This practice-based research has been initiated from Smithson’s “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey” (Smithson, 1967) that employs the term “toxic discourse” (Buell, 1998) and “dialectical landscape” (James, 1973) to explore and expand the dichotomous extremes from “Nature versus Culture” to “Landscape (object) versus Cityscape (subject)”. Referring to the thoughts from Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), William Wordsworth (1770-1850), Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Jean Baudelaire (1844-1866), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Robert Smithson (1938-1973), Richard Long (b.1945), Michel de Certeau (1925-1986), Brian Dillon (b.1969), and Rebecca Solnit (b.1961), “Walking/ Flaneur” would be explained and coined Walking as Creative Reflections and Outcomes for creative/ literary/ philosophical thoughts.

This PhD thesis mainly consists of THREE research aspects: “Walking Along the River/ On the Road/ In the City…” that demonstrate “Walking/ Flâneur” as a significant artistic-interventive tactics to further explain and illustrate as interceptive/ interactive/ interpretative praxis to contextualize “Towards the Dichotomies In-Between Nature-Culture”.

“Walking Along the River” (the Nature) is initiatively investigating from the Old and New, and the Chinese and Western visual language from the epistemology/ ontology/ genealogy of landscape/ earthwork/ environmental art/ moving image. A most significant and crucial example could be well illustrated by Richard Long’s A Line Made by “Walking” (1967) that documented and recorded the creative reflections and outcomes within the landscape and cityscape contexts (Nature-Culture-bound).

“On the Road/ In the City…” (the Culture) interrogates on Cosmopolitan Urbanism that are inspired from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and de Certeau’s Walking in the City (1984) that develops a controversial platform as critical documentation for Modernization and Urbanization in term of cityscape. It involves an objective-nature-rural-life to a subjective-culture-urban-experience that exemplifies to scholarly interrogation of Dualisms/ Dichotomies “Walking Along-On-In” as the preposition of NatureCultures (as Human vs Non-human, Haraway, 2003) or Nature/Culture (Latour, 2017) on biocultural and sociocultural contexts.

This dichotomous statement is going to be referred and formulated as fundamentals and grounds to the contribution of knowledge: Moving Image as Hybrid Ideas, in which will be explored/ hypothesized/ testified/ criticized via the documentation/ contextualization/ dissemination from Art Praxis.