notes

• link titel

Two-legged Research is a course for true wanderers into an exploration of experimental walking.

A walk can be considered as 'a transitory experience where our deep human rhytms coincide with their environment.'

You will explore different methods with a particular focus on duration, instruction, navigation, rhythm, rest and movement.

This course is inspired by diverse walking practices, from the ancient Songlines of the Australian continent, to the Drunken Dragon walks from China, from the migrations of animals and plants, to the tourist hike and audio tours, from the wandering philosophers and psycho-geographers, to the marching band and carnival parade.

Which unexpected perceptions, questions, and revelations can walking lead us into? And how to compose a walk that can set us in an awe of wander (or wonder)?

Walking - ‘Move at a regular pace by lifting and setting down each foot in turn, never having both feet off the ground at once’

_

in the old Maya culture : Red Sky walke, * your feet are the heaven of the earth (ancient Maya culture) invites you to go on a journey of discovery and new experiences, beyond the terrain that is familiar to you. The trick is to see the beauty in every experiment, simply because you will learn from it anyway. It is not about the preconceived end result, but about the unexpected that arises when you start experimenting without an end goal. Red Skywalker sets off without a plan and adjusts the course along the way, based on experience. This path is also about the stories we share with each other, the stories of experience through which we learn from each other.

The Walking Seminar. Embodied Research Methodologies in emergent Anthropocene Landscapes https://issuu.com/artist-in-residence-ahk/docs/wandelkrant___insert_samengebonden. assignment: from the exotics— to the everyday surrounding , read text together….

a walk as inspiration for a work or as a work itself…

Rebecca Solnit

• The Rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests athat the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: a history of walking.
• she describes walking as a state in which the mind, the body and the world are alingned, as though they were three characters finally in concersation with each other, three notes suddenly make a chord. According to Solnit, the walking agreement not only provides a pleasant or healing feeling, which we all know, but also promotes creativity; during the walk, the passing landscape becomes, as it were, intertwined with your thought world, which also becomes a landscape. The new ideas that gradually emerge feel more familiar than usual. As though thinking were traveling rather than making.

Frederic Nietzche “A thought only gains value after it has been walked through”

• landing Sites Cocky Eek; https://cockyeek.com/projects/landing-sites/

* Richard Long: My footsteps make the mark. My legs carry me across the country. It's like a way of measuring the world. I love that connection to my own body. It's to me the world. Richard long. The Guardian, June 15, 2012.

• In the sixties walking art became a genre by itself. Long bases his work on the human scale. This distinguishes him from American Land Art artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, created imposing works of art in the open air with bulldozers. The only things that remain are maps, photographs and word pictures, which he calls 'second-hand' by definition.

In the nature of things: Art about mobility, lightness and freedom. Simple creative acts of walking and marking about place, locality, time, distance and measurement. Works using raw materials and my human scale in the reality of landscapes.

The music of stones, paths of shared footmarks, sleeping by the river's roar.

A Line Made By Walking and England 1967. Long created this work by repeatedly walking back and forth in a field made of grass. After that, Richard Long photographed this from an angle at which light enhanced the look of the line.

* Stanly Brouwn: takes walking, a man's step as his point of departure. the human measure against which all else can be compared. check it out! plus pictures.

• After the rains, the air smells fresh with ozone sap, and leaf litter, and my senses are alive with curiosity. Anna Tsing
• 'Sit as little a s possible: do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement - in which muscles do not also revel'.
• Walking at ones own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of [one's] body and [one's] mental state“; in other words, it allows creativity to flow. Ferris Jabr from his article “Why walking Helps us Think” for the New Yorker, September 3, 2014
• By walking barefoot we can start to feel our environment again. Louisse Spisser

….

• Walking Exercises: Lines and Squiggles in the Desert: https://libarynth.org/dust_and_shadow/walking_exercises?s[]=walking
• drunken dragon walk. source Dr Shen Hongxun -TaiWuChiGong practice.
• You're walking and you don't always realize it, but you're always falling. With each step up,you fall forward slightly and then catch yourself from falling. Over and over your falling and then catching yourself from falling and this how you can be walking and falling at the same time. Laurie Anderson - Gravity's Angel, inspired by the book Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pinchon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHFCdviF6zU (start 1:04 till- end)
• Sometimes you are not even aware that you are listening, but moving along with your tempo. Laurie Anderson. Northon lectures #02.

• Guido van der Werve, in 2007 left with a small crew to the Botanical Golf, to make a movies where he slowly walks over ice, just in front of Sampo, a three and a half thousand ton icebreaker of the Finnish government. A risky venture, but delivered an iconic result: the film number eight, Everything is going to be all right.
• Monty Python; Ministry of silly Walks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCLp7zodUiI

walk step, moonwalk in between exercise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-yX0GIi5s0 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-yX0GIi5s0

Francis Alÿs, strolls with critical thinking through world cities. so he enters a rich state of consciousness. which yields surprising videos. Francis Alÿs is known for using poetic and metaphorical techniques to highlight the political and social realities of his city. Often, the issues he addresses range from national border politics to globalism and areas of conflict in his community and the effects of modernism. Francis Alÿs – Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), Mexico City, 1997 The Paradox of Praxis 1 is a four-minute, fifty-nine seconds long video that features the artist as the primary subject. In the video, Francis Alÿs is seen pushing a massive block of ice around the city of Mexico until it melts into nothing. In total, Alÿs pushed the block of ice for 9 hours before it melted. However, the final copy of the video was edited and condensed to just a few minutes. The video features sights, sounds, as well as streets and storefronts of the city in the background. The final scene of the video also features a group of 3 young boys that smile up at the camera as the video comes to a close.

