It took us 120 minutes to walk/draw the F1 track in east Austin, the underdeveloped area of the city and formerly segregated zone for African Americans and Latino/Hispanics (mostly Mexicans). In contrast, the wining race car did 56 laps in 90 minutes in the the F1 Austin Circuit of Americas track in November 2012.
We decided to trace and walk the silhouette of the official F-1 track on the ground of one of the forgotten zones of the 11th largest city in the USA. Jack Murphy and I, met on a Friday afternoon in order to do a situationist and psycogeographic walk, a sort of juxtaposition and performative urban collage. We had discussed and imagined before ways to appropriate, articulate, and criticize our experience of the city of Austin. A place that is continuously exploited not only by commercial and consumer culture, but also by technology evangelists, and more recently by luxury sport enterprises such as the Formula One. The myth of Austin as the capital music of the world, the place of the biggest interactive/film/music festival (SXSW), and the home of the only F-1 race in America is continuously recreated and promoted.
There are of course many Austins, many different experiences of what a the fastest growing American city could be. There are Texican Mexicans everywhere, coming back to what used to be their territory, working on different services, from gardening to cooking to cleaning. There are the high tech kids, coming from the USA north east coast, from asia and even from South America. There are hipsters, youngsters from all over the USA in search of a progressive, cheap, and musical and fashion oasis. There are the locals, who don´t quite understand very well the explosion, the crazyness, the grow. It is funny to be here, like a paradox of capitalism, American nostalgia, consumer culture, and globalization. Global cities are caricatures when they don’t really historically deserve it. They are just too much. Too much of a thing. Like Christmas trees filled with too many things. Like one of those Barroque church eccentricities Spaniards tried to create in South America in the 17th century.
We walked in an area of Austin that is very different to the one of the development, of the capital music of the world. We walked trying to draw and trace the F-1 race track. The same scale. Transposed to the Austin East Side. I never imagined encountering so much wilderness in Austin. But it is there. We jumped fences, entered deep agglomeration of trees, surrounded dried creeks, crossed high school stadium tracks and surrounded many churches. We also took pictures, some videos, and recorded a GPS trace. Using Zeega, a platform for interactive and multimodal storytelling we tried to recreate our experience. You can see our first attempt to narrate our walk/draw/situation by clicking here.
There is also a gallery of the photographs I created in Flickr with the best selection of pictures I took during the walk.
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