GPS Drawing

For our GPS drawing, we decided not to travel in any straight lines. Every time we came across an intersection, whether it be two streets or a street and an alley, etc. we took turns deciding whether to turn left or right. It was interesting to navigate the city in this way - we noticed a lot of buildings and backstreets that would otherwise go unnoticed on our usual routes. Funny thing was, as soon as we felt like we were getting somewhere entirely new and unfamiliar, a wrong turn onto the freeway put us right back where we started.

Shannon Wunderlich: Doors Open Milwaukee

For the Doors Open Milwaukee experience, Sam, Christian, Jessi and I decided that we needed to get to the top of the U.S. Bank building. Though Milwaukee is technically a "major" U.S. city, there's not a lot of opportunity for your average Joe to spend time on a double-digit floor of a skyscraper and we wanted to capitalize on the chance to view our city from its peak atop the tallest building around.

First and foremost, I was surprised at the amount of people in attendance. Sometimes I think I'm a little naive when it comes to wrapping my brain around just how many people can inhabit a certain square mileage - I guess I just didn't think there would be much of a turnout. But, I thought wrong.

Even before we reached the building, I'd heard that there was some sort of wait, which I found hard to believe. Upon our arrival, we were met with a steady flow of humans entering and exiting the building, which I still didn't quite buy. Only when we found ourselves at a standstill at the very back of a long line to the elevators was I able to understand just how many of my fellow citizens were in attendance.

After a 30ish minute wait, we finally reached the elevator that would bring us up to the observation deck.

Once the elevator doors opened, we were met by this room full of pipes, which I thought was really cool. It was sort of like being in the underbelly of the U.S. Bank building - you know, if underbellies were suspended hundreds of feet in the air and on top of everything else. It was especially interesting when compared with the clean cut marble and glass surroundings of the floor we'd just left.

The deck was packed with still more people, everyone clambering over one another to get a good look. I think the main thing I walked away with from this experience was a sort of reverence for the scale of human presence in this city. The bird's eye perspective of the city that allowed for such an expansive view sort of drove home the idea of the space that I and so many other people move through on a daily basis, that we claim as our own when addressing postcards. I think it's easy to get lost in the cityscape, to lose focus on just how much space is used on so many different planes. It was especially funny to see MIAD from way up there - this building that encompasses such a large part of my life getting lost in the labyrinth of surrounding structures.

Shannon Wunderlich: Micro/Macro

So, I was the weirdo that decided to make one of my three walks without any shoes on.

Having decided to trek barefoot, my experience was a much more tactile one, one that forced me to confront the state of the ground that I walked on. Instead of allowing my eyes to glaze over the smaller details that comprised my environment, my feet called their attention down to the ground to reckon with the filthy state of our streets. I specifically mentioned the overwhelming presence of cigarette butts littered literally everywhere I looked and stepped. And so, for my intervention, I chose to do something with them.

Almost half of my route was comprised of alleyways, in which I stumbled across a few funny little break area benches, like this one. It seemed that the key element of appeal for these back alley getaways was the fact that you could sit down and have a smoke. Actually, that seemed to be the entire reason for these 'spaces' being brought about. Again, cigarettes affect the ways in which our space is utilized.

It's weird, right? How much is dictated by this fix that has become so engrained in our culture. It's also weird to me how acceptable it is to just throw your butts on the ground, even when there's a designated receptacle within arms reach. And it's not just weird, it's kind of annoying, right? I mean, we never really think about them all because we're so removed from our environments via cars and shoes and such, but it's actually a pretty gross thing to have assimilated into normalcy.

I sat down on one of these break area benches and looked around me.

Within the few feet surrounding the bench, my eyes were met with a considerable amount of (cigarette) butts strewn across the ground. I looked to my right and noticed the receptacle within arms reach. Dumb. You don't even have to get up to throw away your cigarette.

So, the spiteful bratty part of me wanted to fire back.

I collected every (cigarette) butt within my seated line of vision and piled them up on the bench.

Here's hoping that the next time Jimmy comes out back for a smoke break, he's confronted with the filth he's helped amass and feels inspired to extend his arm to his right the next time he's had his fix. Sometimes it's easy for the reality of a situation to lose its poignancy when distance comes into play. As the (cigarette) butts are distributed throughout the area, the actual amount of litter is lost. I guess my intent was to illustrate the degree of the issue by compressing the evidence and turning it back on to the offender.

Shannon Wunderlich: Personal/Public

So, I'm from South Florida - and I've never been too proud of it. Something about the culture down there... but I guess that's not actually what we're here to talk about. Despite my lack of tender feelings for West Palm Beach in general, there is one place that I find myself coming back to every time I visit home.

