Designed to fit the space of our pockets, Walks in Progress is a phone-sized book comprising a series of potential experiences for the walking wanderer. It acts as a small everyday antithesis to digital abundance, offering an analogue phone replacement to take on the go. Following a trace of the radical style left by Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit, it prompts first to leave our phones behind:
Dig a hole.
Bury your phone.
Scatter the ashes of the internet over it.
Cover with dirt.
In an age of digital saturation, the idea of taking our time, slowing down, and living in the moment often appears as a surpassed cliché, a distant utopia. Most of what is regarded as human is inevitably lost to these rapid processes and forgotten mundane spaces.
Developed as a collective inquisition by five artists at the Royal College of Art, WIP is carved out from the urgency to address our research question:
“How do we regain moments of slowness and contemplation in a rapidly moving digital world?”
The question is a branch of a wider inquiry into what exactly we “lose” to the digital world when inhabiting everyday life that must be regained, whether that is spontaneous interactions, mundanity, contemplation, inspiration, or simply being present.
Our prompts were developed based on multiple aimless walks conducted in different regions of London by each one of the creators. The observations gathered allowed us to generate both reflective and creative responses that mark the five-chapter division of the book. The format and layout of the book are designed with reference to a scrolling motion, using a French Fold binding and overlapping images, while the motion of vertically flipping pages nods to a classic flip phone.
More importantly, the book also reserves blank pages at the end for you to continue yourself on your own walks. We have also bound this book using screws, allowing you to add more pages, jumble the order, or take just a few with you to go.
Indeed, what Walks in Progress will look like depends on our personal and sensorial responses to the prompts. A book, a journal, a manual, a game, a map, and more; WIP then can also be a mirror reflecting our aspirations for a less digital and more connected future.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” - Marcel Proust
