Remote Walking with Technology during COVID-19

This paper examined a series of walking artworks created between March 2020 and May 2021 that employed digital technologies to connect participants across time and space. These artworks were submitted to the #WalkCreate Gallery in 2021 as part of the research project Walking Publics / Walking Arts: walking, wellbeing and community during COVID-19 and ranged from works that used social media to connect remote walkers such as Blake Morris’s British Summer Time walks - which invited participants to walk 15 minutes before sunrise wherever they were and share images on social media, or Sonia Overall’s #DistanceDrift project in which she posted creative walking prompts on Twitter every Sunday since the start of lockdown, to audio walks designed for those isolating such as Laura Fisher’s Going Out, Going In. Through these examples of intermedial works, that exist between very local places and digitally connected online space, this paper explored how technologically enabled walking work decentred practices of walking and performance and how walking artists sought to use technology to mitigate against some of the anxiety and isolation caused by lockdown restrictions.

About Walking Publics/Walking Arts:
Walking Publics/Walking Arts was a COVID-19 Rapid Response project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council exploring the potential of the arts to sustain, encourage and more equitably support walking during and recovering from a pandemic. We are keen to find out how people have experienced walking during COVID-19 and how artists have used walking in their creative practice.
Links: https://walkcreate.org
https://walkcreate.org/walkcreate-gallery