rural psychogeography//richard long

Looking around for things on rural psychogeography, I found a blog entry on Richard Long (an artist who Barry mentioned in class). It actually didn't talk a whole lot about what has been done in terms of rural psychogeography, but gave a great description of Long's work, which is based around taking an extended walk outside and creating some sort of verbal, sculptural, or photographic work that relates his particular aim and/or response (here for Long's website).

The comments at the end of the blog are interesting, mostly related to how Long has done a couple walks where he drew a line across a map and then followed it. Many said that this is going against the notion of the derive, and I must say that these seem more like mental derives than physical ones, since the route is planned out before-hand. The purpose changes when the route is a regular or pre-determined thing (like my morning walks) because then it is about what you notice along the way. If the same walk is repeated over time the walk becomes about how your relationship to the same place and sequence of experience changes over time, how our minds connect with and beyond their regular environment. This is what I'm interested in--running our hands over and over the same ruts, but they are not the same, they're different because they are changing slowly and because our minds take them in differently.