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October 11, 2004

Walking in Amsterdam

I’ve been thinking about walking lately. One of the things I really want to do during Design Engaged is to get everyone out of the meeting room and moving around. As Molly and I have been thinking about Day 3, which is the real roll-up-our-sleeves-and-brainstorm day, we realized we really needed this outdoors activity to be productive. We’ll be working in small groups on Day 3, so I think it will be nice to get the groups comfortable with each other before that. We also want everyone to arrive at Day 3 with some sort of raw materials that might be useful during the brainstorming work. And finally, I’m not bringing everyone to Amsterdam for nothing; if we’re not out getting lost among canals and alleys for at least a few hours I’ll be sorry.

I posted briefly about Richard Long the other week in response to something I’d read about a GPS drawing project. There’s something, well, kind of dumb about these GPS drawings to me. Even though one or two of the images are striking, others seem…empty, it’s technique applied without much purpose, a “because we can” kind of art. (In contrast, I think that what Chris Heathcoate’s doing with GPS-enabled map-making is more interesting.)

Long’s evokes a whole experience from selected fragments, and in general it’s this careful selection of details that’s key. At times, he does it by setting out constraints that frame the walk. Consider his A Cloudless Walk piece which is a photo and text work. By choosing a sort of generative algorithm, in this case to walk “from the mouth of the Loire to the first cloud”, Long defines constraints in which the rest of the work unfolds. Even if you’re skeptical of this kind of minimal art (“He just walks? And writes down some words?”), consider the elegance of something like his Five Day Walk. This one’s genuinely algorithmic: it’s pseudocode for a walk.

Drifting then into a subject on which I am very far from an expert, this might remind you of the Situationists’ technique of the dérive Which in turn can be connected to the flâneur, from Baudelaire, to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades, maybe Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and so on. Caillebotte’s painting of flâneurs on a rainy day on the Rue de Paris above is from 1877. (There’s been whole conferences on urban psychogeography and on just the subject of algorithmic walking.)

The “algorithmic psychogeography” idea in particular has been codified by the .walk group’s efforts towards the “pedestrian computer.” Their for dummies page notes the “classic pysychogeographical algorithm, that urban exploration haiku”, a sort of street Logo:

// Classic.walk
Repeat
{
    1st street left
    2nd street right
    2nd street left 
}

Another recent algorithmic walk is this one across Berlin in a day, taking photos every 12 minutes. Check out the last photo in the sequence, taken at the Charlottenburger Schloss. Maybe they also walked until they saw the first cloud?

So for the afternoon of our second day of Design Engaged, we’ll do one of the simplest algorithms (slightly different from the one in code above): “take the 2nd left, then the 2nd left, the 1st right, repeat.” Now, this has been done in Amsterdam before. This actually makes it a good candidate for us, since it seems to have taken most people a couple of hours to return to near their starting point. But these simple constraints—another theme that will appear in Design Engaged presentations—will allow us to look at other things.

• This is meant to be an activity to generate photos, sketches, impressions, or other raw materials for Day 3. What can you document about a space and place when you aren’t concerned with finding your way?
• Do you develop any sort of “image of the city” as you’re walking? What emerges as characteristics of the place you’re taken through?
• How are strangers around you navigating the same streets?
• There will be a few local Amsterdammers in our group. How is this walk from your regular commute to work or the newsstand? Why?

Is this just an excuse to go for a nice stroll with friends? Well, partly. And why not? “It’s the psychological and the geographical. It’s about how we’re affected by being in certain places—architecture, weather, who you’re with—it’s just a general sense of excitement about a place.” (From an Utne article on a Psychogeography Conference in New York.)

Posted by Andrew at October 11, 2004 10:13 PM

Comments

Posted by: Chris Heathcote at October 13, 2004 08:26 AM

Posted by: Auke at October 13, 2004 08:27 AM