ABSTRACT

Keywords: techno, natural, walking, mapping, World-Wide-Walks, eco-art

This paper forms a theoretical model of a techno / natural interface by focusing on a series of World-Wide-Walks projects from the 1970s to the present. The inquiry extends our work on The Techno / Cultural Interface: tracking the boundaries of high-tech and traditional cultures presented at TISEA, Sydney, 1992, and published in Media Information Australia, August, 1993. Originally based on ‘dialogues’ and ‘metalogues’ inspired by Gregory Bateson’s concepts of mind and nature as “sacred and necessary unities,” the techno / cultural ideas evolved over the next two decades from theories of interfacing, identities, and consciousness to techno / natural concepts sorting through primal layers of sensuous kinesthetic experience: walking.

The World-Wide-Walks documentation / performances explore ‘natural / cultural / virtual identities’ mediated by video / web / GPS tools, contextually framed between earth & sky and between earth & water. The conflation of technology within the ‘natural’ order provides a necessary challenge in this age of global warming and man-made climate change. To begin meeting this challenge we produced World-Wide-Walks / between earth & sky / Donegal, a Leonardo / Art & Climate Change project in Ireland.

By navigating an art/science interchange of ecological concerns, the current projects examine water related issues. Peter d’Agostino’s work-in-progress W-W-W / between earth & water / ICE was performed at glaciers in Iceland and Terra del Fuego, Argentina. These comparative sites at the top and bottom of the globe provide our current research with compelling evidence of escalating climatic changes for addressing a sustainable future related to ‘glocal’ issues of global and local communities.

• David I. Tafler, Department of Media and Communication, Muhlenberg College, United States.
• Peter D’Agostino, Film & Media Arts Department, Temple University, Philadelphia, United States.

Full text (PDF) p. 143-146