Parisa Eslambolchilar edited Embodied Walking.tex  over 9 years ago

Commit id: 0b4b96c039e36cdfea04f85862187875fe49f5d5

deletions | additions      

       

William Powers and Andy Clarks in building perceptive technological control systems, argued that engagament with context provides an active resource, and not just a starting point, for processes of movement, memory, and other applications of executive nature attention [Ambient Commons Ref]. To use the environment as an active resource means that skills can neither be acquired nor applied nor explained without it. Activity theory is attached to the physical tools and situated tasks that interest us also known as intrinsic structure. Intrinsic means within the essential nature of something, for example, passage is intrinsic to a door.   McCullough [Ambient Commons Ref] defines embodiment Walking creates a relationship between a walker and a place. This relationship is a complex multiple-layer of the material organisation and shape of the landscape, its symbolic meaning, and the ongoing sensual percepton and experience of moving through space. Walking not only offers distinctive forms of embodied practices also (re)produces and (re)interprets space and place. Moreover, walker's body delineates particular kinds of landscape  as suitable for particular kinds of walking [REF Tim Edensor].   The `body-in-becoming' of the walker, as opposed to the `body-in-being' of the farmer, is subject to an often intense, reflexive monitoring about the way in which it moves through, senses and apprehends nature - there are an abundance of essays, fiction and non-ficiton books, poetry. Walking becomes bound up with notions of individuality and self-development, with a retreat from the city and the urban self, and towards a freeing of the bidy, a rediscovery of childish sensation, and aesthetic and moral regeneration. In other words, being the world, informs through the intrinsic structure of situations, that is, with and without mediation. The mediation usually appears in the embodied contexts of everyday life, where it assumes the form, or becomes a feature, of familiar objects such as cars, pavements, shops, ....  As the space of movement grows, the space for mental and physical wandering grows too [Tim Edenso REF].   Walking provides more embodiment, more opportunity for effortless fascination, and better engagement than sitting [REF Ambient Common]. Csordas described the body in the city as `primarily a performing self of appearances, display and impression management'. While walking in the countryside however, 'you have no dignity to support and the dress-coat of conventional life has dropped into oblivion' [Mitchell REF 1978]. City walker feels that he or she is under surveilance by other passerbys and subconsciosly occupied in conforming himself to the world. The urban appearance are accompained by those producing sensual overload. A rural walker feels the sensation at a slower rhythm.   The reflexive contruction of walking in the rural realm,