Final Project: Typologies of Walking/Not (Digital Paths)

This project began as a plan to document desire paths created by people repeatedly walking through spaces not designed for them. I was interested in how these physical imprints show quiet resistance to planning, and how they reveal preference that cuts across official intention. I started looking in Tucson’s vacant lots, around strip malls, and through residential zones for these signs of movement. But during that process, I became drawn to another kind of trace, the ones left behind not in dirt, but in data. While using Google Street View to scout locations, I started noticing moments where the system broke down or where something didn't align. They felt just as much evidence of people stepping outside the expected path. What followed was the process of collecting these fragments and assembling them into a typology. The project became less about walking itself and more about how movement or silence appears in places that are meant to be neutral and controlled. Each image shows some form of drift or disobedience, whether caused by human behavior, machine failure, or a collision between the two. In their own way, they all break the surface of the system. It’s about paying attention to what slips through what the map doesn’t fully control, what the camera doesn’t quite capture. It’s about the ways people bend space, avoid rules, or exist at the edges of structure without asking for permission. Whether in the dirt or on the screen, these are all desire paths in their own way, signs that someone passed through and left something behind, even if only barely. 

Writing EXTRA (In place of office hours)

 McKenzie Wark presents the concept of low theory as a mode of critique that refrains from the institutional capture of art and philosophy. In the Introduction of the book, low theory is positioned against the grand, hardened structure of high theory and commodified art, where Wark sees as largely recuperated by academic or market forces. Instead, low theory lives and breathes in practices and ideas developed outside of academia and the art world. It is exemplified in the work of the Situationist International, through their engagement with everyday life and refusal of specialization. According to Wark, this type of theory is performative and directly related to critique-in-action rather than limited to the creation of static information. Wark's revival of low theory, in my opinion, is not only legitimate but important, especially for contemporary artists and intellectuals operating in interrelated or oppositional areas. Low theory provides an approach of rediscovering the radical edge of critique at a time when opposition has often been aestheticized and reduced through commodification. This is achieved by rejecting legitimacy through conventional means and integrating itself into experienced, dangerous, and frequently marginal acts. For me, the power of low theory lies not just in its ideas, but in the way it moves sideways, experimentally, and often invisibly. 

This notion of low theory resonates deeply with my project, one about flowers encased in ice, which explores impermanence, transformation, and quiet resistance through natural materials. Like the Situationists, who developed their ideas by drifting through urban spaces and observing the breakdown of everyday structures, my frozen flower sculptures embrace decay and change as essential elements of the work. These pieces were not made to last  they were meant to melt, collapse, and disappear. Their temporality resists traditional expectations of preservation, polish, and permanence in art. Rather than presenting a fixed image or message, the project holds a process watching beauty dissolve, shift, and vanish over time. In this way, my critique of control, consumerism, and environmental fragility emerges not through overt commentary, but through the experience of the work itself. The flowers in ice challenge the idea that meaning must be durable or monumental but display a vulnerability, loss, and transformation can be sites of deep reflection. The act of watching them melt becomes a quiet situation of its own that refuses spectacle, embraces impermanence, and invites a slower, more attentive way of seeing. In doing so, the project reflects a belief that art can exist outside of institutional authority and instead live through its process and presence. 

Finale Proposal

1. Abstract 

This project documents desire paths, unofficial foot trails forged by repeated human movement—in and around Tucson, Arizona. By mapping and photographing such paths at dawn or dusk, I will examine how people resist or circumvent official infrastructure. These trails will be categorized into a visual typology such as shortcuts, avoidance routes, and ghost paths will be complemented with a map and a written artist statement. The work explores walking as a subtle form of resistance and refusal, engaging with themes from The Beach Beneath the Street and tactical media practices that foreground unnoticed forms of spatial agency.

2.Artist Statement

This project grows from my earlier “Walk 2” blog post, in which I documented desire paths within my neighborhood. These unofficial trails intrigued me for what they revealed: people carving their own way through a landscape built for something else. This final project expands on that first encounter, shifting from informal observation to intentional documentation across multiple Tucson sites.
My practice often revolves around spatial mood, routine, and the subtle traces left by human movement, so this project reflects my ongoing interests, even though I generally avoid overt performance. Desire paths are unintentional gestures that are iterative, accumulative, and born from bodily habit or frustration with imposed design. I’m drawing inspiration from The Beach Beneath the Street and its discussion of psychogeography and Situationist dérive. These unsanctioned paths represent a bottom-up détournement of urban design. They’re quiet but meaningful through it’s traces of silent negotiation with the built environment.
This project also builds on the work of artists like Francis Alÿs and NeuroTransmitter, who reframe mundane motion as resistant and poetic. My aim is to reveal living geographies shaped by countless anonymous walkers emphasizing that even small gestures can carve new meaning into public space.

