Gameify Rosslyn — The Walk

Short dance videos hidden across Rosslyn, Virginia — in its parks, plazas, skywalks, garages, and public artworks. Each one unlocks only where it was filmed. To see the whole piece, you walk the whole loop.

The route threads Rosslyn's overlooked landmarks: Nancy Holt's Dark Star Park, the Anna & David sculpture, Cupid's Garden, the historical marker where the ARPANET crossed the Potomac, the parking garage where Bob Woodward met Deep Throat, and the elevated skywalk system that once stitched the neighborhood together above its streets. The piece is based on footage and locations from 2013, so it is not a reliable map of present-day Rosslyn: some sites have been altered, and some no longer exist. Part of the walk is discovering what remains. The dance remains.

The original 2013 version paired a mobile app with a live performance at the SUPERNOVA Performance Art Festival: audiences walked from site to site, a short dance playing on their phones at each location while the live performance carried them between the points. Then the app platform went out of business and the piece disappeared — no app, no site list, no map. Only the videos, scattered across camera archives, and a recording of the performance.

The rebuild began as archaeology. The original camera had quietly geotagged the 2013 footage, and GPS coordinates recovered from the video files reconstructed the shooting route down to the meter — where the loop started, where it ended, and the order of everything between. The site plan that existed only in memory came back as data, thirteen years later.

The new version distills the piece to its essential mechanic: point to point. There are no transition videos — those belonged to the live performance. You walk, you arrive, the dance plays, the map remembers where you have been.

Gateway Park · Le Méridien Rooftop · Freedom Park · Dark Star Park · Arpanet · Cupid's Garden · Family · Garage Mural · Hillside Park · Black & Red Sculpture · Atrium at Bennett Park · Radiolaria · Interplay · Highlands Park · Anna & David · Chicago Titan · Continuum & Reposto · Path to Key Boulevard · Arlington Temple · Skywalk · Deep Throat Garage · Metro