World-Wide-Walks

Description

This book presents Peter d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks project, providing a unique perspective on walking practices across time and place considered through the framework of evolving technologies and changes in climate. Performed on six continents during the past five decades, d’Agostino’s work lays a groundwork for considering walks as portals for crossing natural, cultural and virtual frontiers.  

 

Broad in scope, it addresses topics ranging from historical concerns including traditional Australian Aboriginal rites of passage and the exploits of explorers such as John Ledyard, to artists’ walks and related themes covered in the mass media in recent years. D’Agostino’s work shows that the act of walking places the individual within a world of empirical awareness, statistical knowledge, expectation and surprise through phenomena like anticipating unknown encounters around the bend. In mediating the frontiers of human knowledge, walking and other forms of exploration remain a critical means of engaging global challenges, especially notable now as environmental boundaries are undergoing radical and potential cataclysmic change.

Preface

 

Part I: INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Walking on Edges, Peter d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks

Kristine Stiles

 

Part II: COMMENTARIES

Chapter 2: Peter d'Agostino: Walks & Sounds (footsteps, noise and silence)

Gabriel Villota Toyos

Chapter 3: World-Wide-Walks: body-apparatus

David I. Tafler

 

Part III: PROJECTS

Chapter 4: World-Wide-Walks: selected work (1973-2018)

Peter d'Agostino

Chapter 5: FOOTnotes: Times & Places, Walking & Mapping

Peter d'Agostino

Chapter 6: WALKING... in a changing climate

Peter d'Agostino

 

Part IV: DOCUMENTS

Chapter 7: COLD / HOT: Walks, Wars & Climate Change

David I. Tafler, Kristine Stiles and Christiane Paul

Chapter 8: World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky / Donegal 

Peter d'Agostino, Deirdre Dowdakin and David I. Tafler

Chapter 9: COME & GO

Kristine Stiles

 

Part V: APPENDICES

Chapter 10: WALKING... maps–territories

Peter d'Agostino and David I. Tafler

Chapter 11: Natural-Cultural Consciousness: in the age of climate change

Peter d'Agostino and David I. Tafler

Chapter 12: Techno-Cultural Visions: photography-cinema-digital media

David I. Tafler

Chapter 13: Peter d'Agostino's Interfacing Strategies: camera obscura to World Wide Web

David I. Tafler

Chapter 14: Re-Visioning Virtual Realities (1990s/2010s)

Peter d'Agostino

Chapter 15: footNOTES: selected 1970s notebooks

Peter d'Agostino

 

Acknowledgments

Biographies

Index

Sujets

• Photographie
• Photographie
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• HISTORY
• Sociologie, société et politique
• América
• History of art
• General officer
• Anthropology
• General
• American
• Cultural Studies
• ART