Though considered an absurd use of one’s effort and time, the act of pushing the block of ice around the city center was created by Alÿs to examine day to day life in Mexico city. As the video continues to progress, the audience is confronted with images of the sidewalks and puddles of dirty water in various areas of the city. was done to symbolize the frustration that everyday residents of Mexico City endure in an effort to improve their living conditions. that sometimes the only thing that one needs to enjoy their city in a new and unique way can be something as modest as a block of ice. the street, the crowds and the people who populate the street , determine his actions. Passers-by and traffic always provide unexpected twists. In his work Narcotourismo he walked for a week through Copenhagen, each day under the influence of a different dru after followed a depression. In london he walked past houses with fences. like a small child ALys rattled past them during his walks with a stick. Those walks culminated in a series of short films

Francis Alÿs Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes making something leads to nothing)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZedESyQEnMA

The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk, Marina Abramovic and Ulay What walking means in cultural history:

• Homeric bards, old wanderers for whom walking was a part of poetry
• the Peripatetic philosophers who taught and discoursed while walking back and forth in a Stoa
• Collonade; the walking poets of the Hellenistic world, who would leave a little poem behind them them at a brook or under a shade tree where other walkers from town to town would find them, extolling the shade of the tree, the clarity and coolness of the water in the brook,
• The Sky- walking or Cloud-walking Taoist poets and sages, who would walk high mountain peaks in cloud banks
• Li Po walking and following the moon
• The Buddhist walking meditation, in which excruciating slowness first the path then the heel of each foot gloms the ground.
• the Anabasis, the great walk of the Greek soldiers trapped in Persia under Xenophon
• the walk to the end of the world that Alexander the Great wept from inability to complete
• the wandering scholars and troubadours of the European Middle Ages
• Mao's Long March and Gandhi's Walk to the Sea
• the man who ritually walked the length, from end to end, of every street in Mahattan. http://www.manhattanwalkblog.com/

and so on walking just as a motion, as process, as a going on in life, a continuum, a mode of self expression or discovery or exploration, a means of bonding with the landscape, or being at a raw level in the environment, like the Indian sadhus with their vowed walks, their walked vows.

• The prostrating walk in Chine Buddhism. The monk enters a concentration or one pint-state as much as possible, faces in the direction he wishes to traverse, and lies flat on his face on the ground; when he gets up he plants his feet where his face had been when he was lying down, gathers his concentration again, and so on. It's much like the movement of an inch-worm, except that with each prostration he advances about five feet. For centuries Buddhist monks developing their vipassana concentration, or one-point attention to the present moment, would vow do to this exersice for a year, usually circumambulating a mountain with prostrations.One famous monk did this for forty years, then became a teacher of the dharma in his old age.
• (source: The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk, Marina Abramovic and Ulay. pg 95, 112)

• Relation in Space, Venice Biennale 1976. M; “our first performance was, Relation In Space in 1976 and was performed for the Venice Biennale. This idea of this piece was two naked bodies running and hitting each other frontally and increasing the speed for one hour. We really wanted to have this male and female energy put together and create something we called That Self.”

• The Great Wall Walk (1988) was based in the idea of the artists walking towards each other, in theirr early work, the pair walked toward each other over and over again with great physical concentration across a small space. in the great wall the while they converged across a fast distance, their walking invoved perhaps even more mental than physical effort.

(source: The Lovers, The Great Wall Walk, Marina Abramovic and Ulay. pg 95, 112)

Starting from two opposite points, they advanced towards each other for ninety days before coming together. Entitled The Lovers , this action marked not only the end of his relationship and artistic collaboration with Ulay, but also an emotional and creative rebirth. The artist considers The Lovers not as a performance, but rather as the 'conditioning' necessary to create a new work. Boat Emptying, Stream Entering; 3 objects which the audience is asked to use until the energy is transmitted: White Dragon: stand, head resting on a quartz pillow, looking down; Red Dragon: sitting, head resting on a quartz pillow, looking straight ahead; Green Dragon: lie down, head resting on a quartz pillow, looking up. The public is invited to experience physically, with their head resting on a quartz or obsidian cushion and their body in contact with the copper, the degree of energetic emanation conveyed by the materials. Boat Emptying, Stream Entering… , comes out of the experience undergone during this journey. The legends were always about the different dragons: Green dragons/Black dragons/White dragons/Red dragons.” Thus, the materials used here are energy-laden intercessors intended to convey to the audience experience.Their experience from the state of walking and also of being in China resulted in works which were exhibited amongst at Centre Pompidou.

• (https://territoriesofarttherapy.wordpress.com/2018/10/04/the-art-of-walking/)

https://www.ahk.nl/onderzoek/artist-in-residence/2017-2018/nick-shepherd/

the songlines wilfried hou je bek: algorithmic walking cern walk esther polak sound walks…