Walkscape OSU is a month-long open invitation to:

• Explore the campus of Ohio State University (on foot)
• Document your discoveries, observations, impressions and ideas in a way that makes sense to you. Images, objects found or made, words, sounds, gestures, notations are all welcome.
  
• Add your vision to the Walkscape Scroll: On the Oval, May 20 10-4pm. We will be composing a collectively-imagined re-mapping of the campus, a tapestry of ways, paths and sites.

Walkscape is inspired by a book of the same name by Francesco Careri (Barcelona, 2002). Writing as an architectural and urban theorist, Careri examined a series of moments in the history of 20C art when artists turned walking--bodily movement through space--into a critical and creative gesture. Dissatisfied with the conventional and institutional enclosures of art--the frame, the studio, the museum--they took to the streets, looking for new ways to see.

In a line that stretches (circuitously) from the Dadaist "excursions" through Surrealist "deambulation," Situationist "drifting," Richard Long's "A Line Made by Walking" (1967) and the work of OSU's Robert Ladislas Derr, the walking body turns into a means of both creating and resisting meaning: resisting prescribed itineraries, thwarting predictable outcomes, opening new points of access and surprising vistas. What emerges from these bipedal experiments, Careri suggests, are a range of alternative ways of evoking and inhabiting space: practices of pilgrimage, dreamscape, playscape, heterotopia.