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 31 mars 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783209149
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image, photographs and photo/text compositions are © Peter d’Agostino.
Texts in the book are © the authors.
Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas and Peter d’Agostino
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies and Aleksandra Szumlas
Production managers: Mareike Wehner, Matthew Floyd
ISBN 978-1-78320-913-2
ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-914-9
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-915-6
Part of the Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments series
Series editors: Rod Giblett, Warwick Mules and Emily Potter
Series ISSN: 2043-7757
Electronic ISSN: 2043-7765
Printed and bound by Gomerain, UK.
This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Contents
Preface
PART I: INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: Walking on Edges, Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks
Kristine Stiles
PART II: COMMENTARIES
Chapter 2: Peter d’Agostino: Walks & Sounds (footsteps, noise, and silence)
Gabriel Villota Toyos
Chapter 3: World-Wide-Walks : body-apparatus
David I. Tafler
PART III: PROJECTS
Chapter 4: World-Wide-Walks : selected works (1973–2018)
Peter d’Agostino
Chapter 5: FOOTnotes: Times & Places, Walking & Mapping
Peter d’Agostino
Chapter 6: WALKING… in a changing climate
Peter d’Agostino
PART IV: DOCUMENTS
Chapter 7: COLD / HOT: Walks, Wars & Climate Change
David I. Tafler, Kristine Stiles, and Christiane Paul
Chapter 8: World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky / Donegal
Peter d’Agostino, Deirdre Dowdakin, and David I. Tafler
Chapter 9: COME & GO
Kristine Stiles
PART V: APPENDICES
Chapter 10: WALKING…maps–territories
Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler
Chapter 11: Natural-Cultural Consciousness: in the age of climate change
Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler
Chapter 12: Techno-Cultural Visions: photography–cinema–digital media
David I. Tafler
Chapter 13: Peter d’Agostino’s Interfacing Strategies: camera obscura to World Wide Web
David I. Tafler
Chapter 14: Re-Visioning Virtual Realities (1990s/2010s)
Peter d’Agostino
Chapter 15: footNOTES: selected 1970s notebooks
Peter d’Agostino
Acknowledgments
Biographies
Index
Preface
Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler
Walking on walking,
under feet, earth turns . *
I.
There are many ways to define and describe a walk. For my part, conceiving of walks as video “documentation/performances” in real time was the first step in this process. The Walk Series (1973–74) set a baseline for a rigorous and seemingly absurd set of walking actions in San Francisco: around the edge of my roof, back and forth along a fence, toward and away from the ocean on a beach. I later realized that my walks along the edges and borders of these places represented micro and macro worlds. The roof enclosed the personal space I inhabited below, the fence separated a debris-lined city park from the bustling flow of cars on a freeway, and the shoreline at Ocean Beach was, in fact, a natural western border of a city (San Francisco), state (California), and country (the United States), as well as the edge of the North American continent. Whether appearing to be on a circular or linear path, each video walk formed a circuit, returning to the place I began, in the actual, unedited time it took to complete each action.
The Walks came to embody a range of natural–cultural–virtual identities: mediated mixed realities of walking through physical environments and of surfing the web. As they evolved during the past five decades, from 1970s videotapes into video/web projects during the 1990s, mobile/locative media and 360 VR video/photo installations during the 2000s to 2010s, I have continued to perform symbolic, ritualistic walks spanning six continents. Recent World-Wide-Walks/between earth & water projects confront “glocal,” global–local concerns about a changing climate.
In art and life, there is one person who has been there from the beginning, still beneath the roof and along the shoreline – completing me, and even some of the sentences in this book – my wife Deirdre Dowdakin and by extension our dear daughters, Brita and Lia. I dedicate this book to them. – All my love, pdA.
II.
Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks projects provide unique perspectives on walking practices across time and place within a context of evolving technologies and global climate change. This book addresses a broad range of related conceptual, social, and historical concerns – from “walkabout,” traditional Australian Aboriginal rites of passage, and the exploits of explorers such as John Ledyard, “the man who dreamed of walking the world,” to artists’ walks and related contemporary themes covered in the mass media: books, films, and television. As demonstrated by these intrepid figures and their many counterparts, the act of walking can situate an individual within a world of empirical awareness and the surprise of unknown encounters around the bend.
Mediating frontiers of human knowledge, walking and other forms of exploration can illuminate global challenges, most notably an environment undergoing radical and potentially cataclysmic change. Walking, interactive and context dependent, integrates the mind and body in the pursuit of knowledge. This book considers narrative, memory, and cognitive boundaries. These orientation systems organize and contextualize walking as a historic, human, artistic, and essential process for rediscovering an ever-changing environment. Beyond reflecting the evolution of media technology, the Walks embody evolving perception, notions of cognition, geographic and social shifts in the artist’s experience, interactions with other artists, coupled with an expanding theoretical frame for measuring a life’s history of travel and observation. – DT
Chapters In “Walking on Edges, Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks, ” Kristine Stiles presents an overview of the Walks , from their origin in the early 1970s to recent projects encompassing natural–cultural–virtual identities. Situating the work within a contemporary arts context, Stiles cites other artists, related art movements, as well as philosophical and theoretical threads linking the Walks with broader concerns. She reviews the operation of the projects on the boundaries between site and non-site, representation and signification, Surrealism and resistance, environment and existence. Each brief encounter with these walks invites viewers into a meditation – an “intercommunication” among related histories of place. “Peter d’Agostino: Walks & Sounds (footsteps, noise, and silence)” by Gabriel Villota Toyos discusses sound as a perceptual construct, an “audio-vision,” a symbiotics of the cinema. He goes on to evaluate the Walks ’ contrapuntal performative use of sound, starting with the Portapak, as a harmonic event reminiscent of Cage, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, informing the “sound of the body that walks” in the landscape. This sound emerges from a perceptive capacity in which sight and hearing become inextricably united while at the same time remaining independent, thereby capable of transmitting much more complex information. According to Rick Altman, sound converts the media text into an event in space and time that disrupts surrounding matter. “ World-Wide-Walks : body-apparatus” by David I. Tafler examines the relationship of the human perceptual apparatus with tools developed to enhance perception, and their deployment capturing the changing nature of the perceptions of the surrounding world. As exemplified by the work of Dziga Vertov, filmmakers opened up a dimension of perception that captures everyday events, re-presenting them in their socio-contemporary context. The chapter considers the moving human body, “a dynamic field of ceaseless action,” as the instrument mediating the genesis of technology with the transformation of the environment, breaking the body’s operation down into three modalities: gravity, mobility, and memory. Walking, the baseline of experience, functions within the critical, ever-present orienting system of gravity; the multiple material and ethereal dimensions of the body, its mechanics, movement, mapping; and the historic contextualization of history, theater, and now social media. “ World-Wide-Walks : selected works (1973–2018)” is a survey of Peter d’Agostino’s projects performed on six continents over the past five decades. This chapter begins with The Walks Series (1973–74), initiated as video “documentation/performances,” and proceeds to document World-Wide-Walks videos, photos, websites, and new media works exhibited as place-specific, site-specific installations in art galleries and museums. In “FOOTnotes: Times & Places, Walking & Mapping,” Peter d’Agostino addresses the larger question of beginnings, the universals and particulars of the Walks , through a condensed form of photo-texts. The Walks explore globalization, colonization, mapping, architecture, ethnography, computation, indigeneity, and navigation. The chapter concludes with William Carlos William’s concept of the variable foot , referencing form and meaning, measurement and human experience. The sequence of pages, subtitled “Begin Again…,” serves as a continuum for the ongoing encounters represented by each incarnation of the Walks projects. In “WALKING… in a changing climate,” d’Agostino focuses on the changing climate, with a progression of recent between earth & water projects that confront global warming by crossing natural, cultural, an