Tag: The Glorious Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan

110. Stuart Horodner, Walk Ways

walk ways cover

Stuart Horodner, then at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in Oregon and now at the Singleton Center for the Arts in Lexington, Kentucky, curated a 2002 exhibition on walking art, Walk Ways, which travelled to, among other places, the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the Oakville Galleries, in Oakville. It’s possible that some people reading this blog post might have seen the show. I managed to find the catalogue through Abebooks; it includes an essay by Horodner, documentation of works included in the exhibition, and pages from Horodner’s notebooks on walking. It’s a relatively short book, compared to Rachel Adams’s Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017, a massive catalogue of an exhibition of walking art at the University of Buffalo in New York, which I’ll be writing about here at some point in the next couple of weeks. But because I’m interested in the various ways that walking art is brought into gallery spaces, I thought I would begin Horodner’s catalogue first, on this cloudy morning.

Horodner’s essay, “Walk This Way,” begins with an expression that was current on college campuses in the U.S. in the 1980s: “Walk with me, talk with me” (10). This expression was intended to convey “sympathy and trust,” Horodner recalls (10). He then invites his readers to imagine that they are walking with him as he tells us about Walk Ways, “this exhibition of works by nineteen contemporary artists who have incorporated walking into their diverse practices and productions” (10). These artists “walk in their studios, on concrete streets, on sandy beaches and snowy mountains,” he states. “Their strides are a purposeful or meandering activity that combines bodily and mental freedom to yield distinct artworks that deal with politics, geography, history, and the architecture of the body” (10).

Horodner notes that “[t]he history of walking is long and various,” written about by writers ranging from Thoreau to Rebecca Solnit and discussed on web sites. “There are walks of historic importance, including Mahatma Gandhi’s 200-mile-long pilgrimage with his countrymen to the sea to make salt, or Martin Luther King’s numerous group marches on behalf of voting rights and racial justice, culminating in the march on Washington, D.C. in 1963,” he continues (11). Groups like the Sierra Club and the American Hiking Society bring together people who walk in the mountains, while in cities there are urban walks for fundraising and parades. “We walk down the aisle, walk to work, walk the dog, walk the plank, and as Lou Reed suggested, we occasionally ‘take a walk on the wild side’”; there are silly walks, too, like those made by John Cleese or Charlie Chaplin (11). Walk Ways, however, “takes its cue from Claes Oldenburg’s ‘I Am For an Art” manifesto of 1961, which promotes and art that ‘imitates the human’ and ‘embroils itself with the everyday crap’” (11). Walk Ways, Horodner suggests, takes Oldenburg’s call seriously by choreographing “a seemingly unremarkable activity, offering a series of How To’s that present walking as a subject or method or as a metaphor for human agency” (11). The artists involved include Francis Alÿs, Hamish Fulton, and Janet Cardiff, whose walks are “most often documented in combinations of photography, video/audio, and text”; Tom Marioni, Curtis Mitchell, and Rudolf Stingel, who “use walking as a means of producing gestures in what are primarily expanded drawing and painting practices that take place in the studio”; Eleanor Antin and François Morelli, who “perform walking-related tasks that feature sculptural acts of pilgrimage in public spaces”; Mowry Baden, whose work is kinesthetic; Jim Campbell, Martin Kersels, Douglas Ross, Janine Antoni, and Paul Ramirez-Jonas, who explore “the psychology of locomotion”; Nancy Spero, who uses walking to explore history; Sharon Harper, who uses it to explore rural landscape; and Matthew McCaslin and Richard Wentworth, who walk to explore urban space (11). 

The exhibition could also have included Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of people walking, Alberto Giacometti’s bronze sculptures of figures striding through space; Bruce Nauman’s videotaped studio walks; and Vito Acconci’s Following Piece of 1969, in which he chose people at random for 23 days and followed them until they entered an office or private residence (11). Another work Horodner wanted to include, but which was unavailable, was David Hammon’s video Phat Free (1995-1996), “which follows the artist, a solitary black man making lonely music by repeatedly kicking an empty can down several darkened New York City streets” (13). Horodner mentions these possibilities, he writes, “as an indication of how deep the pool of possibilities is for an investigation of walking as a subject of art” (13). He also notes the existence of other exhibitions and books that cover similar territory (Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust, of course; Walking and Thinking and Walking, a show in Denmark from 1996, the catalogue for which is apparently unavailable now; and another Les Figures de la Marche, held in Antibes, France, in 2001, which didn’t know about). “This may simply indicate a shared interest on the part of the organizers and writers, or it may reveal the more profound connection between contemporary art and the human body in motion,” Horodner concludes (13).

