progression in time, from yesterday to the new dawn tomorrow. But tomorrow never dawns. A specific form of the difficulty is found in Herbert Marcuse’s lecture “The end of Utopia” in Berlin in 1967, when he sees no exit from the difficulty that the new requires abolition of the old institutions in order to happen, while the awareness which could lead to such abolition is part of the new. The new thus carries the burden of itself creating the pre-conditions for its appearance – an impossibility. These flaws in the concept may help understand why histories of avant-gardes make happier reading for those in power than those seeking to upset it. An alternative approach in relation to both difficulties is suggested by Lefebvre’s idea of moments of presence, by which he means (I think) momentary realisations of liberation within the routines of everyday life. Since, in a sense, the new already exists in such moments, what is required is recognition rather than progression. Or is this a philosophical conceit?

POND / This Way Please: an exhibition featuring tours of the local / http://www.mucketymuck.org/b_1_exhibitions/TWPlease/TWP_pr.htm / http://www.mucketymuck.org/b_1_exhibitions/current/index.html

This Way Please is a participatory curatorial installation premised on the concept of a travel agency offering tours of the everyday. Works selected for the exhibition foreground the subjective experience of the world as necessarily mediated through personalized maps, guides, tours and cartographic accoutrement. The exhibition will feature performances and their documentation, installations to be experienced in the gallery, and additional items intended to be taken away by visitors.

San Keller / Long Way Home / http://www.swissinstitute.net/Exhibitions/2004_torimitsu/keller.htm

For Keller's action <The Long Way Home - San Keller accompanies you home> participants and artist will meet up at 10pm in the main hall of Grand Central Station on each last Friday of the month. So as to be recognisable to the participants San Keller will be carrying a sign with the action's title round his neck. Before embarking on the long way home the participants will have to decide on the way they want to be taken home. Who will be home first? Who will be the last to return home? What places will the journey lead through? During the whole winter, “winter-help” will be advertising the action with flyers and posters. Anyone living in New York is invited to participate. Each action will thus create a coincidental community that, starting at Grand Central Station, will make their long journey home together. The journey will lead to each participant's home. Snugly returned, the homecomers will have to provide the remaining participants with a simple meal so as to ensure their safe way home.

Dates of the action:
Friday, 28 November 2003, 10 pm main hall, Grand Central Station New York.
Friday, 26 December 2003, 10pm, main hall, Grand Central Station, New York.
Friday, 30 January 2003, 10pm, main hall, Grand Central Station, New York.
Friday, 27 February 2003, 10pm, main hall, Grand Central Station, New York.
Friday, 26 March 2003, 10pm, main hall, Grand Central Station, New York.
Friday, 30 April 2003, 10pm, main hall, Grand Central Station, New York.

Tim Collins / http://moncon.greenmuseum.org/papers/collins1.html / http://slaggarden.cfa.cmu.edu/people/tim/index.html /
http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archive/intro-env.php / http://slaggarden.cfa.cmu.edu/

For better or worse, we have entered an era that I would describe as one of participatory ecology. Humanity has succeeded in affecting global climate. We have seriously diminished the diversity of life on the planet and recently achieved the ability to manipulate the gene pool. In the quest to control nature and expand material culture, we have discovered limits to our deterministic world views. We have fallen headlong into unwanted ownership for natural systems through indiscriminate use, and are now faced with significant and troubling responsibilities. We must seek new models of perception, understanding, and interaction if we are to acknowledge and act upon these responsibilities. We are in an era where we are responsible for the health of nature, because it is in direct relationship to our own ultimate health and well being.

Walking in the City: Spatial Practices in Art, from the Mid-1960s to the Present / Apexart / Curated by Melissa Brookhart Beyer & Jill Dawsey / http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/dawseybrookhart.htm

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.

A WALK TO REMEMBER / Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions / 10 February - 15 May, 2005 / Organized by Jens Hoffmann / http://www.artleak.org/AWalkToRemember.html

John Baldessari, Jennifer Bornstein, Meg Cranston, Morgan Fisher, Evan Holloway, Paul McCarthy, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Allen Ruppersberg, and Eric Wesley.

