World-Wide-Walks: Peter d'Agostino: Crossing Natural-Cultural-Virtual Frontiers

First published in the UK in 2019 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2019 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2019 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image, photographs and photo/text compositions are © Peter d’Agostino.

Texts in the book are © the authors.

Cover designer: Aleksandra Szumlas and Peter d’Agostino

Copy-editor: MPS Technologies

Typesetting: Contentra Technologies and Aleksandra Szumlas

Production managers: Mareike Wehner, Matthew Floyd

ISBN 978-1-78320-913-2

ePub ISBN: 978-1-78320-914-9

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-915-6

Part of the Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments series

Series editors: Rod Giblett, Warwick Mules and Emily Potter

Series ISSN: 2043-7757

Electronic ISSN: 2043-7765

Printed and bound by Gomerain, UK.

This is a peer-reviewed publication.

Contents

Preface

PART I: INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Walking on Edges, Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks

Kristine Stiles

PART II: COMMENTARIES

Chapter 2: Peter d’Agostino: Walks & Sounds (footsteps, noise, and silence)

Gabriel Villota Toyos

Chapter 3: World-Wide-Walks : body-apparatus

David I. Tafler

PART III: PROJECTS

Chapter 4: World-Wide-Walks : selected works (1973–2018)

Peter d’Agostino

Chapter 5: FOOTnotes: Times & Places, Walking & Mapping

Peter d’Agostino

Chapter 6: WALKING… in a changing climate

Peter d’Agostino

PART IV: DOCUMENTS

Chapter 7: COLD / HOT: Walks, Wars & Climate Change

David I. Tafler, Kristine Stiles, and Christiane Paul

Chapter 8: World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky / Donegal

Peter d’Agostino, Deirdre Dowdakin, and David I. Tafler

Chapter 9: COME & GO

Kristine Stiles

PART V: APPENDICES

Chapter 10: WALKING…maps–territories

Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler

Chapter 11: Natural-Cultural Consciousness: in the age of climate change

Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler

Chapter 12: Techno-Cultural Visions: photography–cinema–digital media

David I. Tafler

Chapter 13: Peter d’Agostino’s Interfacing Strategies: camera obscura to World Wide Web

David I. Tafler

Chapter 14: Re-Visioning Virtual Realities (1990s/2010s)

Peter d’Agostino

Chapter 15: footNOTES: selected 1970s notebooks

Peter d’Agostino

Acknowledgments

Biographies

Index

Preface

Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler

Walking on walking,

under feet, earth turns.*

I.

There are many ways to define and describe a walk. For my part, conceiving of walks as video documentation/performances in real time was the first step in this process. The Walk Series (1973–74) set a baseline for a rigorous and seemingly absurd set of walking actions in San Francisco: around the edge of my roof, back and forth along a fence, toward and away from the ocean on a beach. I later realized that my walks along the edges and borders of these places represented micro and macro worlds. The roof enclosed the personal space I inhabited below, the fence separated a debris-lined city park from the bustling flow of cars on a freeway, and the shoreline at Ocean Beach was, in fact, a natural western border of a city (San Francisco), state (California), and country (the United States), as well as the edge of the North American continent. Whether appearing to be on a circular or linear path, each video walk formed a circuit, returning to the place I began, in the actual, unedited time it took to complete each action.

The Walks came to embody a range of natural–cultural–virtual identities: mediated mixed realities of walking through physical environments and of surfing the web. As they evolved during the past five decades, from 1970s videotapes into video/web projects during the 1990s, mobile/locative media and 360 VR video/photo installations during the 2000s to 2010s, I have continued to perform symbolic, ritualistic walks spanning six continents. Recent World-Wide-Walks/between earth & water projects confront glocal, global–local concerns about a changing climate.

In art and life, there is one person who has been there from the beginning, still beneath the roof and along the shoreline – completing me, and even some of the sentences in this book – my wife Deirdre Dowdakin and by extension our dear daughters, Brita and Lia. I dedicate this book to them. – All my love, pdA.

II.

Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks projects provide unique perspectives on walking practices across time and place within a context of evolving technologies and global climate change. This book addresses a broad range of related conceptual, social, and historical concerns – from walkabout, traditional Australian Aboriginal rites of passage, and the exploits of explorers such as John Ledyard, the man who dreamed of walking the world, to artists’ walks and related contemporary themes covered in the mass media: books, films, and television. As demonstrated by these intrepid figures and their many counterparts, the act of walking can situate an individual within a world of empirical awareness and the surprise of unknown encounters around the bend.

