Digital Collage

Scenes from a Walk—A digital collage project compiled from one year’s worth of images taken with an phone while walking in East Arlington, Massachusetts, from August 2019-September 2020, collaged and compiled 2019-2022.. Late Summer, Fall, Early Winter, 2019 Numbers 1-100 shown out of 570 images.

Scenes from a Walk documents the daily walks in an eight-to-ten-mile circumference around my home. I walked my dog twice every day. During the pandemic we walked more. We made a familiar circuit in the neighborhood, and certain phenomena always drew me in: shadows on concrete, green light underneath the leaves, puddles reflecting the sky, peeling paint.

Situationist Guy Debord writes of the “dérive,” in which people step out of ordinary life to walk, and “let themselves be drawn by their attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” A dérive, with a meaning similar to the English, “drift,” differs from a regular walk. Performing a dérive involves deliberate opening up to the effects of a place, usually an urban space, by walking through it. Most dérives were group activities, focused on urban psychogeography, and lasted a few hours. In this practice, I made adérive with my dog almost daily. The act of being open, of actively noticing, grew ever larger and overwhelming. When one starts to focus, there is so much to see. “Continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration,” wrote Situationist Ivan Chtcheglov to Debord. The accumulation of images, the documentation, the constant state of permeability to the world, combined with the uncertainty and fear of the time, created a heavy psychological reaction. This dérive lasted for one year, and no more.

The collages are formatted to the proportion of an iphone screen and a window frame, a double square. Each image derives from one day only, with some days having multiple images and some days none at all.

Works

Scenes from a Walk #1-#575 High Quality Digital print 11” x17”

Assorted Archival Digital Prints on Canson Matte Paper 24” x 48”

Assorted Archival Digital Prints on Silk, 24'‘ x 96” and 48” x 96”

Digital Projection: Scenes from a Walk, HD Video, 1924 x 3840, 19:00