Next, Horodner turns to discussions or descriptions of individual works included in the exhibition. First are two text and photograph works by Hamish Fulton. Horodner states that Fulton decided, after a walk of more than 1,000 miles in 1973, that he would only make art resulting from similar walks in the future. He cites Fulton’s description of his work from a 1999 exhibition catalogue, which compares walking to the art, which cannot, Fulton argues, represent the experience of the walk (13). “Fulton’s efforts extend the British tradition of the country walk, magnified severalfold in endurance and transcendence,” and his text recalls the haiku of Basho, Horodner suggests (15). I know that Fulton’s long walks, and those of his friend Richard Long, are not currently fashionable—their difficulty does not lend them to the kind of walking that includes large groups of people—but to be honest, Fulton’s and Long’s work was the first walking art I ever encountered, and I am drawn to long walks as a way of attempting to bring myself into relationship with territory or Land. Something happens to me on such walks, and while it’s hard to articulate what that something is, I think it’s close to Craig Mod’s assertion that long walks create “a heightened sense of presence” (Mod); at least, that’s the closest description I’ve found, and I haven’t been able to come up with one on my own. (Doing so is one of my goals.)

Sharon Harper’s Walkabout photographs, Horodner writes, “depict dreamlike visions of women walking in rural areas” (15). The works consist of multiple overlapping prints, “positioned side by side to create a shifting panorama,” and use techniques like “blurred focus, overexposure, and multiple perspectives to evoke feelings of detachment, isolation, and introspective” (15). Harper’s “female protagonists appear to roam a landscape that is drenched in memory” (15). Horodner notes that the word “walkabout” refers to a cultural and spiritual practice of Australian Indigenous people, and suggests that “Harper’s figures are caught in the act of creating their own songline or following those laid down by others” (15); it’s possible, though, that the use of the term “walkabout” in this context could be considered cultural appropriation—if Harper is a Settler, that is—and I think the work would stand without that particular framing.

In 1985, François Morelli observed the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima by carrying a hollow fibreglass sculpture shaped like a charred human torso on a kind of pilgrimage. During this work, which he called Transatlantic Walk, “[h]e often stopped to breathe air into the figure (which was equipped with plastic tubes) or to fill it with water from public fountains, lakes, and rivers. . . . gestures [which] served to provide symbolic sustenance, as if he were keeping his companion alive” (17). The exhibition included “performance artifacts”—slide photographs transferred to video and his journal of drawings—along with the sculpture itself, hung “at torso height, allowing viewers to imagine themselves carrying it” (17).

Douglas Ross’s pan-American project “involves him wearing a self-made robotic video camera that is guided by a compass” (17). The camera records the relationship of north to his body. “When Ross wanders the streets, he appears to others as a city cyborg, making use of his home-made prosthetic for mysterious reconnaissance work,” Horodner writes. “Like Morelli, his performing presence in the community can be baffling or unsettling, and each of them seems to enjoy presenting an image of ‘the artist’ in the process of being one” (17). The work exhibited in Walk Ways included Ross’s equipment and a selection of documentary videos, installed so that the viewer faced north.

Migration, a video by Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez-Jones, “takes the romantic notion of lovers on a beach and adds the troubling elements of domination and subservience” (20). The artists, who are married, “take turns following each other while documenting their footsteps-in-the-making with video cameras” (20). When Antoni follows Ramierz-Jonas, her feet fall within his footprints; when he follows her, however, his footprints obliterate hers. As installed in a gallery space, the work is a two-channel video “shown on a pair of up-ended monitors placed next to each other, seemingly uniting the two separate walks into one extended horizontal image,” transforming “what at first appears to be an unequal power dynamic into a complex progression of reciprocity and love” (20). 

