PUBLIC MARKS with search musical

November 9th 2007 - November 13th 2008

one year on foot - 4646km through China

unlimited beard & hair growth

thelongestway.com

musical score by the kingpins ( myspace.com/theoneandonlykingpins ) and zhu fengbo

Additional info:

- I never finished my original goal of walking to Germany. Instead, I walked for a year and roughly 4500km, passed the desert of Gobi, and then decided to stop walking for now.

- All of the distance from Beijing to Ürümqi has been completed solely on foot, straight good old walking. There are instances where you can see me in the video sitting on a plane or riding a boat, but those are during breaks I had to take from walking, either to sort out bureaucracy issues or to take care of some personal things.

- I had been planning this trip for over a year before I even started, and getting as far as I got was an experience for which I am very grateful.

- Obtaining the necessary visa for a trip like this was not very easy, hence I had to go back to Beijing a few times to resolve some issues.

- The songs I used in the video are 1) Zhu Fengbo - "Olive Tree" and 2) The Kingpins - "L'aventurier" - visit the Kingpins website if you want to know more, they are very cool I think.

- This is not a strict "1 pic a day" video, because I wanted to make it a bit more alive by adding some additional movement. Sometimes during the film you would follow me turn around, or something would happen in the background. I tried to capture these moments to make the video more interesting.

- The core of this project is in fact my website "www.thelongestway.com" where I have posted my extensive travel diary, starting from day 1 (Nov 9th 2007) and describing every single day until the end one year later.

Drawing inspiration from John Cage’s, Notations, Notations 21 features illustrated musical scores from more than 100 international composers, all of whom are making amazing breakthroughs in the art of notation. These spectacularly beautiful and fascinatingly creative visual pieces not only make for exciting music, but inspiring visual art as well. The scores are accompanied by written contributions from the artists that explore every facet of their creative processes, from inspiration to execution. Contributors include the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Earle Brown, Halim El-Dabh, Joan La Barbara, and Yuji Takahashi, as well as emerging composers whose compositions are also visually astounding and important.

What does music look like? The Shape of Song is an attempt to answer this seemingly paradoxical question. The custom software in this work draws musical patterns in the form of translucent arches, allowing viewers to see--literally--the shape of any composition available on the Web. The resulting images reflect the full range of musical forms, from the deep structure of Bach to the crystalline beauty of Philip Glass.

Cartographic conjecture, emergent systems and experimental musical notation all coalescent in the space planes of Emma McNally’s drawings.