3. Previous work
1.     “Walk 2” Desire Path Blog Post – documented informal shortcuts in my neighborhood
 

2.     Outskirts in dreams – images of Tucson’s liminal zones captured in a way to feel minimal 

3.     Spanish Trail Suites – documented photos of the ignored decaying Spanish Trail Suites 

4.  Detailed Proposal
 
For the final project, I will intentionally document desire paths across Tucson to explore how people create meaning through movement. These paths are found in varied contexts: residential zones, public parks, shopping center edges, and areas adjacent to vacant lots or construction sites. I will visit each location at dawn or sundown, taking still photographs, my own body will not appear. Instead, the focus will be on the path’s form, materiality, and immediate context (pavement, dirt, grass, edging, barriers, fences). The photos aim to reveal how these paths diverge from or intersect official walkways; close-ups will highlight textures and traces of repeated use.
The photos will be arranged into a typology grid. Categories include:
•       Shortcut: Paths that significantly reduce distance
•       Avoidance: Trails that bypass fences or barriers
•       Ghost Path: Now-blocked trails that remain visible
 
I will create a map, marking each site with notes on its name, type, and time of visit.
 
The final presentation includes:
•       Photographic typology grid
•       Annotated site map
•       Written artist statement exploring how desire paths embody spatial resistance and psychogeography.
 
This project ties directly to key course themes: walking/not walking, spatial control, and resistance. Desire paths represent silent refusals of people choosing their own routes, subtly disrupting official plans. The “Ghost Paths” especially resonate with the city’s temporal dimension: points of erasure and memory. As The Beach Beneath the Street suggests, psychogeography involves emotional and counter-normative encounters with space. Desire paths are the city’s unplanned subtitles that allow small eruptions of agency within a controlled design. I will also reference tactical media strategies, where small gestures (like leaving a hand-written sign or small installation) expose or challenge dominant systems. Though there’s no explicit intervention, the act of documenting becomes an archival intervention—making visible what often goes unseen. This is a low-key but politically resonant take on performance, less about the presence of a visible self but more about the testimony of collective movement. By presenting these paths, I animate traces of negotiation, memory, and refusal embedded in Tucson’s everyday landscape.

5. Visual Research & Sketches
 
Concepts/Ideas
•       Photo A: Existing desire path in a nearby lot
•       Photo B: Liminal zone bordering a park, with clear foot trail
•       Sketch C: Rough typology grid layout
•       Sketch D: Hand-drawn map concept with path annotations
6.  Equipment, Timeline & Budget
Equipment
•       Digital camera or smartphone
•       Notebook or phone for field notes
•       Access to Google Maps and editing software
 
Timeline
•       Days 1–2: Scout and finalize sites
•       Days 3–4: Photograph sites at dawn/sundown
•       Day 5: Select and organize images; draft typology grid and map
•       Day 6: Write artist statement; finalize layout
•       Day 7: Assemble content and submit
 
Budget
•       Travel: Walkable and drivable within Tucson
•       Materials: None except for the use of existing personal equipment such as FUJIFILM XT-4, ND filters, and selection of lenses

Walk 6: With(in) Daily Life

The other day I was in Los Angeles, and I made it a rule for myself to hold eye contact with everyone I interacted with. I kept thinking it would wear off after the first few interactions, but the discomfort kept renewing itself in weird, subtle ways.

The day itself was packed. My girlfriend and I started at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. It’ was a place that I really excited to go. But even there, in an environment that already encourages observation, the eye contact thing made everything feel off. In one of the exhibit rooms, I made eye contact with a museum employee standing by a glass case. Normally I’d give a polite nod and move on. Instead, I held the look. Just for a second or two longer than normal. She looked back, then dropped her gaze, then looked back again as if checking to see if I had a question. I didn’t. I just nodded and moved on. It felt like I’d broken some kind of invisible rhythm. It was really uncomfortable. In a city where everyone’s half-looking past each other, it felt like I was holding up a mirror, even though I wasn’t saying anything out of the ordinary.

The real test came that night at The Weeknd’s concert. There were people everywhere. While we were in line for merch, I made eye contact with a couple behind us, one of them immediately looked away like they weren’t sure what I wanted. Inside the so-fi stadium, was even more complicated, I had never been there before so I was getting to adjusted to that as well. I tried holding eye contact with strangers we passed but it got awkward fast. One girl looked at me with the look as if we knew each other like, and a guy just stared back blankly until I had to look away. But the strangest moment was when I turned to look at my girlfriend. We’d already been talking, but holding eye contact for just a second longer made even that feel oddly charged as if I was seeing her in the middle of chaos, fully present for a moment we’d normally drift through. There’s something about concerts though I thought was interesting for this assignment, everyone is packed together, sharing sound and space but no one really wants to look at each other. We all want to feel connected, just not seen.

