Urban Exploration Walkware

wilfriedhoujebek writes "The Dutch Group Social Fiction has been experimenting with walking on algorithms for some time now. Under the heading ".walk" they are taking the thing one step further by introducing pseudo-software to determine the route of their walks. They explain how this works and how different .walk can be connected together to form a 'pedestrian computer'. You might want to read the postscript first."

Comments

Re:It's funny. Laugh

[tijnbraun]

From the homepage http://www.socialfiction.org/:

Pseudo software as a self generating route description. Is this a joke?
For the half of it: yes, .walk is a joke. For the other half: no, .walk is a serious attempt to find out if walking can be used for more than transportation alone. Because we were already exploring walking around on algorithms, it was a logical step to modify these little programs into something that actually solves problems. Theoretically these individual .walk programs could be connected into a computer. In the "programming .walk for dummies" text it is shown how you can solve quite complex computations by stripping them down to their smallest factor & have a interesting walk at the same time. .walk has however nothing to do with computer programming in any sense, it only mocks them. .walks is not developed by programmers & the .walk examples are written with only a minimal knowledge of both math & simple computer languages like Basic. Everybody should be able to figure out what a script does, but nevertheless people are scared by them, just as they are scared by Justin Timberlake's lips. This is in a sense part of the fun of the .walk project, there is nothing wrong with alienating people a little bit, because they will only love .walk the better for it in the end.
Do you fancy a walk with us?