Pedestrian speech act: filmed landscape explored through stalking.

Abstract

This study proposes that a landscape recorded by video while walking into it, or what I call stalking into it, enables the creation of a more profound self-reflection than a single isolated picture of the same landscape. My stalking, whose primary process is based on Debord’s subject-object model, is derived from several fields including, but not limited to, psychogeographic fiction and psychogeographic research. Stalking is an intensely self-focused way of moving through the landscape while filming it, that draws on the unconscious walking practice of deambulation, and the notion of “the signifying body” in relation to hand-held camera filmmaking, which encourages a kind of sensory and bodily hyperawareness. Based on Elder’s conviction that this signifying body can be reflected in film by catching changes in perception, movement and the body’s location in the moving image, a similar hypothesis is explored through stalking movements reflected in a series of films called Paths. These path films created through stalking are perceived as a kind of “in-between” space, as underexposed videos positioned between my inner space and the outer space of the woodland zone. This research project explores my stalking reflected in these paths as visual autobiographical traces, as pedestrian acts of speech, and as creating a certain experience and form of time defined within the uniquely positioned environment of the woodland zone. Furthermore this study investigates my stalking and filming actions as disrupting pictorial space, and as creating video labyrinths connecting past and present walking experiences within suburban hinterlands, furthering aiming to implicate the viewer through my simultaneous absence and presence in the image.