Walktrack is a meditation on walking and how we think about the act in combination with locative media. Thinking about both the construction of these works as artists and producers and also the simultaneous currents of memory, motion and mediated experience that work produced in this mode exploits.
Walking is of course already augmented. Augmented by memory triggers and associations of place augmented by the shifting environs the walker passes through, by the physical fact of inhabiting a moving gait with all the continual bodily information the very act produces as it happens. Of course walking is also already a narrative, a chain of consecutive events in motion, a personal physical enaction of our seductive understanding of time as story. As has been noted by numerous walkers and thinkers we move through it as an act of bodily cogitation. As we walk and fall we join the dots, find the next foothold, sense the new direction.
Any form of truly locative media (audio, text, image, video, AR) is designed to take these pre-existing augmentations as a given. As material to be used in the construction of overall affect. Locative media work is composed of a shifting collection of ingredients, site (the entire environment, static or in motion), physical intimate personal presence, relationship to and associations with media delivery mechanisms or devices and the media delivered in-situ. For the artist building work from these elements the associations between the elements give rise to any gestalt impact the work has in the location or in walking/passing through it. This can be thought of in much in the same way as the famous Kuleshov effect in cinematic editing giving rise to an associative meaning between individual shots thus creating one of the building blocks of cinematic language.
Walktrack is both documentation of a specific walk (Lake Mungo, New South Wales, Australia) and the act of thinking about producing a locative walking piece that responds to the act of walking through that particularly resonant site.
***
Chris Caines is an interdisciplinary artist who has been working internationally in a variety of digital and electronic media for over twenty five years and his work has been collected by and seen at many festivals and Museums including Australian Centre for the Moving Image, The Queensland Art Gallery, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate UK, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Berlin, Venice and Cannes festivals. This work has been supported by numerous arts grants, commissions and international residencies.
He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Media Arts program at the University of Technology Sydney is the current director of the Centre for Media Arts Innovation.