Wayfaring: place and painting in the tropical far north

Walking and painting are investigated in this research to establish a connection with the previously unfamiliar environment of tropical Far North Queensland. This practice-led research project reveals how walking mindfully in nature, and embodied bodily knowledge, can inform works of art. The research is influenced by anthropologist Tim Ingold's (2011) notion that life is a process of wayfaring where we experience the world in terms of movement along a meshwork of trails. Ingold's writing instigated a fundamental shift in my understanding of place. At the beginning of the project I imagined place as a contained or fixed location, however I came to understand place as a sensuous internal/external experience developed over time and along continuous pathways. As a result of engaging with the phenomenology of walking in the natural tropical terrain, I developed a methodology of wayfaring-painting. This new mode of imaginative wayfaring onto the canvas became both a specific mode of creative practice and a means for expressing a wayfaring philosophy in material form on individual canvases and in also the composition and arrangement of the final Wayfaring exhibition. This approach to place-making offers a vision of the tropical landscape that emphasises the significance of the lived experience of contemporary life in the Far North. A central question guides this practice-led research project: How can a body of contemporary visual art evoke the experience of wayfaring in the tropical Far North? Progressive findings are shown in staging exhibitions, culminating in Wayfaring, in which the works of art evoke my phenomenological experience of walking on forest paths and stretches of beach in the Far North. These are the places I've come to know as 'home'. Viewers are invited to take their own wandering journey through the abstracted painted landscapes, which aim to evoke new understandings of the tropical environment and, perhaps, illuminate their own experiences of wayfaring in the world. Wayfaring-painting involves manifesting this sensuous contact in painting. This combination led to new imaginative terrains, revealing deeper understandings of place, self and belonging

Walking and well-being: landscape, affect, rhythm

This thesis is an ethnographic exploration of group walking practices in the Hampshire countryside, investigating the embodied, affective and social practice of the shared walk and its relation to the individual pursuit of wellness. Responding to the growing literature in qualitative health geography using ‘therapeutic landscape’ as a conceptual framework, group walking practices are approached in this thesis from a perspective of more-than-representational theories of social practice that aims to address group dynamics and the role of social relations for the establishment of therapeutic spaces. While also drawing attention to the embodied and affective nature of experience, this thesis opens a discussion between health geography and cultural geographies on the issues of the body, mobility and collective experience. Further, the thesis aims to place the study findings within the wider cultural phenomena of ‘walking for health’ through an exploration of practices of assemblage. Deleuzian assemblage theory, both as a pragmatic analytical tool and an ontological position, offers a new approach to thinking health and place relationally, arguing for a distribution of agencies and providing a framework for tracing their emergent effects across complex networks.The thesis finds its empirical focus in ethnographic fieldwork with five walking groups as well as individual mobile interviews. The findings discussed in the thesis firstly pertain to the significance of social relations for well-being, exploring the kinds of socialities that are produced while walking together, and arguing that the shared walk has the potential to establish a place-specific social aesthetic that can be experienced as restorative. Secondly, the rural walkscape as a therapeutic landscape is analysed as a specific outcome of place-based rhythms, implicated in the performativity and mobility of the body in the creation of a restorative place/practice. It is found that the shared walk is characterised by specific rhythmic qualities and that walking as a health practice is subject to a range of norms, regulations and performative styles.The findings and conceptual development in this thesis contribute to an interrogation of the complex processes through which therapeutic landscapes are established, practiced and experienced. The thesis also contributes to more-than representational geographies of embodiment, affect and landscape, which are intimately tied up in the production and performance of both wellness and place

Pedestrians in two middle-income island countries - what happens when traffic grows?

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: In growing cities in middle-income countries, walking is still an important mode of transport but pedestrians are not catered for as well as car users, who can use new and enlarged roads. This makes walking more dangerous and less pleasant. It may also reduce the use of streets as social spaces (a common activity in warm climates). We analyze these aspects in the capitals of two islands countries: Havana (Cuba) and Praia (Cabo Verde). OBJECTIVES: How are walking and street activities affected by the growing traffic volumes and speeds in the two cities? How do residents perceive the current situation and adjust their walking behavior? METHODS: A mixed-methods approach. In Havana we used: 1) participatory mapping to develop a new road classification based on movement and ‘place’ (an often-forgotten dimension, encompassing waiting for buses, strolling, relaxing, and socializing); 2) community street audits, where participants walked along a busy street and rated the walking environment. In Praia, we used: 1) GIS mapping of walking conditions by neighborhood; 2) workshops where participants drew perceptual maps of their neighborhood and discussed factors affecting walking and how roads interfere with knowledge and experience of walking on different neighborhoods. RESULTS: In Havana, the new road classification revealed that most areas with high ‘place’ importance also have high movement importance. However, infrastructure in those areas caters mostly for vehicles, not pedestrians. The audits pinpointed several problems related to crossing the road, and the respite from traffic offered by street colonnades. In Praia, GIS mapping showed spatial inequalities in exposure to busy roads and other aspects of the walking environment. The perceptual maps confirmed that busy roads limit access to places and people on the other side, creating “blank spaces” of unknown areas on the other side. CONCLUSIONS: Common results arose from the researches in the two countries: a situation where growing traffic volumes and speeds are changing the perceptions of public space. Streets (used by people and slow-moving vehicles) are becoming roads (where motorized traffic is dominant and walking becomes dangerous). While new and improved roads increase accessibility, boosting employment and income, they also decrease safety and impede social activities IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE AND POLICY: Traffic calming and crossing facilities can decrease risk for pedestrians. But this will reduce traffic speeds in areas that are already congested, so measures to improve public transport and tame the growth of car use are crucial. The methods used in this research provide useful information for governments, using minimal data but rich knowledge from the communities