Audio artist Janet Cardiff was represented in the show by a video, Hillclimbing, made with her husband and frequent collaborator George Bures Miller, who holds the camera. In the video, the pair are “heard walking toward the top of a snow-covered hill” with their dog (21). “We hear the sounds of their physical effort: their labored breaths and the crunch of boots in the snow,” Horodner writes. “When Miller falls down, we hear Cardiff say, ‘Are you okay?’ ‘Yeah,’ he answers, and the piece loops back to the beginning, so that, at least on the video, the summit is never reached” (21).

Nancy Spero’s work included in the exhibition was Vietnamese Woman, a print work made on a long piece of paper using a single polymer plate, with the image repeated over and over, in different colours and at different heights, achieving “a kind of stop-action walking sequence” (22). The work refers to “news images of people fleeing the massacre of civilians in the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai by American troops in 1968,” Horodner notes. “Spero insists on using anti-heroic means—paper, printing by hand, collage—to create large-scale friezes that are impossible to see completely at a single glance, and therefore must be ‘walked’” (22).

Eleanor Antin’s 100 Boots “consists of fifty-one photo-postcards, each one showing fifty pairs of black rubber boots arranged in a different location across the United States . . . like scenes from a ‘road movie’” (25). The work took more than two years to make, and Antin travelled from California to New York posing the boots in various places. “100 Boots obliquely evokes the United States’ engagement in the Vietnam War, with Antin’s bodiless ‘army’ appearing to protest, parade, trespass, and commune with nature as it makes its way east,” Horodner writes. “Antin mailed the postcards to many artists, writers, critics, museums, galleries, and universities, enabling the recipients to follow the humorous pilgrimage story being told in installments. The project was a ground-breaking example of staged photography and Mail art, strategies that have been used by numerous artists since” (25).

At 6 feet, 7 inches, Martin Kersels is a big man. His Tripping Photos is a series of self-deprecating photos that depict him “flamboyantly falling face down onto the sidewalks of Los Angeles in a series of carefully orchestrated stop-action ‘trips’” (27). “These slapstick gestures seem to confirm the societal assumptions regarding a large person’s awkwardness,” Horodner writes, “while the staged precision of Kersels’s actions contradicts such generalizing” (27).

For Francis Alÿs, walking is “a metaphor for the creative act,” and “he has performed numerous passeos (walks) that he has documented in the form of postcards, each of which features an enigmatic photograph and a brief, carefully written text” (25). “Such actions allow Alÿs a mobile practice of interacting and observing the social fabric of different cities. His ability to entertain people while critiquing particular contexts was evident in his contribution to the 2001 Venice Biennale”: a work called The Ambassadors in which two peacocks (standing for Alÿs) were paraded around the festival grounds by two guardians, who handed out postcards. Walk Ways included several of Alÿs’s postcards.

Walk Ways also included Richard Wentworth’s poster project, To Walk, which included photographs of “a variety of sites in southeast England” taken during different psychogeographic dérives and which in local communities in the form of a broadsheet which encouraged people “to take a fresh look at both the rural and urban landscape in these locations by reproducing the distinct structures and semiotics that Wentworth found there” (29).

Sculptor Matthew McCaslin “makes installations that incorporate common household lighting components, hardware, and video sequences of daily events” (30). His work Check It Out, “an industrial handcart stacked with V.C.R.’s, working safety lights, a clock and T.V. monitors that show repeated images of urban commuters. . . . presents walking as the ritualized and gear-laded activity of people caught up in the hustle and bustle—wheeling carts, schlepping suitcases, and carrying briefcases containing our essential tools for the day” (30).

Jim Campbell’s Ambiguous Icon series consists of “modest-size L.E.D. displays that feature changing patters of blinking red lights, which he has programmed to create impressions of silhouetted figures walking, running, and falling” (31). According to Horodner, “[t]hese rather rudimentary sequences are ‘completed’ by the minds of the viewers, which fill in the ‘missing’ information between the black ground and the pulsing grid of red dots, producing the effect of movement” (31).

Tom Marioni’s Walking Drawing, Horodner suggests, literalizes the phrase “get your walking papers” (34). The artist taped “a long horizontal sheet of paper to a wall in his studio at a height that was level with the midsection of his body, attach[ed] coloured pencils to his waist, and then repeatedly walk[ed] close enough to the wall to create a series of overlapping lines” (34). “The drawing is pinned in place by two vertical wooden strips,” Horodner continues, “and is best seen and understood when the viewer re-creates the movements of the artist—a simple act that documents the up-and-down affair that walking really is” (34).

