Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the 'negotiated' space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.
Walkscapes deals with strolling as an architecture of landscape. Walking as an autonomous form of art, a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory, an aesthetic instrument of knowledge and a physical transformation of the 'negotiated' space, which is converted into an urban intervention. From primitive nomadism to Dada and Surrealism, from the Lettrist to the Situationist International, and from Minimalism to Land Art, this book narrates the perception of landscape through a history of the traversed city.
An exploration of walking and mapping as both form and content in art projects using old and new technologies, shoe leather and GPS. From Guy Debord in the early 1950s to Richard Long, Janet Cardiff, and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists have returned again and again to the walking motif. Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and Mapping, Karen O'Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping projects by contemporary artists. She offers close readings of these projects—many of which she was able to experience firsthand—and situates them in relation to landmark works from the past half-century. Together, they form a new entity, a dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By alternating close study of selected projects with a broader view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping itself maps a complex phenomenon.
a collection of intimate reflections by artist Ernesto Pujol, which bring together his experiences as a former monk, performance artist, social choreographer and educator.
A renowned explorer and acclaimed author shows us that walking is a natural accompaniment to creativity—and among the most radical things we can do. “Simple, profound … compelling … [a book that] packs a surprisingly motivational punch” (GQ). Why do we walk? Where do we walk from? What is our destination? Placing one foot in front of the other and embarking on the journey of discovery are activities intrinsic to our nature. But as universal as walking is, each of us will experience it differently. For renowned explorer Erling Kagge, walking is a natural accompaniment to creativity: the occasion for the unspoken dialogue of thinking. Walking is also the antidote to the speed at which we conduct our lives, to our insistence on rushing, on doing everything in a precipitous manner.
This book rethinks the Armenian people as significant actors in the context of Mediterranean and global history. Spanning a millennium of cross-cultural interaction and exchange across the Mediterranean world, essays move between connected histories, frontier studies, comparative literature, and discussions of trauma, memory, diaspora, and visual culture. Contributors dismantle narrow, national ways of understanding Armenian literature; propose new frameworks for mapping the post-Ottoman Mediterranean world; and navigate the challenges of writing national history in a globalized age. A century after the Armenian genocide, this book reimagines the borders of the “Armenian,” pointing to a fresh vision for the field of Armenian studies that is omnivorously comparative, deeply interconnected, and rich with possibility.
A passionate, thought-provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity, from the author of Orwell's Roses Drawing together many histories--of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores--Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. She profiles some of the most significant walkers in history and fiction--from Wordsworth to Gary Snyder, from Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet to Andre Breton's Nadja--finding a profound relationship between walking and thinking and walking and culture. Solnit argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in our ever more car-dependent and accelerated world.
Skateboarding is both a sport and a way of life. Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart. Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.
A deeply informed, yet playful and ironic look at how the internet has changed human experience, memory, and our sense of self, and that belongs on the shelf with the best writings of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. “One day, as I was daydreaming on the boulevard Beaumarchais, I had the idea—it came and went in a flash, almost in spite of myself—of Googling to find out what I’d been up to and where I’d been two evenings before, at five o’clock, since I couldn’t remember on my own.” So begins Maël Renouard’s Fragments of an Infinite Memory, a provocative and elegant inquiry into life in a wireless world. Renouard is old enough to remember life before the internet but young enough to have fully accommodated his life to the internet and the gadgets that support it. Here this young philosopher, novelist, and translator tries out a series of conjectures on how human experience, especially the sense of self, is being changed by our continual engagement with a memory that is impersonal and effectively boundless. Renouard has written a book that is rigorously impressionistic, deeply informed historically and culturally, but is also playful, ironic, personal, and formally adventurous, a book that withstands comparison to the best of Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard.
