Walden; or Life in the Woods
A voyage of spiritual discovery and manual for self-reliance in a world of irreality.
Chapter I
Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, in the middle of the city, in a house that was digitally rendered and placed on the shore of a modelled landscape that resembled Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts. I would not force this story of my affairs on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries about the idea of hiding away from society and shutting myself up from life’s inexorable activity in some snug digital retreat had not been made to me so often. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in this to pardon me if I undertake to answer some questions about my mode of life in this book. I wouldn’t talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. As for the rest of my readers, please accept the portions of this text that might apply to you, and may it be of good service to those whom it fits.
It began in 2018 with a proclamation. Live virtually for 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days. I called this initiative Project Walden. At that time, my goal was not within the realm of commonly available technology, so work at the early stages of the project involved study, recreations, experiments, research, and documentation of findings as I worked up to an extended departure from reality. As many of which I have tried to document here.
The manual guiding my efforts was Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods, a transcendental thesis on living deliberately in natural surroundings. The book is based on reflections gathered during a 2 year, 2 month, and 2 day stay in a cabin built by Thoreau on the shore of Walden Pond around 1845.
Shortly after devising Project Walden with some early VR headset tests in a room that was specifically built to the tiny dimensions of Thoreau’s pond side hut, I moved to New York and chose a simple, furnished apartment in Manhattan’s east village for its relation in both size and placement of furniture to the cabin at Walden.
From there, I began with an autopsy of Thoreau’s interior experience by living and writing and making myself available to the forces of isolated confinement while I recorded the psychogeographic effects of solitude in contrast to the throbbing world just outside my door.
I wrote about the city.
I wrote about jazz.
I wrote about opera.
I wrote about Bantcho Bantchevsky.
On January 23rd, 1988, some weeks after being released from the hospital for treatment of a heart attack at the age of 81, Bantcho sat himself precariously on the balcony railing of the Metropolitan Opera during an intermission of a matinée performance of Verdi’s Macbeth. When an usher motioned towards him to remove himself from the railing, Bantcho allowed himself to slowly fall backwards, where he immediately picked up speed, and after smashing his head into the dress circle railing beneath him, crash landed into the orchestra seats, breaking one of them in half.
I wrote about suicide at the opera.
I wrote about the solitude found in a faux wood panelled bar in the east village that was almost always empty.
There were no experiments with VR during this time.
With technology not being the focus of my research, I turned instead to benchmarking reality.
That changed, however, at the outset of a global pandemic.
In March of 2020, I was forced into exile and put Project Walden on hold to take up residence in Canada. Upon entering the country I was given orders from the government to quarantine for 14 days.
Having to reside in a bigger and more lavishly furnished space than I was used to compromised the domestic principles of simplicity and reduction that I had borrowed from Life in the Woods for the early analog stages of Project Walden. So I decided to cease project activities until I could return to my Thoreau-like workspace in New York. It wouldn’t be long, I thought.
In Canada.
In quarantine.
And on pause.
Perched above street level, over a city that had stopped moving because of the influx and fear of a spreading sickness, I suddenly had the majority of humanity join me in the discourse of isolation that I had, up until then, been exploring for more than 700 days in Manhattan.
It felt crowded.
With little to do, and without any direction or purpose for this revised version of aloneness, I spent most of my time listening to the 1963 Charles Mingus album, Spontaneous Compositions and Improvisations. It begins with the song, Myself When I Am Real.
I lived on thick slabs of moist, red velvet cake brought repeatedly to my door by an invisible workforce. I filled digital carts full of 9017 ALYX 9SM apparel and accessories, then let them lay there in limbo until algorithms convinced me to come back and complete the purchase. And I stared at vacant furniture in a living room configured for social interaction and comfort.
It was during that long stretch of stillness and contemplation that a new paradigm within the language of interior design revealed itself in context to the Project Walden work that had been completed so far.
Knowing my temporary home in Canada could never repeat the success I found in New York at matching the dimensions of Thoreau’s small house in Massachusetts, I realized that if the project was to continue, I would have to accelerate my plans to conduct research inside digital renderings of Walden Pond and its infamous shack.
It was time.
In Life in the Woods, Thoreau advises against adorning a home with decorative objects until the walls, and the lives of the people residing in them, are stripped bare in order to create a proper foundation of taste for such things. And that knowledge for beauty is best cultivated outdoors.
When my quarantine was complete I knew what had to be done. Three days later, most of the furniture in my new home was removed.
I rearranged what was left against constructivist themes of new purpose.
I created disparate stations for play and watching and creating and streaming, and on occasion, dancing.
