ELENA AFIRMATIVA
Project awarded a runner-up (accésit) in the CreaMurcia 2013 competition, Visual Arts category.
The act of moving step by step can take on different meanings depending, for example, on the reasons for doing it, the chosen environment, and the degree of chance or decision exercised by the walker over the itinerary. There is a vast range of artistic practices around walking: from conceiving the walk in nature as a search for the wild, for a spirit lost to social forms and conventions (as H. Thoreau argues, and as some Land Art artists practice), to the flâneurs’ strolls against the new urban rhythms of modern Paris, or the dérives of the Situationist International. In contrast to these physical walks that connect the walker to their surroundings are those artists who wander mentally and privately without engaging in bodily movement. While we consider the human body’s physical capacities—through which the legs make walking possible—to be of great importance (as Thoreau says, 2001, p. 7: “As if the legs had been made to sit and not to walk”), it is worth noting that the mind also offers other possibilities for displacement which, when faced with the physical inability to walk or the impossibility of obtaining satisfactory experiences, can offer us alternative paths. Today, one of the most democratized tools that also exempts the body from physical–spatial movement, and that removes distances between users—or between users and information—is the Internet. Walking through the Internet—also called browsing or surfing—implies a mental displacement through different virtual spaces. This medium and new technologies uphold immediacy: the here and now. However, that optimization of time seems to fade when we connect to this immense database. We get lost in it, linking documents without stopping and without noticing how time passes. While, when we browse the web, we are not necessarily seeking that slowed rhythm of rebellion championed by numerous artists—being able, as Pilar Rubio Remiro writes, to “accommodate the movement of the body to the demands of the spirit” (2011, pp. 15–17)—it is true that the Internet fosters a new version of flânerie, in which one also strolls without a predetermined destination, moving through links that sometimes take us to unforeseeable places. The piece titled Would you like to go for a walk with me? reflects on users’ movements through information prorated within the specific hypertextual architecture of the medium—an architecture that extends to many of its tools and services, as evidenced, for example, by blogs, wikis, and social networks. The work is made accessible to users through a Facebook profile whose features have been leveraged to generate a wide variability of “walks” through hypermedia information (image, text, and video) designed for this experience. That information, in turn, addresses the practice of digital strolling through the databases of the Web itself. It is, therefore, a work situated within Facebook that is experienced through the displacements the user makes across the profile’s information—whose only plot is the hypertextual displacement itself—and in which, because it is a social network, the user can add, share, and modify content. In addition, an initiative has been launched consisting of weekly visits to the profiles of the friends of Would you like to go for a walk with me?, capturing screenshots and creating an intervention/collage that we publish in the album “Paseando por vosotros” (Walking through you).













