The Landscape swallows up all boundaries

"You can see that views of the earth, or how to treat the landscape, have political implications." 

excerpted from Paul Toner's Interview w/ Robert Smithson, 1970.*

"In a technological society, the values have dissipated, and the ecology thing is a way of delivering one from death. The ecology thing represents moral confusion, and a need to continue. It is a media issue, like "the war on poverty". My work isn't about the war on poverty, or the war on anything. I'm not a salvationist. I know there is that need to transcend one's condition. You know that you are growing older, and that you are going to die, and you want some kind of continuance. People always thought that nature is self-sufficient, and that it was going to continue. Now nature itself is threatened. The dinosaurs lived and died and ice ages have come and gone. It might be quite natural that Lake Erie is filling up with green slime. It might just be another stage. There is no going back to Paradise or 19th century landscape, which is basically what the conservationist attitude is. People have always had different views of what nature is. The early view of Paradise is a nostalgia for the closed garden. There is not consciousness of that now. There is a whole history of how man views the earth. In the 16th century people thought they were leaving the notion that the earth was corrupted by the fall. The attitude in the "middle ages" was to say that the mountains weren't spoiled, or the corroded aspect of a corrupted situation. Then the romantics came along. They aestheticized mountains--and produced "the mountain controversy"--whether or not the mountains were the habitation of the devil. That was changed by the Romantics (who actually were leagued with the devil). The sentimental idea of the landscape as a "beauty spot" is directly out of that romantic preoccupation with the landscape. There has always been the war between the formal and the anti-formal. It goes back to the natural and unnatural gardening techniques. It was a political issue in the time of Alexander Pope. His view of the garden was that it was to be meandering and twisting , as opposed to the gardening of the French. You can see that views of the earth, or how to treat the landscape, have political implications. I'm interested in all types of places, not just the outdoors; that can become a stance that doesn't have any resolution, or become overly precious. I'm more interested in the way things are. A lot of working outdoors is just escapism because things are so horrible. People want to get out into the fresh air, and that becomes a sentimental escapist tendency. The tendency to go out is a peripheral concern, and peripheral concerns are romantic--going out into the infinite. If you bring that back, it is more of a classical thing--it completes the dialectic. So I am neither romantic nor classic, but working in the tension of both areas."

*.pdf available soon

walking games database

This post will serve as an archive for walking games. More to come!

Q: Why impose rules on walking?

A: to break habit  TO BRING ABOUT A DYNAMIC NOVEL EXPERIENCE OF PLACE

guy debord says: "the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes."

rules for walking

games:

walking on colors,  wm. s. burroughs

intersection game, the diggers

 sufi walking games p.l. wilson


easy, alan kaprow


.walk, wilfried hou je bek


Following ‘The Man of the Crowd", Christina Ray and Lee Walton


Count all the puddles on the street when the sky is blue, yoko ono


the map is not the territory, guy debord

Public Space is illusory, Nature is illusory

OASES

propaganda distributed at MayDay General Strike in Oakland, CA


addresses the relationship of public space, privatization, nature, civilization


also, implicitly involves unitary urbanism 

Rules for Walking

Sufis practice a form of "intentional and symbolic wandering" called siyaha. In his book Sacred Drift, Peter Lamborn Wilson describes siyaha as a "game with rules", highlighting how the structure siyaha imposes on an ordinary activity like walking provokes extraordinary leaps of imagination and mindfulness. The rules provide a focus that enables the walker to perceive what they may habitually ignore: the fine grain interrelationships of the objects, processes, sensations of a particular place. Simple, specific commands like "watch your feet" reveal details that may go unnoticed, but are nevertheless present and affective, like the impressions one's feet make in wet grass, the plodding rhythm of walking in dry sand, and furthermore, the memories, sensations, and desires prompted by these interactions.

via Wilson...

"There have existed various styles of Sufi walking; presumably dervishes of earlier and more "golden" eras practiced a sort of freestyle wandering, but by the medieval period siyaha had become a game with rules. For example, some orders defined the permissible amount of time a dervish could rest in any one place--forty nights for instance, or only one night--while others demanded such ascetic practices (which may still be seen in India today) as the wearing of heavy chains or women's garments--or that one watch one's feet while walking. The overall purpose of such precision must be to induce a state of permanent awareness and concentration on every detail, till it becomes luminous detail.

With such practice, the walker achieves a state of mind (or soul) similar to that of the lucid dreamer, or intelligent dreamer, who knows "that in the sensory world of fixed engendered existence there are transmutations at every instant, even though the eyes and the senses do not perceive them, except in speech and movement"

Sufi scholar W.C. Chittick comments:

"People know that dreams need interpretation (ta'bir). The word ta'bir derives from the root 'b.r., which signifies 'crossing over,' hence, to traverse, to ford, to pass. The interpreter (mu'abbir) is he who passes from the sensory form of the dream to the meaning which has put on the clothing of form. From the same root we have 'ibara' or 'verbal expression,' which is the passage from understanding to exposition.

When the nature of the cosmos is truly 'verified', the knower sees it to be a form of imagination, in need of interpretation like a dream" (Chittick, The Sufi Path)

The Walker is he who travels with his reflection in search of the signs and proofs of the existence of his Maker. In his walking he finds no proof for that other than his own possibility. The physical world and the imaginal world here coincide with the precise "fit" of total identification."

imagination serves an essential function in someone's engagement with place. It is to be navigated and interpreted in correlation with space.