Mediating frontiers of human knowledge, walking and other forms of exploration can illuminate global challenges, most notably an environment undergoing radical and potentially cataclysmic change. Walking, interactive and context dependent, integrates the mind and body in the pursuit of knowledge. This book considers narrative, memory, and cognitive boundaries. These orientation systems organize and contextualize walking as a historic, human, artistic, and essential process for rediscovering an ever-changing environment. Beyond reflecting the evolution of media technology, the Walks embody evolving perception, notions of cognition, geographic and social shifts in the artist’s experience, interactions with other artists, coupled with an expanding theoretical frame for measuring a life’s history of travel and observation. – DT

Chapters

In "Walking on Edges, Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks," Kristine Stiles presents an overview of the Walks, from their origin in the early 1970s to recent projects encompassing natural–cultural–virtual identities. Situating the work within a contemporary arts context, Stiles cites other artists, related art movements, as well as philosophical and theoretical threads linking the Walks with broader concerns. She reviews the operation of the projects on the boundaries between site and non-site, representation and signification, Surrealism and resistance, environment and existence. Each brief encounter with these walks invites viewers into a meditation – an intercommunication among related histories of place.

Peter d’Agostino: Walks & Sounds (footsteps, noise, and silence) by Gabriel Villota Toyos discusses sound as a perceptual construct, an audio-vision, a symbiotics of the cinema. He goes on to evaluate the Walks’ contrapuntal performative use of sound, starting with the Portapak, as a harmonic event reminiscent of Cage, Schoenberg, Stockhausen, informing the sound of the body that walks in the landscape. This sound emerges from a perceptive capacity in which sight and hearing become inextricably united while at the same time remaining independent, thereby capable of transmitting much more complex information. According to Rick Altman, sound converts the media text into an event in space and time that disrupts surrounding matter.

"World-Wide-Walks: body-apparatus by David I. Tafler examines the relationship of the human perceptual apparatus with tools developed to enhance perception, and their deployment capturing the changing nature of the perceptions of the surrounding world. As exemplified by the work of Dziga Vertov, filmmakers opened up a dimension of perception that captures everyday events, re-presenting them in their socio-contemporary context. The chapter considers the moving human body, a dynamic field of ceaseless action," as the instrument mediating the genesis of technology with the transformation of the environment, breaking the body’s operation down into three modalities: gravity, mobility, and memory. Walking, the baseline of experience, functions within the critical, ever-present orienting system of gravity; the multiple material and ethereal dimensions of the body, its mechanics, movement, mapping; and the historic contextualization of history, theater, and now social media.

"World-Wide-Walks: selected works (1973–2018)" is a survey of Peter d’Agostino’s projects performed on six continents over the past five decades. This chapter begins with The Walks Series (1973–74), initiated as video documentation/performances, and proceeds to document World-Wide-Walks videos, photos, websites, and new media works exhibited as place-specific, site-specific installations in art galleries and museums.

In FOOTnotes: Times & Places, Walking & Mapping, Peter d’Agostino addresses the larger question of beginnings, the universals and particulars of the Walks, through a condensed form of photo-texts. The Walks explore globalization, colonization, mapping, architecture, ethnography, computation, indigeneity, and navigation. The chapter concludes with William Carlos William’s concept of the variable foot, referencing form and meaning, measurement and human experience. The sequence of pages, subtitled Begin Again…, serves as a continuum for the ongoing encounters represented by each incarnation of the Walks projects.

In WALKING… in a changing climate, d’Agostino focuses on the changing climate, with a progression of recent between earth & water projects that confront global warming by crossing natural, cultural, and virtual frontiers. These projects record the empirical experience of walking at the edges of glaciers, deserts, rivers, waterfalls, wetlands, coastlines, cloud forests, and water cities to confront glocal – global/local ecological concerns about a sustainable future. After a sequence of World-Wide-Walks photo-texts, this chapter continues with research notes of informed commentary ranging from scientific studies to local knowledge.

COLD / HOT: Walks, Wars & Climate Change by David I. Tafler, Kristine Stiles, and Christiane Paul is composed of excerpts from the catalogue accompanying an exhibition focusing on the theme of COLD / HOT as it relates to Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks / between earth &water installations, ICE / DESERTS / WETLANDS. As a key to the thematic content of this exhibition, recent Walks performed with 360- degree VR video cameras serve to bridge d’Agostino’s use of new media technologies with an earlier work, VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality, portraying simulations of armed conflicts in Asia and the Middle East as a fully immersive interactive virtual reality project. In the Anthropocene era, walks, wars, and climate change, as observed on glaciers, deserts and wetlands, become sites of accelerated and enflamed transition, potential zones of stress and conflict.