I cleared enough room to accommodate a spacial representation of a small cabin placed among the natural beauty of a wood. A place that could only be experienced by strapping my face into the shrouded darkness of a headset to step behind its metaphysical curtain and project graphics straight into my retinas.
I was creating an interior design that adapts to the media being brought into it.
Or walking into it.
Or thinking about it.
On the body.
Through the body.
Or otherwise.
This new assemblage was designed for its ability to assess everything for a confused participation in two realities. Interior spaces must embrace technological isolation, which will create abstract, austere assemblages of screens and audio devices that offer interactive focal points ideal for media consumption and experiences of past and future virtualities. They need to singularly consider an aesthetic that traverses two worlds. They require open, empty expanses that can be rendered with endless possibilities — a space station, a night club, your childhood home, whatever — but, at least for now, they also still have to function as usable living spaces for the moments spent in a singular dimension currently accepted as truth.
It was a breakthrough moment in the work. The kind that Project Walden was meant to reveal in the same way Thoreau was able to catalog an entire way of life that’s still studied in the present by writing about time spent in a small cabin by a pond over a century ago.
Expecting more revelations to come, my Mingus-drenched mode of assessment continued, and carried over into what I would wear in this new version of living room that I had created.
Thoreau cautioned extensively about the novelty of clothing in Walden.
Its enabling of class structure.
Its manipulation of perception.
He said that any enterprise requiring new clothes should first be attempted wearing old, trusted garments.
I will file a separate report on my findings related to fashion and false reality, but to be brief here, I had to discard Thoreau’s cautionary recommendations for costume, and instead, adopt my own qualitative principles with regards to dress at the intersection of virtual and real space.
While I waited for a new Oculus Quest to arrive, I began an audit of the wardrobe I had amassed up to that point.
My closet was filled with attire for the in-person meetings that had since been supplanted as the driving force of capitalism. Shirts and ties, hanging like sentient beings waiting to take the form of my body now seemed as obsolete as furniture configured for entertaining.
From the floor of my near empty living room, I went on the internet to find clothing ideal for a new phase of Project Walden.
I found Razzle Dazzle.
Razzle Dazzle is a form of camouflage developed during pre-radar WWI that protected naval ships by covering them in contradictory, zebra-like patterns. Rather than trying to hide a floating war vessel, Razzle Dazzle allowed predatory submarine captains to confirm, undeniably, that they could indeed see something on the water, but the blatant reality of what they were seeing forced self doubt onto how they were perceiving it. Details like distance, speed, and course could not be confidently defined, making targets less likely to be obliterated by torpedo.
Razzle Dazzle is the art of hiding in plain sight.
I needed clothes that were just as perceptively unreliable.
I needed clothes that could move freely in and away from the space I had created.
Clothes that could embrace the moulting of reality and reawaken my senses. Clothes my followers will only see by way of a looking glass — a screen. Clothes that could state my presence and declare my arrival to others, but keep where I was and where I was going to my spectator as mythical as the existence of the Burj Khalifa on the horizon of Dubai.
The ultimate compliment that could be paid to the peculiar state of dress I was exploring would be for a viewer, algorithm, reader, spectator, technology, or form of intelligence to ask — is this real?
Eventually, I decided on the house of Versace as the official clothier for Project Walden. And that 1017 ALYX 9SM would be the provider of any decorative utility objects I might require.
With my cart full of comfortable, free flowing silk garments, covered in dazzling patterns that aligned me with technological subcultures, and the mythology of Greek gods, I pressed PLACE ORDER from where I sat on the floor of what would eventually be my cabin in the woods, and waited for the new research materials to arrive.
The act of reading is understood by many to be a way to escape ourselves for the mental interiors of someone else.
Words stream onto the page or screen from the minds of their author and allow us access to an externalized consciousness. Pursue this construct any further than the work itself, however, and you will likely arrive at the realization that the person you think you are getting close to doesn’t actually exist.
Writing is an isolating, solitary activity that can take over your life. But really, a writer has no life, at least not one that they can call theirs. When a writer is writing, alone in a space, in effect they are not really there at all.
Much of my writing leading up to Project Walden has been an attempt to use literature as a portal into the existence of others. Mainly authors.
I lived as Henry Miller in Clichy, Paris. Gay Talese on Manhattan’s upper east side. And acted as William Faulkner from where he lived in Hollywood while he was there to begrudgingly work on the film scripts that would finance his more respected works.