Rudolph Stingel’s work refers to Conceptual and Minimalist art. His eight square foot Untitled is made of thick sheets of styrofoam, which Stingel put on his studio floor and then walked on while wearing acetone-soaked boots, which melted the styrofoam in the shape of his footprints. “The resulting object recalls the clunky steps taken on the lunar surface in 1969 by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first men to set foot on the moon,” Horodner contends (34).

In Dirt Event #5, Curtis Mitchell clogged a patterned rug with a paste made of dirt and then paced back and forth on it “until he wore away a rough path in the new ground, revealing glimpses of the rug’s original design” (37). In Walk Ways, the carpet was paired with “a large sheet of glossy photo paper pinned to the wall, which turned black after being exposed to light” (37). The juxtaposition of the two objects “provides an architectural stage where the viewer can consider the ravaging effects of time together with his or her own dark reflection,” Horodner suggests (37).

Mowry Baden’s Wolf Cane is, Horodner writes, “a devious tool to be used in the landscape: a collapsible metal cane modified with the cast of a wolf’s paw attached at the bottom, designed to leave false prints on the ground” (37). In Walk Ways it was presented with a travel case and instructions. “Someone using it on a walk through fields or woods would create interpretive quandaries for others walking by after them,” Horodner notes: “Was a wolf pursuing a man, or vice versa? Or were they companions?” (37). I wonder how one could tell the difference between the paw of a wolf and the paw of a big dog, myself.

“The artists in Walk Ways explore the connections between mind and body, motion and site, process and residue,” Horodner concludes. “Their diverse practices serve to illuminate how a simply daily movement can inspire a complex meditation on the physical world and the self as a ‘mover and shaker’ within it” (39). As with other exhibitions of walking work, Walk Ways demonstrates the variety of ways that artists can respond to walking, either as a practice or as a theme. I particularly like Francis Alÿs’s postcards; what a great way to document walks and to invite others to participate, however vicariously, in the experience of walking. That, I think, is an idea worth stealing.

Works Cited

Horodner, Stuart, ed. Walk Ways, Independent Curators International, 2002.

Mod, Craig. “The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan.” Wired, 29 May 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/six-weeks-100s-miles-hours-glorious-boredom-japan/.

98. Craig Mod, “The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan”

mod photo.jpg

Looking down over Hirasawa post town, Nagano Prefecture.
Photo by Craig Mod.

 

My friend Geoff Travers sent me a link to Craig Mod’s discussion of his 620-mile walk along Japan’s “Nakasendo,” or “inner mountain route,” one of the longest historical walks in that country. I’ve been thinking about that article for a couple of weeks now, and although I promised myself I would read about other things than walking until the end of this project, Mod’s comments about boredom and walking are important, and I want to give myself a chance to think about them by writing about them.

Because Mod’s article was published in Wired, it’s not surprising that much of its focus in on technology—or, to be more clear, Mod’s decision to avoid as much of the internet as possible, and his use of technology to achieve that goal. “In practice this meant going cold turkey on all social networks and most news and media sites,” Mod writes. He used an app called Freedom that blocked his access to most websites and social-media apps. He only allowed himself access to a few websites—one about the route he was walking, Wikipedia, and some Japanese blogs—that gave him some historical background on the towns he was walking through, and he downloaded a GPX route file (whatever that is) into an app on his phone. That file contained the historical Nakasendo road overlaid on a contemporary map, so that he could locate his route when there were no way markers. “I was able to deviate from the historical route with greater freedom, knowing just where the original line lay,” he tells us. “I could do this with essentially zero cognitive overhead, which is an advantage the ever-updating smartphone map has over a paper map.” He also used Google Maps to find cafés called kissaten in villages. Apparently those cafés are the best way to meet regular Japanese people.

