Hello Spectrites !
For those of you in Paris on October 17th, pencil your
calendar !
Best
Annick
------
Leonardo/Olats and the Bookstore of the Jeu de Paume have
the great pleasure to invite you to the launch of Karen
O'Rourke's book Walking and Mapping: Artists as
Cartographers in Paris with the participation of the artists
duo Esther Polak et Ivar van Bekkum.
Thursday October 17th 2013 – 7 – 9 pm
Librairie du Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
T. 01 47 03 12 36
librai...@jeudepaume.org
www.librairiejeudepaume.org
www.leonardo.info/lbsinfo.html
* * * * *
Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers
Karen O’Rourke
MIT Press, Leonardo Book Series, May 2013
Walking & Mapping
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/walking-and-mapping
Leonardo Book Series
http://www.leonardo.info/lbsinfo.html
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/leonardo-book-series
Leonardo/Olats
http://www.olats.org
An exploration of walking and mapping as both form and
content in art projects using old and new technologies, shoe
leather and GPS.
From Guy Debord in the early 1950s, to Richard Long, Janet
Cardiff and Esther Polak more recently, contemporary artists
have returned again and again to the walking motif. Debord
and his friends tracked the urban ambiences of Paris to map
the experience of walking at street level. Long trampled a
path in the grass and snapped a picture of the result (A
Line Made by Walking). Cardiff created sound walks in
London, New York and San Francisco that sent the audience
out walking. Mapping is a way for us to locate ourselves in
the world, physically, culturally, or psychologically.
Debord produced maps like collages that traced the
psychogeography of Paris, while Polak and her team equipped
nomadic Fulani herders in Nigeria with GPS devices and
developed a robot to map their itineraries in the sand.
Today, the convergence of global networks, online databases,
and new tools for mobile mapping coincides with a resurgence
of interest in walking as an art form. In Walking and
Mapping, Karen O’Rourke explores a series of walking/mapping
projects by contemporary artists. Some chart “emotional
GPS”; some use GPS for creating landscapes made of data
--“datascapes”-- while others use their legs to do
“speculative mapping.” Many work with scientists, designers,
and engineers.
O’Rourke offers close readings of these projects--many of
which she was able to experience firsthand--and situates
them in relation to landmark works from the past
half-century. She shows that the infinitesimal details of
each work she considers take on more significance in
conjunction with others. Together, they form a new entity, a
dynamic whole greater than the sum of its parts. By
alternating close study of selected projects with a broader
view of their place in a bigger picture, Walking and Mapping
itself maps a complex phenomenon.
The author
Karen O’Rourke is an artist and writer based in Paris,
France whose work has been exhibited in Europe, the United
States, and South America. Her art projects include City
Portraits, Paris Réseau/ Paris Network, Archiving as Art and
A Map Larger than the Territory. A past recipient of the
Leonardo Award for Excellence, she is a Maître de
conférences at the Université Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne).
http://karenorourke.wordpress.com/
Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum
The art of Amsterdam based artist couple Esther Polak (1962
Amsterdam) and Ivar van Bekkum (1965 Rotterdam) focuses on
movement: to capture the moment when something is about to
happen, or just happened, or even both… and to make this be
tangible in their work. They are fascinated by new and
distinctive ways to depict movement itself. Every
representation of movement changes again one’s experience of
space. To show this, that’s what Polak-VanBekkum's work is
about. Among their projects: Amsterdam REALTIME,
NomadicMILK, Spiral Drawing Sunrise, Pelagic Seascape et
Urban Fruit – Street Wrapper. http://www.polakvanbekkum.com/
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