Latest text I wrote about my project for walklistencreate:

https://walklistencreate.org/2024/01/30/depending-on-how-you-look-at-it/

Place is an organized world of meaning. It is essentially a static concept. If we see the world as process, constantly changing, we should not be able to develop any sense of place.

(Tuan, 1977). 

Walkingwhiledrawing is an ongoing project I started in 2020 whilst my Erasmus Semester at Vilnius Art Academy and in Nida Art Colony (Lithuania). I was interested in how we perceive our surrounding while moving though space, how we remember routes and built up our subjective maps. As drawing is my main tool of artistic practice, I decided to draw my surrounding while passing by and designed a drawing machine, a tool that allows me to draw while walking. Using the drawing machine quickly became a rather performative act of drawing and moving through space and therefore opened different aspects of the project regarding the physical act of walking and drawing at the same time as well as my translation of the moving space into drawing. After translating my walking-drawings in several other media as painting, animation and larger scale drawings I found VR-painting and started to repaint my walks in the 3D space. The translation of a 2D drawing in 3D if copying the original lines and at the same time reconstruct their position in the virtual space is an interesting process as the drawings end up being impossible 3D objects that can only be understood if looking at them from the perspective they were drawn from in the first place. Therefore it is emphasizing the limits of 2D drawing as well as questioning how we perceive our surroundings. My first project "THE INNER LIFE OF MY STAIRCASE" which has been exhibited in the Goethe Institute in Nancy, France in 2021, is the rebuilding of a staircase in VR, which I was drawing when walking upstairs and downstairs and therefore resulted in being represented as two staircase, one for each perspective. 

For my final M.A. project at the FH Bielefeld for design I went back to Nida Art Colony and decided to base the project in the Parnidnis Dune in the natural heritage of the curonian spit in Lithuania. I made nine walks focussing on different aspects of the landscape and tracking my GPS at the same time. With a combining the GPS-Trace and the drawing-documentation I was able to construct the landscape in VR which is representing my subjective perception of the place. The process of combining the drawings and placing them in relation to each other as well as their position in the VR-space that derived from the GPS-trace, brought up other questions regarding space, size, position and perspective in the 3D-space. People are able to experience the dune in real scale with the VR-Glasses and may question the limits of 2D-drawing and the 3D-space as well as find their personal approach to the landscape. Apart from that I built an Installation which contained painting and interacting projections on one side and the full screen projection of animations of walking in the VR-Dune on the other side. That way my work was also accessible if not waring the VR-Glasses and also emphasized parts of my project. 

The whole process is documented in the PDF "walkingwhiledrawing" which can be found further down on the pages as well as my theoretical research on other locative media artists and researchers such as Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre. 

The Project can be found in the oculus animation store if you type in: Parnidis Dune / walkingwhiledrawing.