November as a Pedestrian

Pedestrian is an umbrella title and one of my experiments within this is a month of documenting my daily, everyday walking activity beginning November 1st.
https://bethheaneyresearch.blogspot.co.uk/
I imagine it won't be of interest to anyone but me! But putting a time constraint on research in a project and obliging myself to publish brief notes is something I find useful (and also feeds another aspect under analysis re; my non-linear, scatterbrain thinking style).

Pastoral http://bethheaney.blogspot.co.uk/p/gallery.html now exists as a working document. I kept a journal and it was a dynamic, organic process that I am still using and adapting.  When I began the project I set myself rules and structure and this enabled free thought and open exploration. It helped me organise my observations, context, ideas, feelings, everything.. and kept it contained in one object (I still can't work out if this is the piece/artefact or whether one day it will be realised in a different way).

For Pedestrian the aims are - alongside the written blog notes - to make an instinctive (visual) response to each walk I log and as these are retrospective of the activity to examine a variety of time based recording methods (technological and 'analogue' or manual, old and new hopefully) to look at the space between what happened and what remains.

Observations to be considered:
Awareness of my body in various ways eg. objectively, subjectively, embodied.
The ambulation through obstacles.
Posture.
Auditory responses.
Emotional responses.
Sensory awareness
Self consciousness/invisibility
Track/trace/map/route/guide
Perception of time.
Interesting incidents....and my reaction to them.
Aloneness.
Socialness...
Converting knowledge (walking/drawing confluence/parallel/feedback..)


Themes:
Cartography
Spacial representation, perception
Bodily performance v mind performance.
Linear/non linear systems (the desire lines, habits, wayfaring/transporting - Ingold)
Narrative
Syntax of walking/drawing (dots and lines - Walking as writing or reading - Solnit)
Behaviours of walking (Mauss or Bourdieu)
Urban Design vocabulary, (confluence, furniture....) Semiotic readings, and designed control
Walking as a quiet protest. Pedestrian empowerment.
The politics of roads...
Documentation as product? What is appearing in the banal recounts of the walks?
Drawing and walking as a genre.

and on and on and on........

Notes page 6

Sunday, 29th October 2017

I don’t know why this is important but it was in my personal diary from September, perhaps it helps me think about the embodiment of walking in comparison to swimming:

The river has undertow, various currents and depths. It is not one line. Time varies, flow varies, direction is not uniform.

Swimming - the skin of the water, the shape of the liquid, the slow steady linemaking of the swimmers.  Doing nothing but swim in lines back and forth, a surface illusion of order.  The water isn’t behaving to order though, even though the currents, ripples and movements are subtle it is still happening. Acting against the ordered lines of the swimmers.

“The question expressed itself as a movement of emotion", I tried to look at this but I didn’t know what my emotions were.  You need a baseline emotion to be able to detect the other emotions ‘moving’.  Its a multiple emotion river: moving with the undertow etc.  We feel the river all at once - all the emotions (current) are present at once.