Mod shared his walk, but he writes that he wanted to avoid “getting caught up in the small loops of contemporary sharing platforms,” so he used a custom-build SMS tool to send out one text every day, and one photo, to an unknown number of recipients. He didn’t know who was subscribing to the messages: subscribers joined by sending a text to a number he wrote on his website and in his newsletters. Recipients could respond, but he wasn’t able to see what they said. “Those responses have been collected in a print-on-demand book that’s waiting for me when I get home,” Mod writes. “My intent is then to respond to the responses in aggregate, long after the walk is finished.” The point of “this convoluted system,” he continues, “is to use the network without being used by it”:

the purpose of time-shifted conversation is to share the walk without being pulled away from it. I could use a tool like Instagram to approximate this, but I’d have to fight with its algorithm and avoid looking at the timeline. I’m not superhuman. I would look at the notifications, the likes, and comments. Reply to them. Become intoxicated by the chemicals released by the tiny loops. Invariably this process would make me think about that audience and how they would be reacting to the next text and photo. I would have lost the purity of the experience.

“The daily SMS became a forcing function that deepened my experience of the walk, made me more aware of how painful or joyful or crushingly boring the days were,” Mod continues. “Being able to share in somewhat real time and not be pulled out of the moment was just an issue of tools and framing.” 

Mod also shared sound files of his walk, recorded every day at around 9:45 a.m. He would take out a small Sony recorder, plug in a microphone preamp, and then plug in a pair of binaural microphones. “The microphones sit in my ears, sucking in sound like audio microscopes, so it just looks like I’m listening to music,” he writes. “But I’m not; I’m recording high-fidelity audio.” At the end of the day, after sending out his SMS, he would publish the audio file to a podcast called SW945. “For me,” he states,

the recording process was a little beat—15 minutes of mediation each morning. It forced me to think about the sounds of the day. I recorded in front of temples, standing next to rice paddies full of croaking frogs, in screaming pachinko parlors, bowling alleys, cafes, hotel lobbies. Anywhere that seemed to typify that day, that moment, that chunk of the road. I’d close my eyes and marvel at the sheer volume and specificity of sound around me.

Like the SMS, it seems that the recording was a way of deepening the experience of the walk for Mod; it drew his attention to what he was hearing. “Both the SMS and podcast publishing systems are ‘open’ systems, with no controlling entity like Facebook or Twitter,” he points out. “And they are ‘quiet’ systems, in that production and consumption spaces are separated. You don’t have to enter a timeline of consumption in order to produce.” Mod’s ways of sharing the walk are thought-provoking. When I use the WordPress app on my phone to blog my walks, I do end up responding to comments and checking the statistics of how many people are reading. And I always end up using Facebook to publicize the blog, which inevitably draws me into its web and out of the experience of walking. Mod has found ways to engage with others without getting sucked into a social media platform. It’s very smart.

But I was most interested in Mod’s comments about “the grand, pervasive boredom” of his walk. “Let me be clear,” he writes: “I was luxuriously, all-consumingly bored for most of the day. The road was often dreary and repetitive. But as trite as it may sound, within this boredom, I tried to cultivate kindness and patience”:

A continuous walk is powerful because every day you can choose to be a new person. You flit between towns. You don’t really exist. And so this is who I decided to be: a fully present, disgustingly kind hello machine. I said hello to bent-over grandmothers and their grandchildren playing in rice paddies. I said hello to business folk about to hop into their Suzuki Jimny jeeps, to Portuguese workers on break from car factories, to men in traditional fundoshi underwear about to carry a portable shrine in a festival. I greeted shop owners cranking open their rusted awnings and a man selling chocolate-dipped bananas. I’d estimate a hello return rate of almost 98 percent. Folks looked up from their gardening or sweeping or bananas and flung a hello back, often reflexively but then, once their eyes caught up with their mouths and they saw I was not a local, not one of them, their faces shifted to delight.

I felt as if the walk itself was pulling that kindness from me, biochemically. The feedback cycle was exhilarating. It was banal. It was something I rarely felt when plugged in online: kind hellos begetting hellos, begetting more kindness.

More importantly, though, from my perspective—because of course he wanted to engage with people when he was walking and bored: those interactions were a form of stimulus, a way out of the boredom of the walk—are Mod’s comments about how that experience of boredom fostered “a heightened sense of presence”:

In the context of a walk like this, “boredom” is a goal, the antipode of mindless connectivity, constant stimulation, anger and dissatisfaction. I put “boredom” in quotes because the boredom I’m talking about fosters a heightened sense of presence. To be “bored” is to be free of distraction.

