Moving Body, Moving Mind: Walking and Talking in Illinois

EXCERPT: from the introduction

Walking as Knowing as Making was a year-long series of symposia, discussions, and walks that took place at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Originated within the School of Art and Design, the project formed from discussions between Nicholas Brown and Kevin Hamilton.

We first planned the project as a way of provoking needed discourse where we could find none. With interest in walking on the rise in academia, the arts, activism, no area seemed to benefit from work within any other. Disparate, incomplete conversations provided glimpses into walking's potential as an act of knowledge and production, but each ran the risk of uncritically valorizing some aspect of this commonplace practice. As so many asked during our project, what is walking after all but a series of falls and recoveries of a body, propelling a person through space? Anything beyond that, any meaningful or productive function, is ascribed by a particular person or group, within a particular discourse. Walking's rich potential lies in the differences between these ascriptions. We sought to better understand why artists, activists, poets, geographers and ecologists want walking to be more than movement of a body through space and time.

To this end, we arranged a series of opportunities to ask ourselves and others the question, "Why walking?" We did this through staging a sequence of deliberately interrogatory contexts, where both our assumptions about walking and our means for conducting such a discussion were called into question. In 2004 and 2005, we assembled small groups of "experts" for whom walking played a significant role, invited them to Central Illinois for four-day retreats. Each retreat contained public and private components, talks and walks. We sought to challenge our guests through placing their work in proximity to that of others from wildly different practices. We sought to challenge ourselves and our local community of participants by holding the events in a roaming format, choosing different locations for each presentation or discussion, and conducting some of the events as walks.

The subject of walking deserves such a multiform examination, conducted through practice as well as theory. A complex site of simultaneous activities, walking influences the walker and the place where she walks, produces self and space, place. The walker is seen and also sees, learning and sensing as she is identified and constructed in the eyes of others. The walk also produces a story, an opportunity to recount or map movement for others. In walking, then, we find a nexus of vital and important questions, easily and readily applied. A walk potentially produces subjectivity, history, knowledge of self and other, identity, representation, all in an act centered within a single body.

Through narration, images, and articulation of themes, this paper will introduce some of the potential and challenges we uncovered as a year-long, internationally-dispersed and diverse group of people, walking and talking around the landscape of Central Illinois and the campus of a Research University. Along the way, we will provide hyperlinks to information about the individuals and discourses represented.