You Are Here Columbus

The blog of the social collective of Arawak City, Ohio.

10 May 2009

walkscape osu


http://walkscapeosu.blogspot.com/



Walkscape is inspired by a book of the same name by Francesco Careri (Barcelona, 2002). Writing as an architectural and urban theorist, Careri examined a series of moments in the history of 20C art when artists turned walking--bodily movement through space--into a critical and creative gesture. Dissatisfied with the conventional and institutional enclosures of art--the frame, the studio, the museum--they took to the streets, looking for new ways to see.

In a line that stretches (circuitously) from the Dadaist "excursions" through Surrealist "deambulation," Situationist "drifting," Richard Long's "A Line Made by Walking" (1967) and the work of OSU's Robert Ladislas Derr, the walking body turns into a means of both creating and resisting meaning: resisting prescribed itineraries, thwarting predictable outcomes, opening new points of access and surprising vistas. What emerges from these bipedal experiments, Careri suggests, are a range of alternative ways of evoking and inhabiting space: practices of pilgrimage, dreamscape, playscape, heterotopia.

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Join the campus-wide experiment in creative bipedalism by going for a walk. Visit new places, take new routes, look with a fresh eye: walk by yourself, in pairs, in small groups, en masse. Document your experience somehow and contribute to the Walkscape Scroll on the Oval from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Wednesday (5/20). Sponsored by One Creative University: A project of Arts Initiative and the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities. Contact: mailto:Livingston.28@osu.edu. Read more: http://walkscapeosu.blogspot.com

About

This blog serves as a transparent point of discourse for You Are Here--a Columbus collective that grew out of the Comparative Studies Undergraduate Group at the Ohio State University. It consists of people from all academic and social backgrounds with an emphasis on social theory. Most succinctly put, it is creative scholarship in affect--whether it be from academia, popular culture, art, language, or personal observation. The ideas expressed in this blog are by no means reached by consensus and do not necessarily reflect those of other members. The comments doubly so. Feel free to critique, question, or agree with any views expressed. You don't have to reside in or be familiar with the city of Columbus. As far as we're concerned, you are here.