Bach, Glenn. Atlas Peripatetic artist statement, December 2004.

Nature is not the things we see in the world, but a complex force that animates those objects, causing leaves to fall and birds to sing out. The rocks and grasses and hillsides (as well as human-built roadways and structures) represent the artifacts generated by nature's ongoing systemic processes.

So, too, my walk through that world, a ritualistic enactment of an ordinary journey, a body moving through space and place. The resulting creative project, Atlas Peripatetic, serves as a multi-genre improvisation upon the dynamic structure of that walk.

Incorporating data-gathering, poetry, photography, drawing, and sound, Atlas Peripatetic is an open-ended system where the visual investigations are single examples among a multitude of possible interpretations and presentations of data. The pieces on the wall are not fixed works of art, but temporary arrangements of information.

We begin with the long poem that shares the title of this show, 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 mirrors 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 walk. The drawings included in the show represent blank surfaces inserted into the system in order to capture the invisible tracery of various signals (sounds, memories, energies), the counting of birds presents a more organic contrast to the pseudo-scientific activity of the sound log, and the graphic map of the sidewalk surfaces attempts to quantify the seemingly ordinary grid under my feet.

All of the elements of the project involve 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 a banal 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.