Reference: JFK, by Dennis Adams and Laurent Malone

How do maps influence the way we interpret and engage with the space? How does a map reflect our perceptions and opinions of space?

Through our micro-interactions with the physical, mundane limits, we start to have opinions on space. In this context, walking and mapping provide a field for detecting the space. Through the practice of walking and mapping, my enquiry becomes: Can a publication reconstruct mapping to create a perspective for observing and understanding the space?

It begins with those moments of feeling at a loss for words, as I’m pushed into a process of finding out: I want to say something about the ‘limits’ I encounter in everyday urban spaces, such as a park fence, a bollard or a pedestrian sign, but I have no idea what it is that I want to say. What is it? Can I write more definitions to build my understanding？ Or can I produce knowledge by classifying them into knowledge systems? It wasn’t until I started to see walking as a research tool that I realized my words centre on how individuals understand their surrounding space. Such understanding doesn’t just come from language, and certainly not from urban planners; it comes to us through the repetitive, mundane, sometimes tedious, and even invisible walks we take every day.

The constant interactions between pedestrians and the ‘limits’ of space on their paths reveal a dynamic relationship between them. According to Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life
(De Certeau, 1984), walkers are unwittingly “writing the text of the city”.  Hidden under those taken-for-granted, repetitive movements, frictions are passed onto our muscles and minds through walking. As I started to walk as a social activity to be observed and traced, my understanding of urban space grew from these invisible paths I create daily. Sometimes, when I take the longer route due to a portion of the park fence or shifting routes between the maintained sidewalk and the parked cars, my body feels the power flowing through structures of “limits”. Sometimes, when I take a grass path worn down by footsteps instead of the paved path right next to it or join a group of people to cross against a red light, I participate in the process of pedestrians actively (re)creating their paths.

With an interest in this reality, I reflect on the following questions: How can these micro-interactions (bodily movements, physical sensations, shifting thoughts) be observed and noted? How can these observations be visually represented? How can the visual approach prompt readers to rethink the act of walking and the structures of urban space shaped by ‘limits’?

Holding onto these questions, I found a walking and publishing project called JFK, created by Dennis Adams and Laurent Malone, as an interesting approach to critiquing and analysing surrounding urban spaces. It is a map with no direction. The two artists launched an image-based publication representing an 11-hour-long walk from downtown Manhattan to JFK Airport, with a short text printed on the spine of this book explaining the rules of how this walk is performed.

The publication visually maps a subjectively planned walk (a straight line through the city) in which photography and walking become key tools for exploring space. Malone highlights walking as “a critical tool” (O’Rourke, 2013), providing a physical space for observing the city’s structure. During the walk, Malone and Adams shared a single 35 mm camera to produce photographs in pairs: each was free to take photos of their choice and then passed the camera to the other to capture an image in the opposite direction. Each pair of photographs—one chosen and one blind, quoting from Laurent Malone, are “transects” (O’Rourke, 2013) of the cities—shows how pedestrians measure their path and landscape within a limited perspective.

Such a photographic record of walking highlights the point of view as another key element in this publication. On each double page, the horizontal images face opposite directions, giving the reader the illusion of standing between spaces. This evokes the pedestrian’s perspective, which is a dynamic situation: as people move forward through the maze of the city, “things fall into and out of sight, new vistas open up, and others are closed off” (Ingold, 2015).

The densely layered pages resemble the physical sensory during a walk, like a tear-off calendar. Their thickness urges readers to flip through them and experience the physical sensation of taking steps repeatedly in time. During that process, the alternating arrangement of the main and subsequent viewpoints emphasises a visual rhythm for reading, stressing further the movements experienced during the walk.

These observations make me consider how a publication could place a walk as its center. It marks the pedestrian’s moving journey instead of showing static directions and distances. The mappers provide a clue for viewers to observe between themselves and the surrounding reality.

Combining mapping and walking gives “a context for listening to that brings together mappers and travellers, writers and readers, image makers and viewers” (O’Rourke, 2013).

Here are the improved enquiries: How do I see these maps in relation to the physical space and my walks? What can be recorded as the research output of a walk, and what does it communicate? How can graphic design assist in presenting the walking research output in a publication and through its form? To answer these questions, I compared my practice with the reference I chose.

Walking is my key tool. However, unlike the planned walk with specific guidelines in the project JFK, I address ‘walking’ in my practice as ‘an everyday activity’ and a research practice that centres our bodies, which “is about consciously deciding how to put that instrument into motion within an environment, and which types of data to sense, sift, and assimilate. ” (Twemlow and Cardoso, 2022) Walking is to consciously walk through mundane spaces with curiosity—to the office, to school, to park, or to the local market—an interesting practice of de-familiarization. The only rule is not to presuppose it will reveal a conclusion but to view it as the beginning of finding out.

While walking, mapping is a tool that helps record, filter and preserve opinion of a space. What is being selected as output becomes a map for viewers to associate themselves with reality. As Guy Debord created the Psychogeographic Guide of Paris, the Situationists started to propose that maps are not only tools for the visual representation of space but also mediums for political and social critique, which revealed the potential of mapping and maps as they can be applied to non-geographical narratives.

My walking and mapping practice unwittingly reveals my focus on a specific category of environmental elements, which I refer to as ‘restrictions/limits’, that have shaped my everyday paths. Later, as I recalled an earlier memory of coming across the long caution tapes wrapped around trees surrounding a park during the pandemic, I realised walking as a practice can associate me with paths, urban space and society. By detecting the control mechanisms in urban spaces, I don’t want to make statements about our ‘everyday space’ being continually destabilised by these structures but to bring what we often regard as an “obscure background” of everyday life to the centre and front. I want to experiment with the form of a publication as a pedestrian map, following these questions: what could be the elements, such as scale and figurative representations, selected for stretching this map? What are these selected elements in relation to the path and structures? If the elements in the map are centred around the pedestrian, such as steps, speed, body movements, physical sensory and drifting thoughts, what form can they take?

Bibliography

De Certeau, M., 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Adams, D. and Malone, L. (1997) JFK. Available at: http://www.laurentmalone.com/traverser/new_york

O’Rourke, K. (2013) Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Ingold, T. (2015) The Life of Lines. Cambridge, MA: Routledge.