augmented illusions

There’s a small number of routes I walk daily: there’s the route across Binnenrotte and the market to get to the town centre, there’s a circuit that takes in the organic food store, the cafe that’s located in the same building, and three supermarkets plus two coffee places. Then there’s the exploration I am doing to make photographs. The other day I updated the geotags in the photos’ metadata and plotted them on a map: almost all photographs come from an area that’s roughly 200×200 meter. I consider that excellent exploration. And, as I am becoming more familiar and more intimate with that patch, there’s an increasingly detailed map in my head. I notice how a lot of my navigation is still pilotage. I am a pretty confident and relaxed navigator while at sea, and it seems I have adopted the same nonchalance in this situation. I use every bit of information the terrain may afford me, but I do not aim for too much precision. It’s crucial that i can thread all the way back to my point of departure, to the string I’ve stretched from that point in space to my present location. There’s memory and attention involved there, and I’ve discovered that the best way to remember is to sing the street. “Ah!” I thought when i caught myself doing this: “Just like the songlines Bruce Chatwin sings about”. Those songlines describe the minutiae in a landscape that does not have very obvious navigational clues. A desert for instance. My own navigational practice relies very much on such minute waypoints or clues. It’s interesting too what will lodge itself in my mind: of Jerusalem I remember garbage containers, a moped that was in the same place every day, a couple of conveniently placed busstops, and a large tuft of grass in a strategic location. I remember walking back after a brief shower along a hedge of rosemary bushes that exploded with scent. Magical. Something to sing.