World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky / Donegal by Peter d’Agostino, Deirdre Dowdakin, and David I. Tafler describes a collaborative project produced as part of Lovely Weather, a series of commissioned works by the Leonardo/Olats in County Donegal, Ireland. Walks focusing on climatic changes, performed on Ireland’s northwest coast and at prehistoric megaliths in the surrounding areas, resulted in an installation that visually embodied the iconography of walking the rugged landscape. In conjunction with the Walks, an intergenerational workshop held at a green community center was informed by George Lakoff’s notion that how the environment is understood by the public is crucial for it affects the future of earth and every living being on it.

COME & GO by Kristine Stiles examines Peter d’Agostino’s exploration of origins, transformations, and receptions operating at an intersection between reality and illusion in Coming and Going: Angel Island (1977). A seminal participatory event of temporal, observational, and durational variation, Angel Island maps the contradictions, reversals and convolutions of ‘knowing’ and ‘imagining.’ The event also marks the deconstruction of artistic control in d’Agostino’s work where viewer-participants take an active role in assembling an articulation of its meaning and use.

WALKING… maps–territories by Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler defines the experiential and manifest process of mapmaking as both symbol and experience. In his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), Gregory Bateson expands Korzybski’s model that the map is not the territory. Jean Baudrillard describes a world beyond boundaries, a world rooted in stories, memories, and identities. Congruent with the practices of other tribal cultures, Australian Aboriginal rites of passage for education of the young means an obligatory nomadic journey through a narrativized landscape. Mapping (retracing) territory articulates ideas – a walk from the Nile River’s source to its delta, a trip on foot from Siberia to Australia, a 21,000 mile journey tracing the history of mankind from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego. John Ledyard, who died in Egypt during his last proposed expedition – a walk from the Red Sea to the Atlantic in 1789 – foreshadowed many of the travelers who made the metaphor of theatrum mundi (the world as a theater) into a reality.

In Natural–Cultural Consciousness: in the age of climate change, Peter d’Agostino and David I. Tafler consider environmental factors that impact human culture and civilization. Out of a rich tradition of artists working with landscape, the ebb and flow of human civilization and its interface with the environment raise the stakes at this critical moment in a world of changing climate. Art’s historic relationship with science suggests the formation of new methodologies to explore the arcane uncertainties. Meanwhile, severe imbalances between social world-views and the natural world may be creating a widening political schism that results in broadly based denials of the human causes of global warming and climatic changes. On the other hand, computer modeling used to analyze short-term weather patterns and long-term changes in climate indicates the necessity for effectively integrating natural–cultural–virtual identities.

Techno-Cultural Visions: photography–cinema–digital media by David I. Tafler focuses in greater depth on the cinematic apparatus, tracing the historic genesis of media: photography, cinema, digital media, to mixed realities (virtual and augmented realities) as information system, a system that threatens to bypass the body as an orienting site, yet augments the capacity to use perception/cognition as an interface with the environment. The claim of codes and machines on time, and attention, comes at the expense of people engaging the natural environment. At the same time, computers, cameras, GPS devices, and their software reveal an expanded realm of knowledge and experience, providing new means of interacting and thinking about the world.

In Peter d’Agostino’s Interfacing Strategies: camera obscura to World Wide Web, David I. Tafler surveys the genesis of the World-Wide-Walks. The development of d’Agostino’s work during the past five decades encapsulates its own history of a photography–film–video–new media art practice. The progression of media projects ranges from home movies d’Agostino filmed in the 1950s, and his first 1970s videos, to the use of GPS-enabled iPhones of the 2010s and recent 360 VR video–photo installations. These works center on relationships with seeing (perception), movement, and locomotion, and most importantly the cognitive processes of emerging new media technologies. In addition to brief summaries, the texts include excerpts of reviews from the period and essays in books that elaborate on the concepts and process in the realization of these projects.

In Re-Visioning Virtual Realities (1990s/2010s), d’Agostino introduces a new generation of World-Wide-Walks projects created as 360-degree VR video and photo installations. Taking a personal look at the emergence of virtual reality, he tracks critical concepts embedded in his earlier work, VR/RV: a Recreational Vehicle in Virtual Reality (1993), a state-of-the-art virtual reality project produced and exhibited at the Banff Center, Alberta, Canada. D’Agostino’s research on VR began in the 1980s while he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, MIT. This chapter concludes with his 1995 essay, Virtual Realities: Recreational Vehicles for a Post-Television Culture? with references to an array of seminal sources: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Gertrude Stein, Roger Shattuck, William Gibson, and Donna Haraway.

