Bach, Glenn. Atlas Peripatetic (MFA Project Report).

Project Statement

I have been a walker almost as long as I have been an artist, and the two activities have always been closely linked in my creative process. The most recent body of work to develop from this connection embodied a ritualistic enactment of an ordinary journey, with a heightened awareness of my body moving through space and place. A multi-genre improvisation upon the dynamic structure of the walk, Atlas Peripatetic stands as the most extensive and structured examination of my route to date.

Incorporating data-gathering, poetry, photography, drawing, and sound, Atlas Peripatetic was an open-ended project where the visual investigations were single examples among a multitude of possible interpretations and presentations of data. For the gallery exhibition I installed selections from this project as they existed at that point in time; the pieces on the wall were not fixed works of art, but temporary arrangements of information.

We begin with the long poem that shares the title of this project, a work in progress inspired by a detailed mapping of sounds heard on my morning walk (the core structure upon which each subsequent element of the project hinges). The arrangement of the poem mirrored the order of streets on my walk, and the process of mapping the chapters of the poem generated a nearly year-long effort at photographing the entire route. The drawings included in the show represented blank surfaces inserted into the system in order to capture the invisible tracery of various signals (sounds, memories, energies), the counting of birds presented a more organic contrast to the pseudo-scientific activity of the sound log, and the graphic map of the sidewalk surfaces attempted to quantify the seemingly ordinary grid under my feet.

All of the elements of the project involved an investigation of the process of artistic research—navigating the threshold at which gathered information undergoes a transformation from raw data into a work of art.

What at first appears to be mere documentation of an ordinary walk becomes instead an investigation of ritual, time, memory, and place. The walk is both subject and object of my work, form and content, and a score for future manifestations continuously reinterpreted and performed.


Project Overview

In many ways I consider myself a landscape artist, albeit engaging a contemporary setting often at odds with traditional notions of landscape. The subject of landscape is more complex than ever before; there are few places left unexplored in the world, and certainly no urban space left unmapped in some way. The ubiquity of broadcast and virtual media ensures that we are familiar with, or at least aware of, a wide variety of landscapes and places. Urban, rural, and wilderness spaces have been filmed, photographed, drawn, painted, recorded, performed, scanned, and digitized. Satellites and surveillance cameras peer into the most remote corners of town and city. The influx of information and sensual data, combined with the pervasiveness of the media-scape, threatens to desensitize us to the idiosyncratic vagaries of where we live, to numb our sense of place.

With this surplus of basic landscape knowledge, many artists have turned to their immediate surroundings in a search for a meaningful sense of place, an undertaking summarized by eco-critic Lawrence Buell:

. . . the quest and discipline of looking for poetry in the shards of quotidian place-based experience was the means by which that encounter was retrieved from the nether world of environmental unconscious to serve as an intimation of recognition and connectedness with person, animal, thing, and place across class and time barriers . . . 1

Through this actualizing process artists have discovered new ways to inhabit the previously overworked construct of the landscape.

Landscape geographers agree that the landscape “denotes the interaction of people and place: a social group and its spaces, particularly the spaces to which the group belongs and from which its members derive some part of their shared identity and meaning.” 2    Beyond that, however, the definitions of place are up for grabs. Since the landscape is a construct, a collective negotiation, and a “synthetic space . . . superimposed on the face of the land,” place is also constructed, with idiosyncratic mappings overlaid upon one another in the fluid arena of the social. 3

Many contemporary landscape artists engage nature as a complex system, a model that displaces the traditional idea of a stable world in perpetual pursuit of equilibrium with that of an instable, non-linear world—an open system. 4    Penetrating this perforated and spotted space is what is known as “hertzian” space, an invisible soup of electromagnetic radiation, television signals, mobile phone transmissions, police radar, aviary I.D. tags, and other wireless effluvia. 5    Normally imperceptible, this activity impacts the visible landscape and changes our relationship to it:

Wireless technologies in particular have challenged our relationship to designed space because they encourage us to think not of static silent structures that surround us but rather of fluid dynamic fields beyond the edge of our natural perceptions, fields within which we are all consumers and all contributors. 6

This hertzian space joins with other non-visible sensations, such as smells, sounds, and temperature, to form what is known as “softspace,” which overlaps and interpenetrates the “hardspace,” the seemingly solid, static structure of nature and the built environment. 7 This confluence of conflicting data presents new cartographic challenges, and the city is where the “mash-up” of hardspace and softspace reaches its peak: “We begin to read cities as more than just a collection of destinations—they are overlapping fields of differing experiences and logics. We are able to explore a ghostly poetic ecology that exists just beyond our perceptual limits . . .” 8