Behold, the intracoastal sea wall.

Now, sometimes the word "intracoastal" gives off a ritzier impression than it should and sometimes palm trees look a little more glamorous than they are. Let me set the record straight here and tell you that the intracoastal is not a Destination with a capital "D". It has no beaches to offer, no restaurants, no waterfront attractions, no touristy enticements - nothing except the occasional smell of low tide and sweaty joggers galore. The water you're looking at isn't even the ocean yet, it's this weird preliminary channel that separates Donald Trump and the other filthy rich inhabitants of Palm Beach from us simple folk over in WEST Palm Beach (that one little four-letter word makes a multi-million dollar difference). The intracoastal is kind of to the oceanfront what a foreword is to a novel - it has it's charm and it's own rewards, but most people would rather just skip it and get to the real deal. For the most part, it's a parking lot for boats.
Despite the ample amount of time that I just spent dissing this place, it's probably the most nostalgic and beloved location for me in my entire hometown, maybe anywhere at all. I think the fact that it's somewhat taken for granted or overlooked is part of the appeal. Instead of going to the overcrowded beaches a few minutes down the road to kick it with the pOpULaR kiDs, my group of friends developed an affinity for the quiet mediocrity of the intracoastal. It's funny how territorial we'd get when we'd see anyone else we knew sitting on the wall. Though it's a long, sprawling waterfront that literally anyone has access to 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and is as public of a place as public can mean, it's also been home to some of my most intimate personal experiences. Just five minutes from home, I'd sneak out late at night for waterfront rendezvouses and skip high school afternoons to lay in the sun with a bottle of keylime soda and a deck of cards. From family moments to friend moments to boy moments to just me moments, I can't begin to count how many can be traced back to sitting atop that sea wall, listening to the water lap against the sides, watching for splashes from jumping fish.

[37 25.818' N, 122 05.36' W]

There is an entire stretch of this wall, spanning at least a couple miles, that lays claim to countless individual experiences of mine, but I would say that this place, under this tree, at these exact coordinates is one of the most personal spots of them all.
Costello Drive is just a block north of this tree. One of my closest childhood friends lived there. Her parents weren't the worst, but they also weren't the best, and so a good amount of those aforementioned late night rendezvouses took place here. Each of us would sneak from our houses and meet here on the intracoastal wall where we'd sit and try to sort things out together, to figure her a way out of this town. Being a year older than me, her time to fly the coop came a year sooner. This would eventually be the place I'd come to pick her up after her parents kicked her out, just days before she shipped off to the Naval Academy. I remember the haze the rain made of the orange streetlight as I pulled over and jumped out of the car to help her with her things, though she and they were already soaked through. It's funny to think about how many people drive past this spot on a daily basis, how many people living right across the street give no thought to the things that have been said and heard here.

Shannon Wunderlich: 3 Days 3 Ways

I wasn't sure how to approach my first walk.
Sometimes I'm not actually a very creative person.
I walk this route relatively often, from home to school,
so I wanted to shake things up, get a different perspective.
But all I could think to do was walk through alleyways.
So, I started there, taking photographs, hoping to string something together.
As I went, I noticed the stark contrast between walking down those narrow side streets and the brief moments in which I'd emerge back into plain sight to dash across rush hour traffic before slipping back into the shadows. Despite the time of day, sunlight seemed scarce on my route.
I thought about the Nato Thomspon reading, specifically about the ideals of the Situationists, even more specifically about their concept of the dérive. A dérive is defined as a type of unplanned journey through a landscape (which is usually urban) where an individual sort of allows their surroundings to determine their course rather than their own personal agenda. In English, the word itself can be literally translated to "drift." Ultimately, the intent of a dérive is to allow geographic and architectural aspects of an environment to direct your course in such a way that yields an entirely new and authentic experience.
So, I drifted.

