Wandering Minds: Tracing Inner Worlds Through a Historical-Geographical Art Installation

The human act of wandering across landscapes and cityscapes has carved the research interests of scholars in cultural, urban, and historical geography, as well as in the humanities. Here we call for-and take the first steps toward-a historical geography of wandering that is pursued in the head rather than with the legs. We do so through analyzing how our audiovisual installation on mind wandering opened up epistemological and ontological questions facing historical geographies of the mind. This installation both modeled mind wandering as conceptualized at different historical moments and aimed to induce mental perambulation in its visitors. In so doing, it was intended both to stage and to disrupt relations between body and mind, the internal and external, attention and inattention, motion and stillness-and, importantly, between the archival and that which resists archival capture. We reflect on how we interspersed traditional scholarly historical and geographical enquiry with methods gleaned from creative practices. In particular, we consider the challenges that such practices pose for how we conceptualize archives-not least when the focus of attention comprises fugitive mental phenomena.