About Joyce Walks

(on footsteps) They cannot be counted because they each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities. Their intertwining paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together. In that respect, pedestrian movements form one of those real systems whose existence in fact makes up the city.
Michel deCerteau

Joyce Walks is a psychogeographical tool which generates walking maps based on routes from James Joyce's Ulysses in any city in the world using Google Maps. The system prints maps to be used as the basis of walks exploring the city of your choice and generates mashups using your pictures and videos documenting these walks to share with other users.

Inspired by the Situationist Dérive Joyce Walks is a participatory spatial tool which overlays virtual layers of meaning over real space enabling the user to create temporary location based interventions and temporary social spaces which tactically insert themselves into the urban environment allowing users to inscribe a new set of meanings onto the very fabric of the city, Although the focus is on routes from Ulysses the user is not limited to this and the system can be used to remap any practice or narrative which can be spatially expressed to any city in the world

As a participatory artwork Joyce Walks facilitates users in creating their own unique performative spatial event, the art is created by the participants in the very practice of walking, the act of passing itself. However while each walk is unique to the creator or creators they also form part of a continuum with each walk generated, performed and documented adding to an archive of unique performative walks. While each one is contingent on a unique set of social and spatial conditions they nonetheless have a commonality and it is this communality which creates an additional layer of meaning and interaction between the discrete components.

Extending Joyce Walks

The technology behind Joyce Walks is not limited to remapping Ulysses but can remap any cultural event that can be expressed spatially. An example of this is the recent Tulca Freedom Trail which remapped the Boston Freedom Trail to Galway for the Tulca Festival of Visual Art . At the moment this is done on an ad hoc basis but we will shortly be extending Joyce Walks so that it will be possible to plug in your own routes either as gpx tracks or kml files to share your routes with all users. For the initial stages of this we are also inviting submissions of routes to be added to Joyce Walks, contact me at conor[at]stunned[dot]org if you arte interested in making a route proposal.

Joyce Walks is created by Conor McGarrigle with programming by Emer MacDowell.

For advice on using Joyce Walks please click the help tab.

Contact me at conor[at]stunned[dot]org