The battered valise contains an assortment of bizarre treasures: corked test tubes filled with dirt, a rusted compass, a pair of dimpled plastic insoles. People walk by the table where the case sits gaping open, peer in and ask questions.
What's that for?
Whose is this?
A professor left it behind, explains Laura Bergeron, a student at the University of South Florida. One day he went for a walk and never came back. Passersby look skeptical, but Bergeron maintains a straight face from her seat behind the table. Now his students are carrying on his in-depth research into people and the way they walk, she adds.
Would you like to participate in an experiment?
The variety of refusals she receives — maybe later, I'm meeting somebody, we were just on our way home — could constitute a research project unto itself, but for every person whose eyes widen with suspicion or faint alarm at the thought of participating, Bergeron nets a more adventurous soul with her practiced pitch. Beside her, three fellow students fill out the research team: Raul Romero, armed with a video camera; Victoria Skelly, tapping away diligently on a vintage orange Contessa typewriter; and Desiree D'Alessandro, charged with the task of observing experiment subjects from several feet away.
But Bergeron has what might be the most important role in the whole set-up: helping participants choose their walk. The experiment, it turns out, is really performance art masquerading as social science. "We're actually artists, but we're performing as researchers," D'Alessandro explains to a passerby. "Our notes are very unofficial."
The quartet of USF students has made walking — and, specifically, walking in the context of Tampa Bay — their subject. But instead of approaching the topic didactically or politically (e.g., by handing out fliers or staging walk-ins), they want you to perform the act of walking in its many forms, whether goofy or serious, quirky or mundane — the premise being that if you get people playing with the idea of walking, you'll get them thinking and talking about it and even doing it, too.
If you're wondering how all this walking constitutes art, you're probably not alone. The type of thinking that brought the four students together last Saturday at the USF Sun Dome to stage their alternately amusing and absurdly bureaucratic walking experiment differs a bit from the type of thinking that produces representational paintings or figurative sculpture.
Think of "How We Walk In Tampa," as the students call their project, as one big collaborative performance (encompassing both lay participants, the student organizers and even their respective professors in USF's art and communications studies departments). Or think of it as relational art, where the intangible and immeasurable changes that the artists ignite through the brief connections they make with participants are, in effect, the artwork.
Though they've staged the performance at the Tampa Museum of Art and USF's Contemporary Art Museum, last Saturday's set-up at the Getting Green By Going Green Expo put the students in complementary company: exhibitors included engineers, landscape architects and vendors of biofuel vehicles.
Bergeron presides over the end of the table where participants choose a type of walk from a pile of hand-typed paper tags: cakewalk, limbo, gangster walk, line dancing, victory march, treadmill, skedaddle, New York walk, protest march, and so on. After a moment of thought or brief discussion about what such a walk might look like, the participant — now tagged with the walk label tied around his wrist — performs it on a runway indicated by a line of white tape on the floor. The faux researchers look on. Each performance, whether hesitant or bold, meets with applause and assurances from the students that the participant has been most helpful to their research. In most cases, participants stick around for a while and share their impressions about walking in Tampa, none of which are favorable.
Within minutes of the hour-long project, Ybor is already the butt of one walking joke. Two USF undergrads stationed at a nearby booth, Collette Brewington, 19, and Eric Kinney, 20, pick walk labels reading drunk and sober. About halfway down the tape line, a moaning and groaning Brewington collapses and Kinney carries her for the rest of the walk to a round of cheers.
"You see a lot of that in Ybor City," Brewington explains after her performance, quick to point out that she doesn't imbibe.
Another USF student, Jeff Sheridan, pantomimes large gait, then hangs around for a while to swap horror stories of venturing beyond campus on foot. (Several times during the performance, the student-researchers repeat the statistic that Tampa Bay has one of the worst pedestrian fatality rates in the nation.) When IT consultant Josh Wilson enacts dog walk and forgets to clean up after his imaginary pet, Skelly directs him to an expo booth promoting biodegradable poop bags. Lara Dichraff, a Seminole Heights resident looking for green office furniture at the expo, earns a round of applause after picking the same walk and remembering the clean-up part.
By the end of the hour, a fellowship of walkers gathers around the table, engaged in a lively debate about what's wrong with walking in Tampa.
"It's what we were meant to do. Why can't we do it?" asks a frustrated D'Alessandro.
"Because there are too many freakin' cars," Dichraff says.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2008.