“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the middle of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” (Charles Baudelaire)

A Walk to Remember is an exhibition that invites a group of Los Angeles based artists to conceive and carry out guided tours through neighborhoods and areas of the city with which they have a particular relationship or affinity and that deal specifically with the rich cultural history of the city.

The exhibition relates to Walter Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur as a figure who derives pleasure from the hustle and bustle of the city streets, who moves purposelessly among the urban crowd with the eye of an artist: a spectator of contemporary life and urban scenes. Yet, A Walk To Remember diverts from Benjamin’s idea when it examines a specific European phenomenon of the early 20th century: the postmodern condition of Los Angeles in which walking is clearly a thing of the past. In addition, in giving each walk a purpose and in trying to bring various locations and social and cultural relations of the city to the audience the exhibition reaches beyond what Benjamin described as an “aimless affair.”

Members of the audience taking part in a walk will each be given a disposable camera to document their individual impressions of the artists’ walks from their distinct perspectives. The cameras will be collected at the end of a walk and the developed photographs will be presented inside the gallery space along with maps of the city outlining the different routes. A small brochure including descriptions and maps of all the walks will be available enabling the audience to realize the tours themselves, should they wish.

LOS ANGELES URBAN RANGERS / http://www.thorn01.com/urban_rangers/ /
http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/gardenlabshow/participants/scott_text.html

A brew of local artists, geographers, environmental historians, curators, architects, and others – are here to serve you, visitors to the gardenLAb experiment. We aim, with both wit and a healthy dose of sincerity, to facilitate creative, critical, head-on, oblique, and crisscrossed investigations into our sprawling metropolis and its various ecologies.

In the tradition of the National Park Service and other land management agencies, we will offer a series of (simulated) campfire programs and guided hikes within the Wind Tunnel over the course of the gardenLAb experiment, on the following Saturdays between 2-4pm: September 18, September 25, October 2, October 9, and October 16. For specific program descriptions, please see the schedule below.

Like all good park rangers, we will be identifiable via our uniform, including our official Los Angeles Urban Rangers patch. (Unlike most park rangers you may have encountered, however, our intention is to blur or subvert conventional assumptions about the natural versus cultural, the wild versus urban, by treating both the city and exhibition as found ecologies.) Although we will be a mobile force throughout the Wind Tunnel, please look for us at our installation space, the Campfire Circle, in its southeast corner. Also be sure to grab your own copy of the Los Angeles Urban Rangers Official Map and Guide, a free publication orienting you to our project and, more importantly, to Los Angeles at large.

Project Organizers: Emily Scott, Sara Daleiden, Therese Kelly, Jenny Price

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

New Babylonians: Contemporary Visions of a Situationist City > Iain Borden & Sandy McCreery (eds)

TOC > Critique of Lines / The Great Urbanism Game / New Babylon: An Urbanism of the Future / Utopian Transfiguration: The Other Spaces of New Babylon / The Surreal Foil / Transborderline: A habitable cross border structure to support the free circulation of people / Images at the Edge of the Built / City Hall Vauxhall X / Connections Could Be Made There: Detecting Situationist Tendencies in Adriaan Geuze and West B / What is the Difference Between a Situationist and an Essex Girl? / Manoeuvre: Discursive Performance / Abstract Tours Operator / Weather Architecture / Scene B / Fruin Street, Millennium Space, Possilpark / Jon Jerde's Consuming Fantasies and Other Urban Interiors / Webbed Babylon / Out of Babylon / A Global Derive / The Indeterminate Utopia / Multi-Source Synthesis: Delivering a Sustainable Future / BuildingProfile: The Oresund Link / Practice Profile: Radical Derive / Book Review / Highlights from Wiley-Academy / Site Lines

http://www.msstate.edu/Fineart_Online/Backissues/Vol_16/faf_v16_n02/text/babylonians.html / http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/otherzine4/nbab.html / http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/people/A_borden_iain.htm / http://architettura.supereva.it/parole/20031126/

Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance > Bronislaw Szerszynski, Wallace Heim & Claire Waterton (eds)