My method was to enact the publicly documented ways in which these authors went about the business of writing. I lived the routines and habits they kept, in the environments they lived and worked in — sometimes in their actual homes. I dressed in costumes they had been known to wear, I did what they said they tended to do on any given day, and during the time I was doing this, I rewrote the words that made up their most well known works. Eventually this behavior allowed me to depart myself and use their body of work to leave my body and eventually, to varying levels of validity, become them.
Because I could only base these performances on external outputs and materials — writing, interviews, biographies, photographs, videos, and audio recordings that, in most cases, were produced by others — my explorations into otherness always revealed a fissure in truth, and exposed the fictional parts of their existence.
The outward presentation of ourselves to others is a type of analog virtual reality, mediated by the forms of communication made available to us at any given time as human beings. All of which are unreliable. This includes one of our earliest technologies, language.
We are all characters.
And now, through Project Walden, I am the character of Henry David Thoreau.
Thoreau created Walden with the limitations of persona in mind. And yet it invites recreation because the life it describes is so meticulously laid out for its user to follow if they should choose to do so.
Walden is the detailed documentation of a performance that took place over the course of 24 months, 175 years ago. It allows us to get closer to its author than most literary works because it is less of a novel and more of a manual for the interior mind and physical space of its author. The dimensions and materials used to build the home Thoreau lived in and contained him are exact and documented, down to how many nails were used to construct it. The book he wrote has more than enough info to be used as a departure from oneself, and has been the source text for explorations into simple, sustainable living, spiritual reawakening, meditation, and, as exemplified by this very text you are reading, a new understanding and acceptance of an unreliable world, environment, and space.
But the book is not a simple business. It is an alien world of swamps and brambles, screes and cliffs, written with surgically precise words that take its reader captive for a forced march through solitude and boredom with deliberate and detailed descriptions of dietary behaviors, food growing, geographies, sounds, weather, and interminable descriptions of birds and their many nuanced songs.
Walden demands that it be read as it was written and lived, deliberately and slowly. It uses long and complex paragraphs and sentences filled with metaphors, allusions, understatements, hyperbole, personification, irony, satire, metonymy, synecdoche, and oxymorons, all of which make it difficult to concentrate while reading or streaming. Whole chapters can go by with its reader thinking that they haven’t retained a thing. There is no story, no plot, and very little action. At times it can seem endless.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the land around Concord, Massachusetts, where Walden Pond is located and Thoreau built his home on, said that reading Thoreau made him feel nervous and wretched. My own experiences reading Walden included many false starts. I was aware and fascinated as many were by the thesis of the book, but had never actually read its full text. That task began in earnest during the aforementioned early stages of Project Walden, shortly after I arrived in Manhattan on the morning of September 9th, 2018.
I landed after a long flight that spanned the full width of North America and, after a forty minute cab ride from New Jersey into the city, reached the tenement building that housed the room I would be calling home. My replicant cabin in the physical world.
The lease had been long since signed from thousands of kilometres away. Once everything had been finalized from afar, I obsessed over every detail that I could find about it with microprecision until I could actually be there. I poured over every view of the building on Google Maps, navigated around the surrounding neighborhood countless times in Street View mode, analyzed every image I could find of the room I had chosen, and constantly compared it to any renderings I could find of Thoreau’s home at Walden. There was never enough material to truly experience either home in my mind. Both held me at a distance until I could really be there. And now, at least with the room I would use as my Walden cabin in Manhattan, I was.
A naked feeling found me as I stood there among a pile of luggage in the east village while I watched the taxi cab pull away. It took two trips up three flights of stairs to assemble my belongings outside the door of the room, where I would reside for what I thought would be the foreseeable future.
I opened the door with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation. The room was almost identical in size to the 150 sq ft. space Thoreau built in 1845. It had a single bed along one wall, a tall boy dresser immediately beside it, a desk and chair against the wall at the end of the bed, and a sink and hot plate on the other wall across from the desk and bed.
But this was not a hut placed in the woods of Massachusetts. I was now in one of the most densely populated metropolises in the world. Hunting, fishing, and relieving myself outdoors would not be an option. Already, I had departed from Thoreau’s regimen of simplicity. Small as it was, my cabin still had electricity, a small fridge, its own bathroom, even a TV mounted to the wall. The only feature that didn’t extend beyond what Thoreau had lived in was the window.
Thoreau’s cabin had two huge windows, one cut into each long side of his house. Being inside it must have been like sitting or sleeping in a kind of observatory that surrounded you with the natural world. My room had a much smaller, single window. It was tall, but less than half the width of Thoreau’s. And the only view it could provide of nature was a small sliver of sky you could see if you got on your knees to look up past a wall of brick that was directly across from my room, effectively blocking any peripheral view. But these differences mattered little once I was settled. Like Henry David Thoreau, at the outset of my arrival, I was content with my modest dwellings, and excited to begin the work ahead. Over time, my optimistic countenance would slowly erode.
