“The physical world …,” writes Alfred North Whitehead, “is, in some general sense of the term, a deduced concept. Our problem is, in fact to fit the world to our perceptions, and not our perceptions to the world.”11Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature. New York: Prometheus Books, 2004, p. 165.

The issue that Whitehead gestures to here is a basic problematic of modern scientific discourse: that the world is divided between that which we experience with our perceptual organs and the imperceptible causal explanations offered by scientific reasoning. The textbook example of this division contrasts the red glow we see with our eyes as the sun descends past the horizon, and the explanation of this phenomenon offered by science of the scattering of light wavelengths as they pass through molecules and particles in the atmosphere. The gulf opened between a particular experiential perception and the abstract principles of physics obscures the fact that both are based on specific patterns of interaction with the same phenomena; and how, too often, one is taken as fact and the other as mere sensory illusion.

In this group exercise, we take Whitehead’s concept, which he calls the “bifurcation of nature,” as a provocation for thinking about the primacy of our senses in daily patterns of interaction with the environment. We propose an aesthetic practice of walking and sensory stimulation, an engagement with the particulars of our daily environments that fall outside our normal determinate modes of getting from one place to the next. In this, we ask participants to move outside their habitual modes of engaging with space and landscape, as a way to rearrange the customary hierarchies of knowledge and sense.

In his celebrated treatise on the everyday, Michel de Certeau describes walking as a way to engage with the particulars of the urban landscape, a mode he thought of as the polar opposite of the map or the city’s rational plan. According to de Certeau, “The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered.”22Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 3rd revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, p. 97. As any speech act always stands in excess of either the system of language or the specific content of a statement, the wandering practice of the walker opens up the possibility of excess and difference over the proscribed ways of navigating space according to the abstractions of the map or the proscribed functionality of the plan.

Our walk took us out into the hybrid landscape of the Tiergarten, a public park in the middle of Berlin. There, we found potent, organic smells, soft and stinging leaves, paths carved through the beaten track, savory herbs, and opportunistic entanglements of the natural and the manufactured. The discussion that followed was of fantastical maps, urban exploration, fables, experiential knowledge, and new names for familiar things. We discussed the technological affordances of our contemporary urban environments and moving beyond the sensory domain of navigation through a screen. At the same time, we imagined a global network of urban explorers exploiting these ubiquitous devices to other ends, sharing their sensory logs via geocaches, and navigating the urban landscape by one another’s made-up plans.

Steps for the Exercise

1. Go outside, somewhere familiar or strange, or somewhere densely populated or deserted; go in a group or go alone.

2. When you’re in a comfortable place to pause, “warm up” by consciously engaging each of your senses, one after the other, for a few moments.

• Open your eyes and let them wander around your surroundings. What do you see? What draws your gaze: a particular color, shadow, or play of light? A shape or line? A movement? Now let your eyes fall closed.
• Draw your attention to your hearing. What can you hear? Is your environment loud and raucous, or is it quiet? What sounds appear in the background and which punctuate the background noise? How many different sounds can you separate? Where do they come from? How do you know what they are?
• Take a deep breath through your nose. What do you smell? Is it harsh or fragrant? Sweet, sour, or acrid?
• Lick your lips to taste the atmosphere. What can you taste in the air?
• Now feel the ground beneath your feet. Does it feel solid? Is it soft or hard? Smooth or uneven? Can you feel the force of gravity between your body and the Earth?

3. As you continue, let your senses guide you in exploring your surroundings. Be open to touching surfaces, objects, and (within reason) the organisms that surround you. Pause frequently to actively reorient your senses to the environment.

4. Record and keep your field notes, taking specimens, images, or drawings of particularly compelling objects, scenes, and experiences. You may want to map out or draw a diagram of your path.

Suggested Questions for Reflection and Discussion

• By actively tuning your sensory organs, how did you engage differently with your environment? Did you find any resistances, either from the environment or from your own body?
• Can you think of other modes of engagement with the environment (i.e. riding a bike, using a smartphone, riding on public transport) that require specific kinds of sensory awareness or a privileging of one or two senses over others?
• As you explored, did anything familiar become strange? Did anything strange become more familiar?
• Which tools do you habitually rely on to move about your environment (i.e. maps, landmarks, street signs)? How did this walk differ from others?

Suggested reading:

Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven F. Rendall, 3rd revised edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958), online, (accessed 28/08/2016).

Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991.

Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” in Jack Flam (ed.), Robert Smithson: The collected writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A history of walking. New York: Penguin Books, 2001.

Alfred North Whitehead, “Theories of the Bifrucation of Nature,” in The Concept of Nature. New York: Prometheus Books, 2004.

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926.