Walking with Awareness (WWA)
Walking With Awareness is a continuous, generative psychogeography project exploring tools that prompt new ways of exploring our everyday surroundings using conditional design, sensory-based prompts and mindful practices.
The following experiments are versions of a “dérive” — a French psychogeography term for an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants stop focusing on their everyday relations to their social environment.
Conditional Design Walks: A custom worksheet aimed prompting users to use place-based rules to guide a walk that strays away from the pre-supposed path and document the outcome.
Walking Compass: A “Walking Compass” is a tool to increase awareness of one’s environment. Participants are invited to take the compass on a walk and fill out a reponse to each sense in the quadrants on the attached postcard creating a custom sense-based portrait of place.
Medium: Cedar blocks, ink, eye hooks, rope, pencil, rubber band, postcard
Psychogeography Workshop at Ours in Richmond, VA
Richmond in Reyjkvaik: Project aimed at exploring the similarities and differences between the urban fabric of Richmond, VA and Reykjavik, Iceland by replicating the same walk in a different place and documenting the experience using a variety of generative-walking tools and mediums.
VCUarts Dean’s International Research Grant Awardee