William S Burroughs developed a walking game similar to siyaha, "walking on colors":

“Another exercise that is very effective is walking on colors. Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness.  I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”

Building with Particulars

A UTOPIAN VISION:

"A mythical isle of runaway children who inhabit ruins of old castles or build totem-huts & junk-assemblage nests"

-Hakim Bey TAZ

Bey's imagined society is far more practical, accessible, even normal than its fantastical language conveys. This form of building/dwelling-- "to use local, found materials simply because they are there, usable and natural, and to let them determine one's aesthetic, rather than to use them because one believes in it" (Higgins, Fantastic Architecture*)--has always been the modus operandi of nomads, pilgrims, squatters, and more recently, occupiers. This is a process-based form of building/dwelling, in which the architecture of a place emerges through a moment to moment engagement with its particularities.

"What did I notice? Particulars! The vision of the great One is myriad."

-Allen Ginsberg Wales Visitation

A morning walk reveals discarded wood, sheet metal, splintered furniture--all useful for construction, dwelling. An afternoon walk reveals a disused wood shed, an abandoned factory, a cave--all useful for cultivation, dwelling. Rather than possessing intrinsic beauty (the myth which drives commodity fetishism), the beauty of the materials is revealed thru their use. This is a place that emerges and re-emerges thru the fragmentation and creative recombination of its particular materials.

The building/dwelling practices of Drop City, a 1960s intentional community located in Southern Colorado, provide a useful illustration. The community consisted of a network of geodesic domes and zomes, constructed from locally foraged materials--car tops, bottle caps, nails, two by fours, railroad ties, chicken wire. In mark matthews' Droppers, founder E.V.D Bernofsky explains "During the construction period , we were always accumulating found material from around the area. We would assemble it into massive collages...the domes themselves became collages that we could get inside of". In Drop City, shelter was born of an art practice and was experienced as an inhabitable art object. Its architecture emerged from the active engagement of the Dropper's imagination with their place.

Our cities and towns have long been suffering the residual effects of another form of utopian building--one in which imagination is imposed on place, rather than engaged with it (see practitioners Haussman, Le Corbusier, Moses). Sterility, boredom and unrest arise from this form of building; overdetermination suffocates erratic currents of vitality and creativity, and as a result, inhabitants of such environments often express these forces through frustrated destruction (consider last year's London riots: the project of an energized community, like Drop City, but one of quite different character). Home delivery of food and entertainment means high rise residents find little reason to leave their castlekeep, children's play occurs in determined spaces like playgrounds and pools , wilderness is experienced in its constructed form--parks, walking is most commonly practiced while shopping.**

Such a form of building alienates inhabitants from their place, because there is no detectable trace of place (context) in the structure itself. Monuments of steel and glass may provide a sweeping view of a place, but they do not facilitate an intimate engagement with it. In an ideal process-based practice of building/dwelling, when inside, what is outside should be visible, not simply through the windows, but in the structural materials, style, indigenous attitude of the structure. Viewed from the outside, the structure should be fluidly integrated in its place, indistinguishable from the character of its context. This seems to be an intuitive, practical form of building, applicable to every place, invoking every place. Considered in comparison, Le Corbusier's vision, for all of its socio-political rationality, ultimately seems more mythical than Bey's "isle of runaway children", because his method is rooted in design principles rather than Particulars, citizenship rather than human agency.

*Hoping to post a .pdf of the full text soon

**But do not despair! There will always exist holes in such seemingly comprehensive projects as gentrification, urban renewal, civilization, etc. These oases--buildings under construction, abandoned buildings, cryptoforests--which escape overdetermination by neglect or incompletion, have a more 'open' character, and thus provide meaningful play/exploration opportunities.

(E)UTOPIA - N O W! H E R E!

The word "utopia" comes from the Greek: οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place") and means "no place". The English homophone eutopia, derived from the Greek εὖ ("good" or "well") and τόπος ("place"), means "good place". This, due to the identical pronunciation of "utopia" and "eutopia", gives rise to a double meaning.

Can (e)utopia exist? Is there 'no good place'?

Utopia can be expressed and appreciated only through one's imagination, but it is not reducible to mere escapism or fantasy. Rather, the imaginative function of utopia can enable a more meaningful experience of now, here-- it can amplify the immediacy of our immediate surroundings, influence how we act in and upon them.

One's relationship to a place gives that place meaning; a place has no fixed meaning outside of this relationship. A place can be 'Concord' to one person, 'home' to another. A tree can be shade to one person, firewood to another. One perceives and acts upon a place in relation to their particular impulses and desires, and this interaction brings the place into being. "Knowledge of the world exists effectively only at the moment when I act to transform the world" .


This relationship between perception and action is not causal, but intertwined in the same behavior. One perceives a place by the way they inhabit it, one inhabits a place by the way they perceive it; one experiences a tree as shade by lounging, one lounges to experience a tree as shade. This process is born of imagination, if we consider imagination the active expression of one's desires and impulses.

Utopia does not exist in another dimension, or in a distant future, but lies dormant in our everyday lives. To summon it only requires an ACTIVE imagination. One does not need to travel to find utopia; one can uncover it in one's town, street, frontyard through actively and attentively exploring: building, dwelling, thinking. Utopia exists wherever people express their impulses and desires through their engagement with place. Utopia is the translation of an imaginary 'no place' to an actual 'good place'.


(E)UTOPIA - N O W! H E R E!