In this Residency, I will explore the ways in which temporality, and the future especially, are encountered and experienced on a series of walks. To do this, I seek to focus on the objects, devices and materials via which temporality is organised, patterned and come across; preliminary research has indicated that these may include traffic lights, door bells, signs, shop opening hours, seasons, as well as more readily identifiable ‘clock time’ such as public clocks and timetables. I also aim to explore the temporalities that the objects, devices and materials identified generate and gesture towards, including, for example, waiting, rushing, checking and repetition, paying particular attention to how the future is involved.
In part, this focus on temporality and the future is to develop walking as a method that has, to date, primarily been attuned to the dynamics of space and place. What happens when walking concerns itself with time? How might encounters and experiences of temporality be documented?
To address these questions, I aim to work and think with a range of visual and sensory methods, including photography, video and sound recordings. In so doing, I also want to reflect on how these mediums may document the ‘same’ walk similarly and differently. A related aim of the Residency is therefore to make explicit the methods, materials and media via which walking as a methodology is deployed, and how the data that is produced may be arranged, curated and circulated. In these ways, the Residency intersects – or intra-acts – with many of the previous Residencies, which cultivate interdisciplinary arts based and visual and sensory approaches to walks and walking.
In the following blog posts, I will introduce the space that I will walk and include examples of, experiments with, and iterations some of the visual and sensory work that I’ll produce.
The work of the Residency will constitute a chapter in a forthcoming book, Engaging Futures: Methods, Materials, Media (Goldsmiths Press), a speculative book that offers a series of short case study interventions into how futures may be grasped and engaged through interdisciplinary, inventive methods – more details are available here and here. It is inspired by, among other things, teaching on the MA in Visual Sociology at Goldsmiths.