If you are suddenly blinded by a mass of light promenading up the streets of downtown Atlanta in the early afternoon of Tuesday, Oct. 12, do not be alarmed. It’s only Robert Ladislas Derr performing his innovative art walk, Chance.
Derr’s mission is simple: to create a video cartography of a given city. To do this, the artist takes the unconventional route around the streets. Wearing four cameras on his body and donning a mirror encrusted suit, Derr walks for 45 minutes documenting everything—the people, the architecture, the cars and the atmosphere of the locale.
“It’s an immersive, 360-degree view of a city and the by-sections through the city,” Derr said.
Before Derr embarks on the walk, he asks for thirty rolls of a dice from the crowd. He then records the number of the die into an algorithm, using the rolls as the foundation for his course through the city.
The die determine whether Derr will move forward, backward, right, left, spin or stand in place. Thirty random commands will lead him through the city while he simultaneously records every angle from the cameras strapped to his shoulders.
“By having a chance algorithm, there is no kind of preconceived idea of where the nice areas and bad areas are,” Derr said. “I go where the dice roll takes me, and that’s a cross section of Atlanta in 2010.”
The basic conceptualization for the walk derived from Derr’s desire to turn the camera outward towards the audience during his performance art. He wanted to capture the world around him while still capturing the movements of his own body.
This avant-garde type of performance art came alive when Derr worked on a personal project in Europe. Using a geographically descriptive chapter from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the artist created a video cartography of the character’s travels by foot through the city of Dublin, Ireland. Derr retraced the movement of the character’s exact locations at the exact times described in the chapter for four days. Using this concept, he did another walk in Providence, R.I. using Edgar Allan Poe’s work about his lover Helen Whitman.
The limitations of these two fiction-inspired walks allowed Derr to revel in ideas of a more extemporized walk.
“[I thought that] it would be interesting to have a more impromptu, a more chance, route through a city rather than a predetermined route,” Derr said.
Since late 2005 when he started the walks, Derr has called Chance an “ongoing psycho-geographical walk performance,” one in which he documents not only the city surrounding him, but the reactions of its occupants.
Through the experience gained from the walk, Derr said that the reactions to the spectacle that is his performance run the gamut from children following him to people assuming he’s a walking advertisement to people asking if he works for Jay Leno or David Letterman (this happened when Derr performed Chance in New York).
“I get ‘Why are you doing this?’ often,” Derr said. “People are always trying to put the walk in context, like there needs to be some rational idea as opposed to allowing the irrational to be the experience.”
In a self-imposed silence, Derr does not speak back with to those on the street. The lack of interaction he has with the bystanders allows them to question what is considered normal, and often leaves them engaged in conversations with strangers.
Typically, the rear camera allows Derr to see reactions that he’s missed when he reviews the footage.
“People feel comfortable when they don’t really have to look at me, and they feel as though they have power over the camera,” said Derr. “Depending on where I am, the rear camera seems to allow gestures to happen that would not normally happen through the lens of the front camera.”
These gestures range from guileless waves to crude hand gestures.
Along with the weight of the cameras, Derr cloaks himself in a veneer of mirrors as he walks in the direction the dice commands. The stimulus for this facet of the act stemmed from Derr’s first walk in Ireland and was inspired by Ulysses’ main character Leopold Bloom, a troubled man searching for his identity in Dublin
“If I [were] going to assume Leopold Bloom as this man who walks through Dublin, I may want to obscure my identity and I thought, if I put mirrors on myself, the reflections of the city will enable me to disappear,” Derr said. “But at the same time, mirrors have this duality—they allow my presence to become a spectacle. When I step out into the daylight and the sun hits my suit, I look like a disco ball.”
Derr has performed Chance in a number of different cities around the world—Argentina, Finland, Canada, Denmark and in U.S. cities.
Aside from Chance, Derr has participated in a number of group exhibitions and performed various works around the globe. The artist’s work was featured in ASPECT: The Chronicle of New Media Art Magazine. He is also a professor at Ohio State University.
Derr hopes to continue performing Chance in the future, but is apprehensive about the idea of bringing the performance to new cities. The idea of having a record of one particular place in two different times appeals most to this artist.
“[I am] documenting how a city changes and if I do the walk in 10 to 20 years, I can see what has happened to the city through the change of time,” Deer said.
Derr hopes to create a category of this performance in what he calls Chance Capitals. The artist’s goal is to conduct the walk in all 50 capitals of the U.S. and catalog the cross-sections of those cities.
This time around, Derr was invited by Flux Projects to perform Chance in the city of Atlanta. Flux Projects is an Atlanta-based organization whose main objective is to support artists in creating innovative and temporary public art. Derr will begin his walk at approximately 12:15 p.m. in Woodruff Park, near the game tables.
“I hope that the readers get interested and come out and see where the route takes me so that they can become a part of the fabric of Atlanta,” said Derr. “I’m a walking spectacle on the sidewalk.”
