Walking Thought

Walking the cities

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Walking Thought is a virtual map that documents a walk preformed on the 6th of March 2011 in response to the Tate Britain to Tate Modern walk in London, UK.

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” is a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, in this piece the premiss of the work is to engage in this idea by walking to think. With this practise rooted into Situationist International, Dérive work. As an element of the Dérive, the Situationist used to take a map from one city or location and traverse a different city with this map trying to get to a location on the map. This comparing of the two cities in this way creates a connection between them, which is only discovered when acting the route. Part of the Dérive was walking and drop people's usual motives for movement and actions in the city, in the hope of changing their relations to the terrain and the encounters they find there. When seeing this piece in this context you understand that the combination of the two city images and the text it in an attempt to generate new way of thinking about the environment and how we engage with it.

The way this piece is set out and presented has elements of Sol LeWitt's 'Certificate for Wall Drawing' series, as the work sets out instructions on how to recreate and preform the work, it also shows the route and images of the way points. With the work giving out suggestions of thoughts through the text, could be seen to lead the participant in how they relate to the juxtaposing of the images. With the text being a poetic or quotation response to the images, hopefully this literature use is widely known in culture so it will allow the participants to engage fully with the work.