Borders: boulders at la rotonda, 2010
Part of the [borders] series documenting walks of famous places in virtual worlds
This video is an excerpt from my walk around Villa Almerico-Capra, also known as ’La Rotonda’, a 16th century manor house and grounds in Vicenza, Italy.
[borders] uses online shared virtual places as settings for walks that examine virtual property ’ownership’ and the construction of historical truth in 3D virtual worlds. In the project, I visit virtual recreations of heritage sites and walk their borderlands. In the course of these explorations, I have captured the unexpected glitches and disruptions in an otherwise seamless environment through video recording. This project has a historical underpinning: According to the 19th Century French writer Baudelaire, the flâneur is a figure who moves through the labyrinthine streets and hidden spaces of the city. The flâneur discovers both low culture, the underworld, and the high culture, fashionable world, but remains somehow disassociated. Wordsworth took to pastoral scenes in his commitment to drifting in space, using the walk as a research method. In the US, the same idea was sustained in Thoreau’s insistence to stroll without a specific goal in order to encounter the spiritual possibilities inherent in a landscape.