By the time The Weeknd came on, I was ready to disappear into the music and let the performance go. Five hours of eye contact sounds easy, but it messed with my head. It’s like I was asking people to be present with me for just a beat longer than they wanted. And you’d be surprised how resistant people are to that especially in a place like L.A., where looking past people is just part of the pace.

After the concert, walking back to the hotel, I looked at the reflection of my own face in a store window and realized I’d been more “on” all day than I expected. Not in a performance sense, but in a hyper-aware, ultra-present way. That little decision to hold eye contact had shifted my whole experience of the day. Nothing huge happened. But everything felt a little bit off. And maybe that’s the point.

Writing 3: Witnessing Each Other

Jennifer Whitney’s account of the Infernal Noise Brigade pushes beyond the documentation of a protest tactic and into the realm of aesthetic theory through action. The band’s deployment of sonic disorientation wasn’t just support for protest logistics it was an attack on the passive. INB was calculated and performative, aimed towards rupture. Their method embodies a critique of traditional activism’s reliance on rational appeals within a public sphere. Rather than address power through speech, INB bypasses it with affect. What they offer is not just music, but a reconfiguration of the political field itself: transforming participants into performers and public space into a temporary zone. While INB claims to decentralize leadership and empower the crowd, their rigorous coordination and tactical precision also suggest a tension between radical spontaneity and elite organization. Can a tightly rehearsed band still claim to dissolve the spectacle, or are they simply creating a more seductive one?

This tension becomes sharper when read alongside Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Projections. Like INB, Wodiczko intervenes in public space to disrupt normalized narratives but through radically different means. His large-scale architectural projections of marginalized voices do not invite chaos but rather they compel quiet, even uneasy attention. Where INB mobilizes collective noise, Wodiczko demands a collective stillness yet both confront the viewer with stories that dominant systems aim to suppress. The comparison reveals an important assumption underlying both practices that aesthetic experience can be politically transformative when it reorganizes our relationship to space, presence, and audience. INB removes the line between performer and observer through sonic immersion. Wodiczko, by contrast, confronts viewers with voices they cannot ignore, creating a temporary collapse between monument and memory. What both artists reveal is that effective political art must not simply convey a message, but can alter the mode of reception itself. Neither artist tries to persuade through argument; both seem to seek towards recondition perception. And in that reconditioning emerges a space where scripted roles dissolve, and the potential for radical imagination begins.

Walk 5: I Walk in Your Name

My girlfriend and I were in Los Angeles for a few days. But in the middle of our trip, I knew I had this assignment to do and I thought it was a nice opportunity to use Los Angeles to walk in someone else’s name, for a cause outside myself. 

I asked my mom what kind of walk I should do. She didn’t hesitate to tell me, “Take the bus. Take several buses. That’s what I used to do when I couldn’t afford a car. That’s the walk I want you to take—for every woman who never got to travel any other way.” And just like that, our transit from Union Station to the hotel became the assignment.

We traveled from Union Station in downtown L.A. to Trend Hotel near LAX using public buses. It was long, slow, and required three different transfers and a final walk along wide, exhaust-heavy roads. 

We were technically on vacation. We could’ve just called a Uber (even though it was like 4PM and it would of cost $80!) and been at the hotel in 30 minutes. But instead, we did it her way. We sat, stood, waited, and transferred.

What surprised me was how different the city felt when seen through this slower, more vulnerable lens. 

My girlfriend who grew up taking the public bus every day moved with a calmness I didn’t have. She knew how it works, how far to walk for the next stop, how to time the rhythm. I realized how much I’d taken for granted in my life from parents who picked me up, AC cars, & quiet rides.

For me, it was eye-opening. For her, it was just how it’s always been.

It was just a bus ride during vacation. But under the surface, it carried so much more. It was a ride in my mother’s name. A moment of learning with my girlfriend beside me, someone who’s lived this kind of movement her whole life. I arrived at the hotel physically tired, but mentally awake. That, I think, was the point.

Project 1: Ephemeral, Site and Social Space

Held Briefly is an ephemeral sculpture made by freezing dead flowers and melted candle wax into a block of ice, then placing it on artificial grass under the sun. In less than an hour, the piece transformed completely. The ice melted quickly in the Arizona heat, the wax re-solidified into soft shapes, and the dead flowers were almost more alive in appearance. What was meant to preserve began to shift, soften, and dissolve.

The work reflects on the illusion of preservation. The idea that we can pause decay, hold beauty still, or suspend meaning in time. As the sculpture melted, it revealed that the act of freezing wasn't a way to stop time, but to briefly frame its passing. In this disappearance, the piece offers impermanence not as erasure, but as quiet transformation.