This project explores how we can create new geographies of the mind by collaboratively exploring our local environments slowly, at a very small scale, and by hand rather than on foot.

Working together, artists Chris Kaczmarek and Deirdre Macleod each recorded, using Whatsapp, a sequence of concurrent haptic walks in which each artist draws attention to a very small part of their surroundings using their hands. The first artist made a very short film and sent it to the second artist via Whatsapp. The second artist chose an element of their surroundings which they felt connects visually to the first artist’s film, and sent their film back to the first artist via Whatsapp. The sequence of films grew as each artist responded to the other’s films.

In contemporary life, we use many digital and mobile technologies such as GPS or Google Maps to navigate and represent the world. These images generated by these technologies are often considered to be ‘truthful’ representations of our environment because they are based on large scale geographical data. In contrast, slow-moving, close-up film-making is regarded as an unreliable representation of reality and, more significantly, futile as we cannot practically navigate the world in such a way.

Our project seeks to challenge ideas about how we can know the world through walking. The process of making and, crucially, sending these short films so that they can be viewed by the other person in a different geographical location enables each artist to create, in their own mind, a hybrid, imaginary place which combines their own memories of the space in which they have been working with partial and selective images of the space in which their artist collaborator is working. We believe that such hybrid geographies of the mind can create new and deep artistic knowledge.