Julia Nishizaki – Looking Outwards – 06

While not directly involving coding, the project that I chose to look at for this week is Tim Knowles’ Windwalks. Tim Knowles is a British artist based in London, and his project, Windwalks, visualizes a series of walks directed only by the wind using different mechanisms. Each walk is filmed, and then plotted by GPS, with the end product a line drawing of the path the individual took.

I found this project particularly interesting, because it incorporates randomness in the form of the wind. While the wind is biased in the sense that there are trends and currents that the wind follows, this factor combined with the individual’s environment ends up generating a unique and personal piece of art. Not only does this project visualize an activity that we often overlook in our day to day lives, walking, it also reveals the outlines of buildings, cars, and objects in the environment, as individuals, prompted by the direction of the wind, collide with the structures of the city, making them visible in a new light. Thus, Knowles is able to create new, different, and deeper relationships between individuals, their cities, and the wind itself.