Panorama resident Lucas Priest will lead these participatory walking games exploring an expanded panorama on Calton Hill (and possibly beyond).
A Slice of Life is a micro-research residency developed in collaboration with The School of Pedestrian Culture and the Collective. Rooted in walking as a social, artistic and critical practice, the project takes Calton Hill (birthplace of the public panorama tradition), as both subject and collaborator. Rather than reproducing the singular, elevated sweep that panoramas promise, Lucas invites participants to look with the site. Together we compose an expanded panorama made from many “slices of life”: micro-observations stitched through time, weather, movement and conversation.
Across a two-hour public walk, Lucas will facilitate participatory “walking games” and scores that train attention. These prompts are simple, playful and welcoming: notice a colour as it recurs; map the breeze across your skin; follow a sound until it changes; trace a line of shadow; exchange vantage points with a stranger; walk the horizon in fragments. Each score invites a new view from Calton Hill, producing a panorama that is cumulative. The city appears not as a spectacle to be viewed from above, but as a living field of relations between people, stones, plants, birds, languages, infrastructures and histories.
This residency extends The School of Pedestrian Culture's ongoing research into attention, place-based learning and collective authorship. Lucas draw on social choreography, urban ecology and traditions of score-based performance. No prior knowledge is required; curiosity is enough. Expect to do something a little unusual in public space, and bring an open mind.
Process is the primary artwork here, but through this residency Lucas will also generate shareable artefacts that encourage others to continue the practice. Selected materials will be available within the Hillside Gallery.
This event is part of our Panorama programme.
About the artist
Lucas Priest is the founder of the School of Pedestrian Culture – a mock-institution designed to disorient how we encounter space and place across Scotland’s central belt. He will take up residency at Collective from August 2025, using the panorama as a lens to explore the changing city and how we experience it.
A Slice of Life builds on recent SoPC projects, including a six month residency with Art Walk Projects and a commission with the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research Collections. At Collective, the work is precisely sited: Calton Hill’s layered histories of looking; astronomical observation, art and tourism, meet everyday pedestrian life. By reframing “walking” as shared noticing in motion, the project asks: How might a panorama be felt, heard and touched as much as seen?