One of the most effective ways of mapping this new hybridized space is through the simple act of walking. Simply placing one foot in front of the other, the walk serves as a means of traversing the landscape, cutting a line onto the contours of the landscape. Humble, yet revolutionary, walking reaffirms the presence of the body in space:

Three decades of postmodern theory describe the body as a passive object. In the face of modern alienation and postmodern absence, walking is a subversive act that enables us to contemplate bodily connections within the built environment. Walking restores a sense of connection; the act of walking penetrates the supremacy of abstraction and theory that has been compounded through interdisciplinary translation . . . 9

Walking offers a more intimate and embodied experience of place and space, a re-inhabitation of the body's natural symbiotic relationship to the earth. This humble act denies the alienation and displacement of modern and postmodern culture, and functions both as a vehicle for creativity and as a creative act itself:

. . . the idea of walking as a subversive activity obscures its ordinariness. The everyday persistence of walking recognizes that breathing and walking give access to something tangible and deflates the importance of abstraction. The bodily experience of moving, by challenging the objectivist account of the world, opens a space for a theory of imagination. 10

This imagination is the poetry of the everyday, a subtle and unobtrusive poetics that can only be discovered through the act of walking.

Francesco Careri argues that the simple overlay of walking on the land represents the very first example of architecture, nomadic space embracing the place-ness of the path. 11   Over the years the walk has manifested in a myriad of activities: transportation, pilgrimage, garden stroll, rite of passage, protest march. The contemporary walk itself is banal, serving as exercise or commute, “the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites.” 12   By appropriating the common ritual of repetitive walks, however, or singular walks through a familiar landscape, the artist can bring a new consciousness to the walk and invest it with meaning.

The walking artist quickly establishes a rhythm through the mechanics of bodily motion. The walk then becomes a model for the creative act, a rhythmic process that mimics the act of thinking. The creative process is a “landscape of sorts and . . . walking is one way to traverse it.” 13   This rhythm sets up a pattern of movements, a grid of vertical strides against the horizontal surface, a reenactment of the cartographic overlay of maps. This haptic exercise maps the landscape through body memory, grounding the walker in the constantly manifesting present. In everyday practice we cover familiar places without much thought, but when confronted with unfamiliar places, we find ourselves mapping anew. 14   By flipping this process, the walking artist remaps the already familiar, challenging the notion that little can be gleaned from the commonplace.

Place is a process, a negotiation, and the road or path is a means by which place can be accessed. The pathways and trails of the nomad slowly evolved into the sedentary constructs of modern roads and streets, and as the walk became less a means of traveling from one place to another and more an end in itself, the street was transformed into a hybridized place of movement consisting of countless individual places experienced in passing. The street is both place and the conduit that allows access to place, and ultimately serves as a model of exploring a frontier, a means of discovering a sense of self, and a sense of the world and our place in it:

. . . the road serves other needs. For untold thousands of years we traveled on foot over rough paths and dangerously unpredictable roads, not simply as peddlers or commuters or tourists, but as men and women for whom the path and road stood for some intense experience: freedom, new human relationships, a new awareness of the landscape. The road offered a journey into the unknown that could end up allowing us to discover who we were and where we belonged. 15

The modern avenue served as laboratory for the flâneur, while the contemporary street finds the neo- flâneur manipulating the mediating filters of technology in pursuit of new connections to the landscape.

As the hero of modernity, the flâneur was the witness with the detached gaze, obsessively collecting images and experiences. Flânerie was a mode of intense perception, epitomizing the dominance of vision over the other senses, specifically a hierachical, voyeuristic male gaze. 16   Flânerie romanticized the underground, the bourgeois drifter, prostitute, criminal. The night streets became the other, a new frontier within the cracks of the civilized metropolis.

The role of flâneur has been updated, with artists shunning the solitary drifting of the old flâneur by forming groups to remap the urban and rural landscapes. The myth of the detached flâneur has been debunked, as we now know that any attempt at observation changes the subject and the conditions of the observation. No longer anonymous or above the fray, the flâneur is no mere spectator, interfering with the subject during the supposed objective act of observation. We influence place as much as place shapes our lives; the subject knows it is being observed, and behaves differently. “Each time we enter a new place,” Lucy Lippard writes, “we become one of the ingredients of an existing hybridity . . . [and] [b]y entering that hybrid, we change it; and in each situation we may play a different role.” 17

My own work has always involved an investigation of place in some way. My move to Long Beach in 1988 from the smaller California city of Oxnard inspired a wealth of poetic and painterly explorations of the new (for me) urban environment, most involving the act of walking. By mapping and re-mapping my walks that grew increasingly familiar over the years, I challenged myself to find unexplored phenomena in the commonplace, an act of performance described by Paul Adams:

. . . place-experience is not binary, a simple matter of knowing or not knowing; knowledge arises from actions, and place-experiences thus present innumerable shades of differentiation depending on what one is doing in a place. Accordingly, [new terrain] can emerge when any way of interacting with the world is changed, and, what is most important for our purposes here, when paths are no longer traveled in the same way [italics his].” 18

After traveling my paths in different ways, I began developing a body of work that would incorporate the three modes of my creative activity: image, text, and sound. Building on my previous thesis exhibition for my Master of Arts degree in 2000, Submersive , where I used video stills and scanned Polaroid photographs to help generate a graphic score performed by an ensemble of musicians, I sought a closer relationship between by work and my walk. 19   With Atlas Peripatetic, it became increasingly apparent that my walk would not only inspire my work, but would become the work.

The first substantial project after Submersive focused on reading aloud all of the texts found along my walk, speaking into a tape recorder, and transcribing the recording later as a found poem. I processed selections from the poem and used them as source material for a music piece.

After this transformation of textual information into sound, I sought other methods of documenting the sounds of my walk without using audio recordings. I decided to take notes on my next walk; using sheets of scrap paper, I jotted down descriptions of audible sounds, along with thumbnail drawings indicating visualizations of pitch, timbre, and volume. Inspired by the promise of these sketches, I attempted a more purposeful “walking drawing”: I attached several dozen squares of drawing paper end-to-end and folded them like an accordion. Using a clipboard to hold this foldout “artist book” in place, I drew the sounds I heard, allowing the pencil to move over the page from left to right, flipping to subsequent panels along the walk.

This led to a series of larger drawings made by documenting sounds from a single, fixed location. These “sound portraits” of my backyard patio, riverside at a campsite in Big Sur, and on the beach in Laguna, consisted of dense clouds of graphite marks resulting from the pencil moving across the paper as I traced the rise and fall of sounds. The technique introduced in these drawings reappears in two of the sound drawings.

During this experimentation with sound drawings, I recognized in the crude scribbles of my original note-taking the beginnings of a taxonomic system by which I could map the sounds of my walk. Tallying hash marks on a printout attached to a clipboard, I documented the descriptive names of sounds and their frequency, transferring all of the data into a spreadsheet, that, over the next six months, expanded to include over 1,300 unique sounds and their variations. Working with this raw information, I brainstormed different methods of visualization, new ways of making drawings that illustrated or derived from whatever the data suggested.

Intrigued by a comment at a critique, I wondered what would happen if I made a series of drawings inspired by the look of this data gathering system, but that would then allow for developments in new pictorial directions. In a precursor to my project exhibition, I presented four works, graphite on panel, the results of my experimentation with loosening the parameters of what the marks represented. I let go of my earlier requirement that the mark somehow reflect the arc of a sound event in some way, and allowed myself to make an abstract drawing that departed in whatever direction the process suggested. The results, however, proved less successful than I had hoped, and I realized that the new direction of embracing a more traditional, painterly system interfered with the core ideas of my project.

Looking back at the data, I noticed that the list of sounds formed a simple, if lengthy, found poem. After several attempts at formatting and fleshing out this list of sounds, I realized that the poem needed room to breathe, and so I took each sound entry as inspiration for more expanded poetic improvisation.

I experimented with different methods of structuring the poem, including a week of walks where I counted the number of steps on my route. I counted the intersections and blocks, then organized the poem into chapters that corresponded to these 110 distinct regions, or stations. This new structure became the basis for the photographic mapping of my entire walk.

After using the camera-phone in a previous project, I realized I could use this tool to capture images from my walk in a very simple and direct manner. Intrigued by the possibilities inherent in using a somewhat crude automatic camera with a slightly wide-angle, fuzzy-edged lens, I decided that since an individual snapshot from the camera yielded a low-resolution image, a collaged image consisting of many individual snapshots might yield an interesting meta-structure. The format of the 360-degree panorama, then, made perfect sense.

Limiting myself to the morning hours between 6 and 8 A.M., and the route of my walk to a fixed combination of streets, I began shooting the first of what would become over 8,000 individual shots. I stumbled through the first few weeks until I arrived at a workable system: consistently employing a fixed shooting order in (usually) a clockwise direction, so that after uploading the images from the camera and saving them in numbered sequences, the process of assembling the snapshots like puzzle pieces into the larger construction would work more smoothly and effectively. In Photoshop I restricted myself to making basic decisions on the positioning, layering, and the opacity or transparency of each element. I avoided the use of filters, color corrections, or other manipulations of the images. Carrying printouts of the progress of each panorama, I was able to pick up exactly where I left off the last time I stood at a particular station.

