Madeleine - Dérive

For my dérive, I started walking away from campus to the North. I ended up walking along the same street for the majority of the dérive, and I was really interested in the way neighborhoods organized themselves and then dissipated as I moved along; the structure of the neighborhoods and the content of my surroundings were strikingly unrelated to the unchanging name of the street and the straightness of my path. When I turned around, I ended up finding my way back via a more circuitous route. One of the most interesting parts of the dérive was that, particularly on my walk away from campus, I completely forgot about the assignment and stopped paying active attention to my surroundings. When I got back, I was fascinated by the idea of just letting your feet take you somewhere without letting the mind become actively engaged, and it reminded me of the automatic drawing we did in class during the figure drawing unit. I responded to the dérive, therefore, by doing a little bit more automatic drawing. I'll post the drawing to the blog later when I have access to a camera, but basically I ended up using a lot of cross-hatching. This technique is interesting in relation to the dérive because it calls for building value with the repetition of nearly identical marks, which are similar to the steps of a dérive.