Walk Cycles

This is a film that examines how walking becomes a site of performance, suspicion, and survival under drone surveillance.

2024, 2:37 min.

Walk Cycles stages a series of looped “walk cycles,” borrowing the
animation term for the minimal sequence of frames needed to
simulate continuous movement. The loop becomes a metaphor for
the burden placed on civilians under mililtary occupation to rehearse
legible, “non-threatening” behavior in the seconds before a drone
operator decides whether they live or die. Each cycle lasts no more
than twenty seconds, mirroring the narrow temporal window in
which such judgments are made.

A figure haunts the work: eerily similar to the bandaged man from
the 1933 film The Invisible Man, who wraps himself in prosthetics
to become recognizable as a human. He embodies a desperate
need for visibility, constructing a body to secure social legibility.
Walk Cycles invokes this characteristic not as a literal reference to
the Invisible Man but as a symbol of the coerced self-presentation
demanded under persistent surveillance.

As the figure’s own gait begins to falter, the gesture exposes how
the pressure to “appear civilian” erodes selfhood. Through repeated
walks, Walk Cycles asks whether recognition can ever guarantee
humanity—or whether the performance of legibility only reinforces
the gaze that denies it.

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Week 1
Thurs, Aug 28
Seminar, EDG36 204

Texts

Shawn Michelle Smith, “The Space Between: Eadweard Muybridge’s Motion Studies” in At the Edge of Sight: Photography and the Unseen
Darby English, “The Aesthetics of Dispossession: William Pope.L’s Performance Interventions” in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Excerpt: pp. 260-270)

Screening

Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (Thom Andersen, 1975, 60 min)
The Great White Way: 22 miles, 9 years, 1 street (Pope.L, 2001 - 2009, Parts 1&2: 9 min)