Walking as Art

March 2013, Walking and Mapping, Artists as cartographers, by Karen O’Rourke

walking and mapping

Contemporary artists beginning with Guy Debord and Richard Long have returned again and again to the walking motif. Debord and his friends tracked the urban flows of Paris; Long trampled a path in the grass and snapped a picture of the result (A Line Made by Walking). Mapping is a way for us to locate ourselves in the world physically, culturally, or psychologically; Debord produced maps like collages that traced the “psychogeography” of Paris.

Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases, and new tools for location-based 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. Some chart “emotional GPS”; some use GPS for creating “datascapes” while others use their legs to do “speculative mapping.”

O’Rourke shows in this book, the link between all these projects and how they form a new entity and a new dynamic. Karen O’Rourke lives in Paris, she is a multimedia and communications artist whose work has been exhibited in Europe, the United States, and South America.

To read more about : http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/walking-and-mapping

By Marion Wolfer

Marion Wolfer is a French Master student in cultural policy and management at the European Institute of Paris 8 University. She is working on cultural networks. She did an internship at Cutura21 for three months. Marion Wolfer est une étudiante de master I en politiques et gestion de la culture à l´Institut d´études européennes de l´Université de Paris 8. Elle travaille sur les réseaux culturels et a effectué un stage de trois mois au sein de Cultura21.