I don't know how long this will take, it might take months, just like the virus.
Yesterday was the first day of what I'm calling my "Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu bracknellien" in which I inadvertently drew "Darth Vader?" as a friend referred to it. I hadn't recognised the shape myself until he pointed it out.
The French phrase comes from a Georges Perec book usually translated as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and I've simply replaced Paris with Bracknell. But I've also replaced a static sense of place with movement through space in the form of running.
Actually I'm borrowing the concept more from Jeremy Wood's gpsdrawing.com idea in which you try to experience or move through every road and/or walking path in the city. At Warwick University campus Wood actually tried to avoid walking paths, and drew all kinds of shapes in the fields and open spaces of campus.
Perec, Wood, and other artists working with spatial media like GPS and exhaustive spatalities of writing are nicely compiled in O'Rourke's book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers.
More important than all of the above theoretical/background material is, however, the emotions that accompanied Day 1 of my project of a complete run-mapping of the spaces of Bracknell. Let's just say it felt like a bit of a manic phase (where the day before had been the depressive).
Generating momentum through this project will be a way of transcending the binaries of up/down emotional swinging that the CoronaVirus is installing in many of us. Of keeping up with the consistency of getting outside to run, no matter what pace.
It felt really good yesterday to simply go out knowing only that I'd start to 'map' Wildridings.
So I did: I went out. First I ran around the object named "Wildridings", outlining it as best I could. This already entailed a transgression, because I had to run alongside larger roads with no pavement/sidewalk.
The main transgression, though, had to do with simply being out. The only other people I saw, aside from the occasional brief glimpse of a car-driver, were dog-walkers. I overheard snippets of conversation from small gatherings on the sidewalk, all revolving around the topic of how deserted-feeling the streets were.
Other than modulating my emotions, then, the purpose of this mapping project is to document the 'word on the street' as much and as fleetingly as possible. I'm promoting ephemerality here as a metaphor for how I want this thing to go: quickly and without much fuss.
It's a tall order, and likely a bit unsustainable, but I'm playing the long game here.
The French phrase comes from a Georges Perec book usually translated as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris and I've simply replaced Paris with Bracknell. But I've also replaced a static sense of place with movement through space in the form of running.
Actually I'm borrowing the concept more from Jeremy Wood's gpsdrawing.com idea in which you try to experience or move through every road and/or walking path in the city. At Warwick University campus Wood actually tried to avoid walking paths, and drew all kinds of shapes in the fields and open spaces of campus.
Perec, Wood, and other artists working with spatial media like GPS and exhaustive spatalities of writing are nicely compiled in O'Rourke's book Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers.
More important than all of the above theoretical/background material is, however, the emotions that accompanied Day 1 of my project of a complete run-mapping of the spaces of Bracknell. Let's just say it felt like a bit of a manic phase (where the day before had been the depressive).
Generating momentum through this project will be a way of transcending the binaries of up/down emotional swinging that the CoronaVirus is installing in many of us. Of keeping up with the consistency of getting outside to run, no matter what pace.
It felt really good yesterday to simply go out knowing only that I'd start to 'map' Wildridings.
So I did: I went out. First I ran around the object named "Wildridings", outlining it as best I could. This already entailed a transgression, because I had to run alongside larger roads with no pavement/sidewalk.
The main transgression, though, had to do with simply being out. The only other people I saw, aside from the occasional brief glimpse of a car-driver, were dog-walkers. I overheard snippets of conversation from small gatherings on the sidewalk, all revolving around the topic of how deserted-feeling the streets were.
Other than modulating my emotions, then, the purpose of this mapping project is to document the 'word on the street' as much and as fleetingly as possible. I'm promoting ephemerality here as a metaphor for how I want this thing to go: quickly and without much fuss.
It's a tall order, and likely a bit unsustainable, but I'm playing the long game here.
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