The myth of New York is built on a foundation of reinvention, but the effect of spending two years in a small room, studying Walden, attempting to deconstruct the preconceived notions of who I was when I arrived in Manhattan on that crisp fall day in September, so I could align myself with a writer that had been dead for more than 150 years, turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. Not unlike the other projects I had undertaken that dealt with persona, getting into the headspace of Thoreau gave birth to a polemical existence between data sets.
Every feeling or act I experienced or performed had its opposing position. Unnerving solitude with the luxury of endless stretches of uninterrupted personal reflection. A repetitive daily existence and exposure to new experiences. Freedom and imprisonment in one’s own thoughts, excitement and emptiness. Frugality and decadence. Me and him.
My room.
His cabin.
As in Walden, where a pond and its surrounding woods became the pulse of Thoreau’s inner being, I was left with nothing to cling to but the isle of Manhattan itself. But there was no firm ground there either because New York is a character in its own right, allusive and entirely open for interpretation by those that inhabit it.
I arrived lost, as one often does in New York, but over the course of two years I created my own personal labyrinth in the tapestry of vape shops, psychic store fronts, bodegas and cafes, the incessant honking of vehicular horns, and the endless plumes of steam rising out of 5th Avenue. Between long stretches where I didn’t leave my room for days, I defined my own rhythms and routines in the city. Dinner at hotels, opera, jazz in the village, late nights at cafes, happy hours in dive bars, late arrival cheap seats at Carnegie Hall, dessert at 21. I was surrounded by throngs of people, but was never not in solitude.
Like other attempts at assimilating my life with the artistic outputs of others, time spent in the interior world of Henry David Thoreau had not yet allowed for a complete departure from the reality of who I was, and where I was. Instead, the two years I spent executing the analog portion of Project Walden turned me into a lobotomized hybrid of fiction and reality: New York and Walden Pond, David Look and Henry David Thoreau. It was anyone’s guess as to what would happen once I began the most important leg of my journey, and started to experiment with identity, isolation, and the exploration of a new way to live deliberately in virtual space. But just as I was about to begin this work, I had to vacate my east village room for what was intended to be a quick escape to the north until it was safe to return.
In Canada, under the context of a full blown pandemic that will likely be understood and referenced in the future as the single most important factor in pushing us toward a global shift to the irreality of a virtual existence, starting the online portion of Project Walden only became more urgent. But there was little to do until I received the materials I needed to begin living digitally in my new workspace, my new cabin — which I will now refer to in the physical sense as The Console, and in the virtual sense as The Cabin.
I started slowly by laying on The Console’s wood floor with my eyes closed, trying to imagine what living in The Cabin would be like. What would a graphic representation of always blue sky, among trees set to whatever season I preferred, and for as long as I liked, do to my sense of existence?
With my quarantine complete, I was free to leave The Console. I took long walks in nearby forests with the sounds of a real, living, environment augmented by audio books streaming into my ears. I spent much of that time listening to a triptych of stories written by Paul Auster about New York amidst the flora and musty scents of the Canadian landscape. I came to realize the changing typographies under my feet could easily be replicated by the mapped worlds of a video game. The many ponds in the park I visited appeared to be set into the forest floor like mirrors, and behaved like a system of reward mechanisms, motivating me to continue finding them. Rocks seemed as if they were placed by algorithm. One evening, under a rising moon that looked as though it were lit by the x,y coordinates of a digital floodlight, I felt compelled to approach a particularly large red cedar tree so I could touch its bark and inquire if it was real or not.
Walking and listening
I began to feel an uncomfortable familiarity with Auster’s story.
exile
an empty urban nothingness
one man walking
another following
multiple, confused, changing identities
The debasement of character down to its foundation so that in its place something else could be created.
solitude
A detachment from mass society.
Cervantes
Auster’s book has an in-depth soliloquy about the many ways Don Quixote exposes the limits and likenesses of fiction and reality, fantasy and truth.
And Thoreau.
