Introduction

Ambulant Science

Ambulant Science expresses two key concepts. The first, literally of ambulation, relates to walking in our urban environment. Walking may provide us with ways of generating and disseminating new or different forms of knowledge than are usual to academic and scientific research practices; through this, it might contribute to a deeper understanding of our cities, for example.
Secondly, an ambulant science is one that is revocable. That is, it is speculative, does not presume to be the only way of understanding the world and can be re-written or revised at any time.

Together, these concepts relate to the ideas of a Minor Science proposed by the French theorists Deleuze & Guattari, who identified 'minor' disciplines that present informal approaches to understanding the world. These stood in opposition to dominant 'major' scientific approaches. For example, the stonemasons who built medieval cathedrals did so without the 'major' scientific knowledge of the engineer. Their working method was ambulant in many ways: being itinerant workers, they moved between sites, gathering and disseminating knowledge as they went about their work; their physical method of building relied less on a knowledge of formal physics than on an intimate understanding of the way that one stone relates to another, how it splits and how it feels to handle.

In Venice

For the Ambulant Science Studio I made new objects, investigations and devices through which to develop a way of undertaking research to make sense of a place.

In a previous publication, London Walking (2000), I had the benefit of the kinds of insight that you get when you live and work in a particular place. Going to Venice as a visitor, I couldn't draw on those years of experience as a resident, so I tried to 'come to terms' using methods suggested to me by my visits there.

I looked to things that are considered peculiar to the place: sometimes physical things, for example the tidal movements that are considered so important, or the building of bridges; they were also more vaguely defined things, such as love and the ways of understanding the world that this concept affords.

As this is an ongoing project, to develop 'ambulant' methods for finding out about places, I also tried to generalize from the particular things that were found there, in the hope that they'd add to the ways of understanding other places too.