Okay, not really. But it occurs to me that I wrote my recent posts on beatboxing and a ‘language of play’ because re-purposing and re-contextualising things – to take an object or activity and reframe it so it feels or does something different – really interests me. So, when I stumbled on this recent very impressive video of free runner Damien Walters [via], it got me thinking:

1. Generally speaking, urban spaces are spaces of and for work. Free running turns them into places where people  play. I like that.
2. Free running is enabled precisely by the kinds of things of otherwise constitute barriers: fences, walls etc. The things that make a city orderly are also the things that enable a playful disorder. That’s obvious, I know, but it’s still neat.
3. Unlike its cousin parkour, this sort of ‘disorder’ is done primarily for aesthetic, rather than practical reasons (in parkour, any beauty produced is a by-product of a relentless focus on efficient movement).
4. This means that free running also is a public form of art, a temporary type of grafitti that uses bodies rather than paint.
5. Even when urban areas are not explicitly for work – entertainment districts, popular streets with bars and restaurants ets., they follow rather strict rules: line up here to get into the cinema, this is the bar’s patio, this is the street etc. These demarcations are challenged in a fun way by free running, particular because it’s so public. The entire city becomes a playground and, in the most optimistic of circumstances, a person watching a free runner might look at his/her urban space differently.
6. If you were to somehow trace the movement of a free runner, it’d all be arcs, curves and circles. These movements are used to generally jump over rectangular walls, straight edges, barriers, boundaries etc. I just kinda’ think that’s neat.
7. While Mirror’s Edge was a cool concept, a game or movie that could embrace the idea that free running repurposes urban spaces in order to reconceive those spaces themselves would be really interesting.

Anyway, I’m sure I’m the millionth person to say something like this but, like I said, it piqued my interest.