The Small Law Library and the Librarian

Preporsition for bachelor thesis project, working from the inside and out. Emphasising spatial quality and experience, More or less ignoring form and program. I’ve had issues with these aspects in earlier project, the form or the program takes alot of place in the project. I haven’t tried this approach before, it’s an attractive thought to allow the project take a form of it’s own, enclosing those spaces i create. The initial concept was to place the pools on the ground (not digging them into the ground) making them volumes that divide and define spaces. Also shifting the interaction between those in the water and those walking alongside the edges. The ceiling should mirror the spaces created by the pool. sinking down over some areas and opening up above others. My process is usually exploratory, I find something i can’t undestand or something where i can’t image the outcome. I play with this until patterns emerge or i feel i can control it. In that stage the inspiration vains. It’s magical to experiencing new things and constantly learning. When i come to that state the project tends to generate itself. During this thesis project I want to define my own process. I want to put it into words in order to understand it myself, but also in order to communicate it to others. Map it all out and hopefully find what makes a project selfgenerating. Filter everything and find the essence of what i’ve learned from my education.

From Bipedal Walking to Quadrupedal Locomotion: Full-Body Dynamics Decomposition for Rapid Gait Generation

This paper systematically decomposes a quadrupedal robot into bipeds to rapidly generate walking gaits and then recomposes these gaits to obtain quadrupedal locomotion. We begin by decomposing the full-order, nonlinear and hybrid dynamics of a three-dimensional quadrupedal robot, including its continuous and discrete dynamics, into two bipedal systems that are subject to external forces. Using the hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) framework, gaits for these bipedal robots can be rapidly generated (on the order of seconds) along with corresponding controllers. The decomposition is achieved in such a way that the bipedal walking gaits and controllers can be composed to yield dynamic walking gaits for the original quadrupedal robot — the result is the rapid generation of dynamic quadruped gaits utilizing the full-order dynamics. This methodology is demonstrated through the rapid generation (3.96 seconds on average) of four stepping-in-place gaits and one diagonally symmetric ambling gait at 0.35 m/s on a quadrupedal robot — the Vision 60, with 36 state variables and 12 control inputs — both in simulation and through outdoor experiments. This suggested a new approach for fast quadrupedal trajectory planning using full-body dynamics, without the need for empirical model simplification, wherein methods from dynamic bipedal walking can be directly applied to quadrupeds

From Bipedal Walking to Quadrupedal Locomotion: Full-Body Dynamics Decomposition for Rapid Gait Generation

This paper systematically decomposes a quadrupedal robot into bipeds to rapidly generate walking gaits and then recomposes these gaits to obtain quadrupedal locomotion. We begin by decomposing the full-order, nonlinear and hybrid dynamics of a three-dimensional quadrupedal robot, including its continuous and discrete dynamics, into two bipedal systems that are subject to external forces. Using the hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) framework, gaits for these bipedal robots can be rapidly generated (on the order of seconds) along with corresponding controllers. The decomposition is achieved in such a way that the bipedal walking gaits and controllers can be composed to yield dynamic walking gaits for the original quadrupedal robot — the result is the rapid generation of dynamic quadruped gaits utilizing the full-order dynamics. This methodology is demonstrated through the rapid generation (3.96 seconds on average) of four stepping-in-place gaits and one diagonally symmetric ambling gait at 0.35 m/s on a quadrupedal robot — the Vision 60, with 36 state variables and 12 control inputs — both in simulation and through outdoor experiments. This suggested a new approach for fast quadrupedal trajectory planning using full-body dynamics, without the need for empirical model simplification, wherein methods from dynamic bipedal walking can be directly applied to quadrupeds

Reading the City, Walking the Book: Mapping Sydney's Fictional Topographies.

This thesis locates itself on the double ground of Sydney’s fictional and material topographies. My purpose is to read and write the city’s spatio-temporal dimensions through four novels: Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947), Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970) and David Ireland’s City of Women (1981). Deploying a hybrid methodology informed by critical and creative approaches to the city in literature and modernity, the thesis investigates the manifold ways in which the novels draw on Sydney’s topographies to shape and structure their narratives spatially, not only in an abstract and symbolic sense but through the materiality of urban places. Each novel I argue, offers new perspectives on the relationships between text, place and writer. My approach and methodologies draw on J. Hillis Miller’s work on literary topographies, particularly novelistic creations of figurative maps. This textual approach is complemented by Walter Benjamin’s conceptualisation of the modern city as a landscape to be read critically with a ‘topographical consciousness’ which I interpret as a set of modes for reading the city as text and the text as city. Intertwined with these literary and material approaches is an ‘on the ground’ methodology for ‘walking the book’. Influenced by Benjamin’s ‘art of straying’, the Surrealists and the Situationists, I reconceptualise the dérive or urban drift as a critical and creative practice for literally and figuratively walking fictional and material Sydney. Through reading the city and walking the book I conclude, familiar urban spaces are imaginatively and critically opened up as past, present and future, the fictional and the material, collide and re-assemble into new configurations: alternative cartographies

Falling Into Action

Kent Hoffman explores human movement, his own mobility, and how it influences the way he moves on land. This personal essay, told through the lens of disability and accessibility, outlines his experience of living with Becker muscular dystrophy. Hoffman\u27s approach to walking and mobility is heavily influenced by a fear of falling. As his mobility is changing, he\u27s adapting and seeking out new ways to move on land. Different modes of mobility determine the way we experience personal movement, but accessibility determines who is welcome in spaces in the first place. Accessibility in the form of providing equal access is therefore a primary consideration when we consider our human right to move on land