In footNOTES: selected 1970s notebooks, Peter d’Agostino illuminates the genesis of his Walks as a work process, a means of collating themes, experiences, theories, and practices. His drawings, writings, and direct references in the form of typewritten quotations encompass wide-ranging themes of the arts, humanities, and sciences. Inspired by Leonardo’s notebooks, footNotes contains the philosophies of Augustine, Wittgenstein, as well as Grotowski’s concept of a poor theater. These and other selected sources laid a groundwork for the evolving World-Wide-Walks, originally conceived by d’Agostino as video documentation/performances.

*By beginning with lines from Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), I intend to set an overall tone for the World-Wide-Walks projects in this book. Snyder’s poetry and that of William Carlos Williams, especially Paterson (1963), has had an immense influence on my thinking and creative process. It is significant to note that these long poems evolved over time: Williams’ Paterson, 1946–58, and Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers…, 1956–95. Their enduring poetic visions continue to inspire as I venture on this journey into a fifth decade.

Part I: Introduction

Chapter 1: Walking on Edges, Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks

Kristine Stiles

Chapter 1

Walking on Edges, Peter d’Agostino’s World-Wide-Walks

Kristine Stiles

I: The Walk Series

Peter d’Agostino realized The Walk Series in San Francisco in the fall of 1973 and early spring of 1974. The series included roof walk, a close exploration of the roof of his Portrero Hill studio; fence walk, an amble along a fence that bordered a freeway overlooking San Francisco; and beach walk, a traversal of a busy highway and a stroll on the beach. He described these walks as documentation/performances to emphasize his use of an early handheld video camera to record his actions in real time. Upon first viewing, the three videos appear quite simple. On reflection, they unfold with an ever-increasing density that anticipated the greater local, regional, and global complexity of his later walks, a compendium that evolved over forty years. This essay travels some of the territory from The Walk Series to what he now generically refers to as his World-Wide-Walks.

In all three black-and-white tapes of The Walk Series (roof–fence–beach), d’Agostino included the trace of his presence in the form of a shadow, a small detail of his body, and sometimes, very infrequently, a fleeting view of his full body appears, the sign of the maker in and of the world. The first hint of d’Agostino’s presence appears in roof walk (September 1973), which begins with a fixed shot of what appears to be a densely pitted abstract surface, the exact identity of which is impossible to ascertain. But the sound of bird calls, dogs barking, and an urban roar suggest a place of dense habitation. Eventually, the stationary shot traverses the pockmarked pebbled plane upon which the artist walks. The shadow of d’Agostino’s legs flickers on the screen such that the sensation of walking transfers to the viewer. Glimpses of his shoes may be seen and one experiences a greater feeling of walking with the artist, a sensation that is enhanced by the handheld video camera that adds to the impression of sharing the artist’s visual field. After walking the pebbled ground for some minutes, d’Agostino raises his camera from its microenvironment to scan the macro world around him. Only then does it become possible to see that he has been walking with the viewer on a rooftop, whose edge becomes visible by degrees, along with the surrounding backyards and nearby streets.¹ The ever-widening panorama takes in a small park surrounded by trees in the distance. Next appear the hills and houses of a city that is recognizable as San Francisco. But the telephone wires, movement of cars in the neighborhood, and familiar objects are quickly forgotten as the camera turns toward billowing clouds in the sky.

For fence walk (December 1973), d’Agostino walked along a chain-link fence dividing a grassy hillock from a freeway. A vague flash of cars is visible through the holes in the fence, which serves both to divide the landscape and to become a barrier that arrests floating debris in a necropolis of accumulated trash. D’Agostino’s shadow again proceeds on the ground and continues to seem simultaneously to belong to the viewer. The recurring trope of the shadow in his work enhances the impression of walking with him, sharing his line of vision, and being coextensive with his action in the environment. But when he lifts the camera from its focus on the ground to study his surroundings, and a fleeting glance of his body appears, d’Agostino wrests sole control of the image as a construction belonging only to him, the artist. Next, he pans across the speeding traffic before locking onto the sight of an abandoned car on the side of the highway. White and ghostlike, the immobility of the car exaggerates the roar of automobiles whizzing behind him in a rush. Deserted and silent, the lone car feels uncanny in its existential isolation, which the black-and-white video enhances. Fence walk ends with a shot of clouds into which a column of smoke from the city rises against the San Francisco hills, themselves littered with the built environment, itself caught against the backdrop of sky-like rubbish clinging to a chain-link fence.