That “heightened sense of presence” enabled Mod to perceive things he thinks he would have missed otherwise: the hidden Christian messaging in small signs along the way, the fact that every small village had “no fewer than three barbers or hairdressers,” the existence of classical statues in small gardens, the playgrounds that looked as if no child had touched them in decades. If he had been listening to podcasts or looking at his phone, Mod would have missed those details–or so he believes.

I think he’s probably right, and he’s talking about an experience that anyone engaged in a long solo walk probably has. It’s not exactly a meditative experience, or at least it isn’t for me: my mind is constantly running with trivia of one sort or another, including how much my feet hurt and how much farther I can go before I allow myself to have a rest. I’m thinking of my walk to Wood Mountain in particular, and how the notebook I scribbled in reveals how gruelling that experience was, while my memories tell me I was having a great time. Maybe both statements are true. I was bored, among other things, and that boredom did lead to what Mod calls a “heightened sense of presence.” I think that’s why I’ve been writing about the experience of space and place in that walk; I’ve been trying to get at that aspect of the experience of walking. I think Mod’s comments open up a new direction for my thinking about walking. That “heightened sense of presence” might even by why so many long-distance walkers describe their experience as somehow spiritual.

The length of the walk is an important part of breaking old habits, which helps to lead to that sense of presence. For the first week of his walk, Mod experienced a form of withdrawal from news and social networks. But as the walk progressed and his body changed, his perceptions changed as well:

Around 10 days in, after the skin had peeled off my pinkie toes and my shoulders started to heal and accept their fate, I found that my general musculature acclimated to the daily grind. Walking shifted from a laborious act of biomechanics, to something that simply happened. This sounds crazy, but it was as if walking became part of my autonomic nervous system, like breathing. With stronger leg and gluteus muscles, the world felt like an extremely high resolution simulation, and I was merely a floating consciousness, bobbing between rice paddies and up and down mountains saying hello to anything that moved. Everything still hurt at the end of the day, but the movement was effortless, and sometimes I found myself yelping with joy, alone in the woods, at the beauty and smoothness of it all. 

That was when his urge for information and digital stimulation faded away. It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a solo walk as long as Mod’s, but even on a relatively short walk, like my nine-day trek to Wood Mountain, I’ve felt similar emotional changes as my body began to change. 

One day an old woman asked Mod if his walking was an ascetic practice. He laughed, but for weeks afterwards, as he walked, he considered that question more seriously: “The grueling pace. The boredom. The pain. And then doing it over again the next day. It certainly starts to sound like an ascetic practice.” And it led to an insistent thankfulness: Mod uttered prayers of gratitude every day as he passed Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. “I recognize what a strange give and incredible privilege it is to take the time to do a walk like this,” he writes. “And the disconnection from online chaos and the creating of space to think, to be present does feel somewhat religious, even if it’s a religion of contemporary woe: to stop being a ding-dong who can’t pull his eyes away from Twitter.” 

Mod doesn’t expect much of his experience to continue into his regular routine now that his walk is over. “But one chief purpose for this kind of monastic walking,” he writes, 

is to literally pound into your body, step after step, the positive habits that can be found only through repetition. To create a physiological template of stillness, or kindness, or focus that you can then attempt to bring back to the ‘real’ world. Stillness is then no longer an idea, but a muscular configuration.

And that awareness, that experience of presence or focus, is one of the reasons that I find the current dismissal of long, solo walks as anti-democratic or exclusionary, as falsely heroic, quite frustrating. The only kind of walking performance that’s now considered appropriate, it seems, are walking performances with other people, performances that fall under the rubric of relational aesthetics or social practice. That refusal of solo performance is hard for me to understand. If solo walks are anti-democratic, what about other forms of solo performance? Are they anti-democratic as well? Has relational aesthetics become the only allowable art form? Isn’t that more than a little prescriptive? I mean, there’s nothing wrong with relational aesthetics, with curating walks with or for others. I like walking with people. But walking alone is good, too. It’s a different kind of experience, a different kind of performance. It might not be for everyone, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be.

Work Cited

Mod, Craig. “The Glorious, Almost-Disconnected Boredom of My Walk in Japan.” Wired, 29 May 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/six-weeks-100s-miles-hours-glorious-boredom-japan/.