Seeking a physical correlation with the idea of the ephemeral walk, I thought that projecting the photographs rather than mounting hard-copy printouts would function more sympathetically with my project. Practical considerations arose, however, when I realized how difficult it would be to install and power the number of projectors required. A mixed show of paper drawings and projected images would prove problematic, with the projections, so closely related to the television viewing experience, threatening to overpower the static drawings. How could the installation, then, convey the complexity of the walk and its multiple views? I decided to print all of the panoramas, each consisting of sixty to eighty individual images, and mount them in a grid on the wall, forming a unified rectangular work that carried the modular structure of the photographs from their inception to their physical manifestation on the wall.

I included a compromise to the problem of projections by creating a master drawing of the accumulated projected panoramas. I mounted drawing paper in the field of projected light, then traced the outlines of the projected image, making permanent the temporal lines of the original panorama. The gradual buildup of marks soon filled the page with dark spidery lines, and at some point the drawing became so dense that further tracing proved impossible. The companion drawing deviated slightly in approach, with the panoramas rotating in a slide show format with a five-second display, the cycle repeating for exactly one hour. The resulting drawing reveals all of the marks made in that time. This accumulation of marks led to the idea of layering all of the completed panoramas upon one another in Photoshop, each at a 10% transparency, portraying the walk as a palimpsest, the history of forms buried and revealed among the layers.

Inspired by a side project done in collaboration with Chicago artist and curator John Kannenberg, I proceeded to identify and count all of the squares and rectangles of the sidewalk surface of my walk. I then mapped the data onto a word processing table, manipulating cell borders and boundaries to create an abstracted map of the sidewalk surface.

The installation of my thesis exhibition provided a comprehensive view of the project as a whole. I installed the pieces consisting of computer printouts (sound log, sidewalk surfaces, bird count, three maps) along with the show title and statement in one room, and hung the drawings and photographs in the other. I chose not to include an actual sound piece to avoid interfering with the sounds inherent in the sound log, and to avoid tainting the other works with an external set of conflicting information.

Conclusions

As an artist using the activity of walking as both form and content, I acknowledge the influence of other artists working in similar ways. Topping the list is Richard Long, whose structured walks through the English countryside (and other remote locations), particularly his seminal 1967 piece, A Line Made by Walking , have influenced my work for many years. While Long overlays varying structures, often geometric or mathematical, upon walks through numerous rural or remote landscapes, my panoramas result from a single fixed structure upon a predetermined urban path, repeated indefinitely—I have appropriated the parameters of the commute as an organizational system within which to explore untapped nuances of place experience.

Like any kind of photograph, the panoramas were approximations, viewed through the mediating filter used to create them. By imposing a somewhat straightforward and linear set of procedures to photograph my walk, and by using the technology of the camera-phone and basic layering techniques in Photoshop, I discovered entirely new rhythms and reverberations in the familiar landscape, with a greater variety of readings by the viewing audience. Taken as a whole, these technological and compositional structures served as a unique means by which my walk might be framed, allowing for an intimate and idiosyncratic documentation of the multifarious experiences of the journey.

Whatever directions my work takes over the next few years, it will most certainly involve the walk. By investing this walk with a higher purpose, by using it as a creative structure and system in the active negotiation of place, I hope to provide a richer, more intimate mapping of the ever-changing, always fresh landscape.

NOTES
1  Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 116.

2 Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi, eds ., Understanding Ordinary Landscapes ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 1.

3 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 8.

4 Nigel Clark, “‘Botanizing on the asphalt': the complex life of cosmopolitan bodies,” Body & Society , vol. 6, no. 2 (2003), 12.

5 Usman Haque, “Invisible Topographies,” Receiver #9, (Spring 2004), <http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/09/articles/index00.html>.

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ben Jacks, “Reimagining Walking: Four Practices.” Journal of Architectural Education , 1 February 2004, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 5-9. (5)

10 Ibid.

11 Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice (Barcelona: Gustavo Gilli, SA, 2001), 36.

12 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 3.

13 Ibid., 5-6.

14 Sean Slavin, “Walking as Spiritual Practice: The Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela,” Body & Society , Vol. 9, No. 3, 1-18 (2003): 10.

15 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 192.

16 Keith Tester, ed., The Flâneur (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.

17 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in Multicentered Society (New York: The New Press, 1997), 6.

18 Paul C. Adams, “Peripatetic Imagery and Peripatetic Sense of Place,” Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies , Paul C. Adams, Steven Hoelscher, and Karen E. Till, eds. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 186.

19For a more detailed examination of this earlier project, see: Glenn Bach, Submersive, M.A. Thesis Project (California State University, Long Beach, 2000).