Artisode; 2.3; Nina Dubois and Jeanette Hart-Mann

Walk to work, a three-day journey from my home in Sarios to my office at the University of Mexico. I think what art is trying to do always is interpret the world for us, give us a different way of seeing the world. We're comfortable with that when it's a painting or a sculpture that you know an animal or a human being. Contemporary art is trying to do that same job but in a different language in a different way. And in this work what I'm interested in is how we perceive the world based on how we move

through it. I've been driving for 20 years commuting to my office at UNM every day and seeing this landscape that I pass through at 60 miles an hour from the car window and I thought that it would be a good idea to see what it was like to get another land by walking from my house to my office. I'm going to cruise on into Madrid. I pass by the diner, used in the Wild Hogs movie. A few folks sitting outside of Java Junction drinking the morning coffee. The question of how you make your experiences available to the public is that's the job of an artist. And so in this case what I did is I took photographs every hour. Every hour wherever I was I stopped and took a photograph and all four cardinal directions. And I kept a voice recorder with me so that when I saw coyotes or you know when strange things happened I would record it so I could

keep track of how many American flags I saw in Albuquerque versus solar units. That kind of thing. One solar unit in the entire Northeast quadrant of Albuquerque and nearly 50 American flags. America has a very amped sense of time. And so one of the things about walking is it just slows you way down. And that's part of how the world changes I think. How you start to see things differently. Walking to work one times is not going to save the planet. Part of the reason I did this is I think it's real easy for people to deal with notions of global warming or sustainability or environmental peril in the abstract. And we're all graded sort of hoping that corporations will stop polluting in that sense. But when you have to actually change your own daily habits that's where the rubber hits the road. And if you believe in a democracy I mean that's fundamentally what Americans have to do. And so my

walking was you know saying look Bill you drive too much try walking. So in that sense it was very personal but I see that as being an expression in the art context that we all have to make it personal. When we make it personal maybe things will start getting better.