The Walk Series

The Walk Series

Peter d'Agostino
1973-74, 61:16 min, b&w, sound

Description

In this early, performance-based work, d'Agostino experiments with perceptions of landscape, time and point of view. The Walk Series documents three different "walks" (on a roof, a fence and a beach) that the artist took in the San Francisco area, while recording with a hand-held camera. These excursions — recorded in real-time and unedited — map the parameters of the artist's environment, as d'Agostino uses video to redefine the landscape in his own image.

Referring to these and his subsequent walks as video "documentation/performances," d'Agostino's overall project evolved into video/web
works during the 1990s and mobile/ locative
media installations in the 2000s.
 His World-Wide-Walks explore elements of natural,
cultural & virtual identities: mixed realities of walking through physical environments
and virtually surfing the web. They have now been performed on five continents over the past four decades.

"The Walk Series belongs to the pioneering works of conceptual video of the early 1970s, itself an early hybrid of minimal, body, and conceptual art. At first glance, the three videos comprising The Walk Series appear quite simple. But they unfold with ever-increasing complexity over time, such that by a close examination, viewers may grasp both the imbricated content of d'Agostino's World-Wide-Walks and his central place in the history of post-studio conceptual video and multimedia."- Kristine Stiles

The Walk Series video installation was the first exhibition at San Francisco's 80 Langton Street gallery in 1975. The restored digital videos were recently included in State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970, co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum / Pacific Film Archive in 2011. A 2012-14 nationally touring exhibition organized by Independent Curators International (ICI) was accompanied by a catalogue published by the University of California Press.