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Walk No.8

Route: PCA towards Drake's Circus and back
Duration: 10 Mins
Time of day: Afternoon

Today we are given a task in our seminar on 'seeing' that is a research method I have been experimenting with so it was an interesting exercise to hear how the cohort responded and how I responded (having been so habitual in this it was a challenge to do it with even more consciousness).

Derive -  Guy Debord.
An unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relation and 'let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and encounters they find there.
We were to take a walk in Plymouth City Centre, document this however we liked and then come back and discuss with a group.

I chose to limit myself to sounds but noted down as my usual five word/phrase list:

Angle Grinder 
Oasis
Traffic
Chatting
Punk


We shared the findings in a seminar setting later on.  I hadn't really absorbed what I heard, my walk hadn't been embodied as usual and consequently I couldn't remember it. I was mute.
I couldn't elaborate on what I heard.  I know it felt like I was walking in a space with sounds, a volume/mass of sounds and I was walking through it but I was preoccupied and concerned with time and the complications of this being my practice already and realising how pedestrian my research is at the moment (pun not intended). I couldn't articulate why it's fascinating to write down sounds and not record them and try and understand our ability to imagine those sounds, like drawings in our minds eye/ear...to wonder about the code of writing rather than capturing the sound with recording technology. How I know the points, spots, plots, where I heard the sounds and they punctuate my mental map. and so on....  How, to walk without purpose flavours what we observe, receiving externally rather than generating from the internal but this walk was with the purpose of noticing, I was drifting physically but my noticing was very much constrained.  My daily walks are of the purpose of everyday tasks but the drift is in the seeing. It's an interesting inversion.


Later we discussed The Everyday and Everydayness, Henri Lefebvre, (where I had discovered rational and irrational are treated dialectically by Lefebvre, and this had been a coup for me and my insistent obsession with linear and non linear - which I'm slowly understanding also requires a dialectic frame).

and this question was posed:
How might your own creative practice be understood in relation to everyday life?
My creative practice at the moment IS everyday life......




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