Another of the stories featured a man hired to sit in an apartment to watch another man in the apartment across from his. But nothing happens. For months, all the subject can be seen doing is sitting at a desk reading Walden. The observer is told to record their observations in a notebook which, over the period of many months, results in the creation of a book. But the book escapes its duty to deliver a linear plot. In and out of its many days there is nothing but Walden. The observer’s book is, in effect, a rewriting of Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
Eventually the reality of actual experience became vulgar to me. The long, contemplative, narrated walks I was taking became shorter and shorter. Nature had extinguished my interest in the uniformity of her land and skyscapes. I was convinced that humanity had arrived at a point where not a single one of the natural world’s inventions could not be manufactured by our own ingenuity and technology. So I stayed in my mostly empty Console and rarely went outside. Instead, I enhanced my interior reality with decadence. I blew through my project budget with wild abandon, and took great pleasure seeking out extravagant delicacies from the confines of my mostly empty quarters. Designer clothing. Lobster dinners. Steak Diane. More cake. Recordings of Charles Mingus played on my vintage Sansui stereo, sometimes Mahler’s 5th, or Schubert’s final sonatas, interspersed with the sweeping dramatism of a Rachmaninov symphony now and then.
Upon returning from one of my last excursions into the large city park, not far from The Console, I found the Oculus headset and clothing I had ordered sitting on the vibrant patterned carpet outside my door. After nearly two years spent planning Project Walden from an analog perspective, it was time to turn my back on trying to connect to any physical or geographical representations and motifs for what Thoreau documented in the woods of Walden Pond. It was time to translate that place, and what happened there, into a coded fabrication of the past, in the present, as a means to interpret the future.
I charged the device, put it on, and adjusted the settings to my preferences. The cameras on the front of the headset allowed me to see through the brick of plastic attached to my face. I was presented with a low fidelity, black and white, augmented representation of The Console. I was instructed to mark the unobstructed boundaries of where I stood by spraying digitally rendered, blood red, paint on the colourless floor so that I could outline the limits of my virtual space within The Console. Almost instantly, a bright grid grew from the outline I created. Then, I was cast into darkness.
When the thing came on I was somewhere else. In a room, in full color, with books on a shelf, and large windows that looked upon a mountainous landscape where other dwellings shaped like mine dotted the horizon. Stars winked at me from the night sky. But this wasn’t actually anywhere else, it was just a graphic that my eyes were forced to look at because everything that was really around me was blocked out by the headset. That’s how rudimentarily we could now be displaced from reality, I thought. It was that dumb, and that terrifying, all at the same time.
After installing an app that would allow me to use Google Street View to visit Concord, Massachusetts, I loaded it up and navigated to the shore of Walden Pond where I knew Thoreau’s cabin — marked with a cairn of rocks and a stone pillar fence linked with thick chains surrounding what would have been its foundation — was located. I kept reminding myself that all I was seeing was a 360º, panoramic photograph, hung on a dome shaped digital mesh that enveloped me, but it still had the ability to replace The Console with a Walden Pond that was frozen in time, a moment determined by the EXIF data of the camera that took the photo. I was standing in multiple layers of time.
I couldn’t have planned my arrival on the shore of Walden Pond any more perversely tuned to history. I was looking at a 2018 photograph of what was left of Thoreau’s home from inside The Console on July 20th, 2020. It was the same day, 175 years earlier, that, after completing his now infamous hut to enough of a degree that he could spend a first night in it, Thoreau moved his things in, and for the next two years called it home.
All that was left of his sufficient and cozy place with the big windows on each side of it, were a few large, flat stones sprouting from the earth where the foundation of his chimney once stood. I could feel The Console beneath my feet as I lay down on the barren ground where Thoreau’s small bed would have been. I looked up at the pines. Except for the faint sound of light traffic on the road outside The Console, Walden was static. No breeze blew through the branches. No birds filled the forest with their song. No beetles crawled aimlessly through the dirt. No butterflies danced on the air. No earthen scents, or sounds of far off locomotives, could be detected. Nothing that Thoreau deliberated on in his text to the level of detail that drove some readers mad existed here. All I could do was bask in the stillness of an image. The building of my own cabin, and shore of Walden Pond it would rest on, was still a long way off, but already I was beginning to wonder how I was going to live in a stiff cadaver of a place like this for two whole years.
Credits
Headset photos: D. Briker
Clothing: Versace
Accessories: 1017 ALYX 9SM
Join Project Walden
Project Walden is the ongoing documentation of the human condition as it transitions into an inevitable virtual existence. It is based on Henry David Thoreau’s original text that served as a record of the 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days he spent living in a small home he built on the shore of Walden Pond in the summer of 1845.
How you can help
In addition to a publisher (digital or otherwise) Project Walden needs:
- Digital renderers / artists
- Ethereum based land owners
- Technological / digital advisors
- Funders (MANA, ROBUX, ETH)
- Mirror voters
- Supporters (please share!)
