Reconfigurations of the Concept of Flâneur by the Artistic Practices of Walking in Contemporary Media Art

The concept of flâneur addressed by Benjamin became a portrait of modernity in nineteenth-century Paris. Many still refer to the flânerie without questioning the contemporary context. We want to show how some current media art works by four Brazilian artists provide participatory experiences that reconfigure this concept. To do so, we will analyze them in the context of the expanded field (photographic and cinematographic), in which the process of hybrid conception of the work is crucial. We will also point out how such processes incorporate walking through space as an artistic practice, creating places of interaction in which, even in the presence of an individual experience, the collective aspect becomes important, bringing a more political approach than the one characteristic of the bourgeois and capitalist atmosphere of Parisian flânerie. The concepts of drift and delirium ambulatorium will also be discussed to understand such a reconfiguration of the flâneur in contemporaneity.