In the third and last tape, beach walk (March 1974), the walk begins in a place not unlike where fence walk took place: a freeway with cars rapidly passing. The camera suggests that d’Agostino is standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the traffic to subside. Someone pushes a baby stroller along the sidewalk at the edge of a retaining wall, beyond which the ocean crashes against the shore. D’Agostino is then seen from behind, hurrying across the street and down a flight of stairs to the beach. The camera during this sequence is situated on a tripod, recording his movements from behind before he picks the camera back up to walk on the beach. Once on the sand, the artist’s cast shadow overlaps with and becomes the viewer’s own, and one walks again with d’Agostino, watching surf and foam flush over shells and sand. D’Agostino rescues the scene from its inherent romanticism by videotaping cigarette butts tumbling in the waves and littering the beach. The walk ends with the camera again stationary as he departs the beach. Briefly glimpsed in a frontal image with the sea behind him, the artist becomes a body moving quickly to ascend the stairs from the beach, to cross the street, and to disappear.

D’Agostino’s appearance in his own productions reminds viewers that seeing is an artifice of the producer, similar to how Dziga Vertov, Alfred Hitchcock, and later dozens of filmmakers appeared in their own work. In this practice, d’Agostino has never lost sight of the fact that the artifact of his making is the residue of real events in which his viewers have the sensation of participation. He accomplishes this act of sharing through the function of the shadow, which enables viewers literally to become his doppelgänger, German for double walker.² While the shadow and the doppleglänger have negative connotations in western history dating from Plato’s Republic, in d’Agostino’s work the double walker could be taken to mean that one has the positive sensation of being in and a part of the activity of exploring and seeing, an illusion made possible through the prosthetics of the camera’s apparatus. By uniting viewers with his shadow, d’Agostino metonymically bridges the distance between subjects and objects, sharing a form of embodiment in the articulation of the signification of things that bring objects closer to subjects. The variable sensation of being both in and outside of the site of walking has been continuous in d’Agostino’s art, from its inception to his use of video and virtual reality and to his present complex multiscreen digital works.

Three years after The Walk Series, with his then future wife Deirdre Dowdakin, d’Agostino created Coming and Going: Angel Island (1977). The couple travelled by ferry to Angel Island, an island in the San Francisco Bay, and walked to its highest peak, Mt. Livermore at 788 feet. They then filmed their return walk in reverse order and short-bursts all the way back to the boat and its final docking in San Francisco. Next d’Agostino cut the film into 50 segments and invited 50 guests to retrace his and Dowdakin’s walk, this time beginning at the San Francisco ferry, traveling back to Angel Island by boat, and walking back up to the top of Mt. Livermore. Each participant was given a strip of the film in a small film canister and instructed to find the place where the images in his or her segment were taken. Once these directions were carried out, participants returned the section of film to d’Agostino, who spliced the section back in the order that the film clips were received. The public and the artists, both having come and gone, watched the reconstructed film together, a new work created through their collective experience.

After the Angel Island walk, d’Agostino produced new work in the series Coming and Going, this time titled Coming and Going: NEW YORK (Subway), PARIS (Metro), San Francisco (BART), Washington (METRO) (1977–79). In this tetralogy, he surveyed the infrastructure of urban mass transit systems in the various named cities, commented on the linguistic parallels of visual images and structures of communication in closed-circuit surveillance cameras, and produced participatory public works. In each city and its subway system, d’Agostino objectified the movement of people on public transportation, deconstructed the spatial and temporal sequences, and situated public acts of walking and riding in a way that revivified banal sites of transport and movement usually taken for granted. As I noted at the time:

Three phenomena are basic to d’Agostino’s art: origins, transformations, and reception (in the sense of receiving, taking possession or getting, harboring and reacting through response). Selecting aspects of observable reality (manifest in events), he creates works that signify passages and relationships among these three points. In effect, he continually produces art that objectifies the transitive, visualizing movement through structures that incorporate spatial elements in sequence, quantity, and number, through language as symbol and through the juxtaposition of real and illusory perceptions. His metaphors stay movement between approach and recession, that synaptic juncture where meaning resides and connects to recognition, which produces knowledge.³

II. Walking on Edges

The Walk Series and the Comings and Goings series launched d’Agostino as an artist who walks on the edge, beginning with the terrain and rim of the several story building in roof walk, the perimeter of a dividing structure in fence walk, and the precipice of the continent at the Pacific Ocean in beach walk, and extending to the urban systems of transportations in major metropolitan cities. While constructing a visual discourse of places and sites on the edge,