Brad Sekedat

Project Proposal: Landscape, Movement and Interaction

At the heart of the proposed research project is the multifaceted relationship between people and things. Whereas it is quite common for scholars to focus on the individual things, or collections of things in understanding what it is to be human, this project will take a slightly different, and broader, bent. The landscape, it will be argued, is a critical component in how things are in the world. Landscapes provide context, but always change. They facilitate interaction between disparate things, including material culture and environmental process, people and animals, people and buildings, roads and animals, discarded things and structures, and on and on. In a sense, landscape is a medium for complex networks of interaction, and movement through landscapes engages participants in a variety of these interactions.

The research proposed here will explore these various interactions. In order to emphasize movement through the landscape as the mechanism according to which new and complex interactions occur, I will focus on a well-established path: the East Bay Path running along the Narragansett Bay between Providence, RI and Bristol, RI. The path is the result of a “rails to trails” effort that turned an unused section of railway into a naturalized bike path. A one mile section of the path, beginning at India Point Park on Providence’s East Side, will be walked, biked and ran to provide different modes of interaction with the path. The path itself facilitates movement through a fairly large portion of Rhode Island, bringing participants into contact with an array of different things, with durable temporal relations. Research will attempt to document as many interactions along this path as possible. The project will utilize several methods of documentation, including photography, video recording, sound recording, copious note-taking, and drawing. The final product will take the form of an interactive wiki, through which participants can engage with portions of the landscape of Rhode Island through text, images, and sound, facilitating, in the process, a new, media based interaction with this landscape.

A preliminary list of things to be documented:

· Remnants or traces of the old railroad

· Path markers along the one mile stretch

· The path itself

· Bridges

· Sound recordings of people using the path

· Fencing along the path

· Buildings along the course of the path

· Refuse

Posted at Dec 03/2007 03:45PM:
chris witmore: Hey Brad. Just some other potentials: how does the trail circulate (various media, including signs, maps, website, events, competitions, etc)? What other features, infrastructures, things, etc. are impacted by it (parking lots, roads, relic property lines, walls, communication lines, bridges, ancillary rail lines, cross trails, crossing points . . .)?