Riku Yamakawa | Deep Time Walk
The Deep Time Walk is a tour program that translates Earth's 4.6 billion-year history into a 4.6-kilometer walk.Summary
The Deep Time Walk is a tour program conceptualized by Stephan Harding of Schumacher College, which translates Earth's 4.6 billion-year history into a 4.6-kilometer walk, where one meter equals 10,000 years. The author participated in a unique version organized by Takashi Maeno in Yokohama's Kohoku New Town. This experience requires participants to shift their consciousness, realizing that their walking advances time itself rather than merely traversing a timeline. The tour begins at the time of the Big Bang, progressing through stages like the emergence of water and life, utilizing the actual landscape to prompt imagination by overlaying past epochs onto present scenery. The author notes that the program functions as a performance, demanding the imagination to erase the current surroundings. A key highlight is the intentionally uneventful period representing a billion years of relative stillness. Ultimately, the walk aims to recontextualize well-known facts about Earth's history, suggesting that the techniques of theater and art can further support this profound engagement with time and reality.
(Source：artscape)