TOC > Performances And Constitutions Of Natures: A Consideration Of The Performance Of Lay Geographies / Ritual Theory And The Environment / A Passionate Pursuit: Foxhunting As Performance / Green Distinctions: The Performance Of Identity Among Environmental Activists / Performing Safety In Faulty Environments / Public Participation As The Performance Of Nature / Performing The Classification Of Nature / Performing Facts: Finding A Way Over Scotland’s Mountains / Performing Place In Nature Reserves / Feral Ecologies: Performing Life On The Colonial Periphery / Slow Activism. Homelands, Love, And The Lightbulb / Technology, Performance And Life Itself: Hannah Arendt And The Fate Of Nature

http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=1405114649 / http://greenmuseum.org/c/enterchange/index.html

A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments > Christopher Tilley

http://www.bergpublishers.com/uk/book_page.asp?BKTitle=A%20Phenomenology%20of%20Landscape / http://www.ucl.ac.uk/anthropology/matcult/staff_member_tilley.htm / http://www.ucl.ac.uk/leskernick/home.htm

Cities: Reimagining the Urban > Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift

This book develops a fresh and challenging perspective on the city. Drawing on a wide and diverse range of material and texts, it argues that too much contemporary urban theory is based on nostalgia for a humane, face-to-face and bounded city. Amin and Thrift maintain that the traditional divide between the city and the rest of the world has been perforated through urban encroachment, the thickening of the links between the two, and urbanization as a way of life.

They outline an innovative sociology of the city that scatters urban life along a series of sites and circulations, reinstating previously suppressed areas of contemporary urban life: from the presence of non-human activity to the centrality of distant connections. The implications of this viewpoint are traced through a series of chapters on power, economy and democracy.

http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=0745624146 / http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/nthrift.html / http://www.geography.dur.ac.uk/information/staff/amin.html

Suburban discipline > Peter Lang & Tam Miller (eds)

TOC > The Occulted Suburb / Visual Browsing / Siting Protocols / Icons of the Sprawl / The Suburban Canon Over Time / The Hanging Suburbs / The Lucky Country / The Aesthetics of Unsightliness / Ambiguous Sovereignties / Eyes That Do Not See / The Territory Versus the City / New Towns / Stalker

http://www.library.njit.edu/archlib/faculty-pubs/lang-suburban.html / http://www.library.njit.edu/archlib/lecture-series/1999-spring/romito.html

Theatre / Archaeology > Michael Shanks & Mike Pearson

TOC > 1. Theatre Archaeology / 1.1. Archaeology / 1.2. Theatre Archaeology: convergences / 2. Theatre and Archaeology / 2.1. The Cyborg from Archaic Greece to postmodernity: dramaturgies of sovereignty / 2.2. Gododdin: the past in the present / 2.3. Visiting the past: stories of heritage and authenticity / 2.4. Monuments and morbid echoes: choreographing the prehistoric body / 3. Theatre/Archaeology / 3.1. Landscape: walking / 3.2. Cityscape: walking / 3.3. Landscape: standing still / 3.4. Esgair Fraith: a sedimentary map

Mike Pearson is Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. From 1981-1997 he was Artistic Director of the Welsh theatre company Brith Gof (whose work was featured in Site-Specific Art, (2000)). Michael Shanks is Professor of Classics and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. He is one of the world's foremost archaeological thinkers, and author of many works including Experiencing the Past, Classical Archaeology of Greece (1996), and Art and the Greek City State (1999).

http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/~mshanks/theatrearchaeology/ / http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/weblog/ / http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/projects/deep-mapping.html /http://www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/mp.shtml / http://www.roehampton.ac.uk/artshum/arts/performance/ARCHAEOLOGY/TowardsArchaeology.html / http://www.civiccentre.org/SPEAKERS/Scholars/M.Pearson.html / http://jsa.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/4/2/147 / http://www.routledge-ny.com/shopping_cart/products/product_detail.asp?isbn=0415194571 / http://www.pixelache.ac/2004/person/list/?id=64

Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice > Francesco Careri

Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the "negotiated" space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.

http://www.booklounge.com/index.php/books/landscape-architecture/theory-history/walkscapes-walking-as-an-aesthetic-practice

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