Chair of the Department of Art and Design, Christopher Kaczmarek, presents on “The Role of Haptic Walking” at an international conference

This past summer, Christopher Kaczmarek presented at a conference in Greece called, “The Role of Haptic Walking in Creating Geographies of the Mind.” Drawing from his own research and artistic projects, he spoke about this project and how this innovative approach can transform the way we perceive, interact with our environment, and create new geographies of the mind.

This project explores how people 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.

Chris Kaczmarek works together with artist Deirdre Macleod, who both recorded 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. The second artist chose an element of their surroundings which they felt connected visually to the first artist’s film, sending their film back to the first artist. The sequence of films will grow as each artist responds to the other’s films.

Their 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. They believe that such hybrid geographies of the mind can create new and deep artistic knowledge.

Chris Kaczmarek collaborates with Deirdre Macleod who has a longstanding interest in how cities work and how those who live in cities experience them. Her current research explores how gesture-based performance might help tell the story of cities. She starts from the premise that movement-based performance is a form of inquiry which can help make sense of lived experience and create new forms of knowledge.

To find out more information about Chris and his work, please visit his website,
https://www.chriskaczmarek.com.