WALK ONE
Instead of clinging to alleys, I took a cue from the sunlight and the shadows cast by the cityscape and decided to play the lava game.
I'm sure everyone played this game as a kid, in some form or another. Basically, there are certain rules for places on the ground that you're not allowed to step on. They're lava. Your feet will melt. Sometimes it's a certain color of tile or type of flooring. This time I treated sunlight as lava and tried to see if I could find my way across town without setting a single foot on lit ground.
I kind of had a lot of fun doing this. Don't get me wrong, it was definitely challenging (I had to cheat twice), but I wound my way through the city in ways that I'd never traversed before. Searching for shadow bridges across busy streets allowed me a new appreciation for light poles and street signs, made me more aware of trees and vacant city lots (i.e. wastelands of bubbling hot magma to be avoided at all costs). Construction barricades became gateways and pedestrians sometimes served as temporary taxis, if you walked close enough together. Sometimes the only way forward was to go back the way I'd come. Sometimes the only way out of a jam was in, as I found myself snaking my way through bank lobbies and the MSOE campus in moments of desperation. I was more in tune with the time of day as I watched shadows grow longer, changing my course. I was also made aware of just how easy it is to make people uncomfortable. Granted, there were times when I looked like a pretty big freak, emerging from the depths of a parking garage basement or pressing myself up against a wall to take advantage of the only sliver of a shadow that could grant me forward motion, but there were other times when all I had to do was change sides of the sidewalk to make someone think twice about me. As I hopped across the speckled lawn of Cathedral Square, I could swear there was a gaggle of disapproving mothers speculating at my intoxication. It was funny to think about the fine line between "normalcy" and "disorderly conduct."

WALK TWO
After having taken my first walk,
I was kind of excited by the dérive approach.
It was such an organic experience, forging a connection with cityscape that made us almost equal in determining the course of my actions. I thought about water and the way it circumnavigates obstacles. I wanted to keep up this approach, so I decided to make my second walk without shoes on my feet. I figured that this would function similarly to the lava game, but would allow me to switch filtering my perception through my eyes to experiencing my environment in a more tactile way. We do so much to cover ourselves, to overcome our surroundings, I wondered what would happen after the simple removal of one little buffer.
I started out strong, attempting to retrace the same path I'd taken on my first walk. How hard could it be, right?
I quickly came to understand the popularity of sidewalks as I stopped time and time again to pick tiny pieces of gravel out of the balls of my feet. My awareness of filth was also heightened as I could now feel the raw grime of the city streets on my skin. I took notice of the types of filth that I could pick up on (that's kind of a freak thing to say, I guess) and noticed the ways in which the surrounding buildings impacted their exteriors. Banks and school buildings had much cleaner back and sidestreets than that of restaurants, which made me feel super gross. I started dwelling on the idea of food slime and bacteria permeating through my feet and swore off restaurants for all of seven city blocks. I thought about the idea of "face value" as it pertained to building facades and how it seemed like establishments couldn't give a shit about the parts of their property that didn't contribute to their profits, the back and sidestreets that went unseen. I found myself praising the heavens when there was any patch of grass to take refuge on and cursing the heat of asphalt parking lots. Broken glass forced me to reroute plenty of times. I think what stuck with me most was my heightened awareness of the unnecessary waste generated by us all, particularly how insurmountable it is. It's everywhere. It's almost like our clothes and shoes allow us the luxury of ignorance, cushioning the impact of a harsh environment unfit for our bare skin. So long as we've got our Nike's on, that broken beer bottle is just fine. Those millions of cigarette butts go seemingly unnoticed. It was odd to realize just how careless we are, how that carelessness has perpetuated itself so deeply into our society that it no longer raises eyebrows.

WALK THREE
This walk wasn't actually a walk.
I, like most other people, also took the bus.
This sort of felt like a copout compared to my other walks, though.
Anyway, I took the bus.
The 15 route is home for me.
I take it at least once a day on average.
I tried not to do anything particularly different on this ride,
no games or rules to dictate my interaction with my environment or removal of clothing items,
I just tried to kind of be more "there" than I usually am.
Instead of zoning out and staring out the window with my headphones on, I tried to take notice of what was different about traveling through space in this vehicle rather than just as myself.
Thinking about this mode of travel in comparison to my other walks, walks that had been so much more committed to my surroundings, made the bus seem really weird and creepy. I mean, right? What weird things, buses, cars, trains, planes, these big boxes made out of metal and glass that we hop in to expedite our passage through space, space that we have no actual relationship with, especially when riding as a passenger. When you're driving you at least have to look at and pay attention to your surroundings, interact and yield to them in some small way. But riding the bus felt almost like sealing myself inside of that capsule at the bank drive thru that shoots through that tube from the building to your car. So cold and removed. If there's something interesting, you can't stop to look at it. If you see someone you know walking down the street, you can't get their attention without a creepy text message. I could have been traveling through any place and that bus trip would have felt the same. By comparison, the disconnect was huge. It felt weird shifting from the interactive mindset of my previous walks to the expedited numbness of my typical commute, but it felt weirder thinking about how I would probably reacclimate to this mode of transportation by the end of the day.