Walking as Medium/Media/Mediation

Walking as Medium
Walking is not a solid medium. It is a temporal and ephemeral medium. Tracks may remain, but not the act of walking itself which disappears in the process of happening.
Walking as Media The term media is not simply the plural of medium. It actually represents a passage beyond the possibility of mediums per se. It is not concerned with an intimate, focused engagement with some present material space, but rather a disturbing sense of dislocation – an endless relay of distancing and delays, a cacophony that refuses to take any kind of adequate coherent shape. The media are particularly associated with the conditions of modern communication systems and particularly also with their technological aspect (a distancing from human intimacy). Walking does not engage, in this sense, strongly with the notion of media. If anything, it represents a field of activity that is more humanly focused. It sets up rhythms of experience that to some extent run contrary to the rhythms of networked, technically mediated experience (even if the latter are often modeled on aspects of walking, running, etc.)
Walking as Mediation This is to think of mediality in its most general sense – as a form of negotiation, as an active and primary process that affects any aspect of experience and being. In this sense, of course, walking serves as vital means of mediating our relationship to the natural and social world.

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