Walking Memories
An open-source artist's book tracing the digital footprints of an exiled wanderer and his Belgian pixels during an eight-year odyssey
An open-source artist's book tracing the digital footprints of an exiled wanderer and his Belgian pixels during an eight-year odyssey
This artist's book documents the awalkaday project from inception in 2017 to its conclusion in 2024. The online book is bound with a toolkit used since day one and its pages narrate crucial keystrokes and steps. A blend of diverse media — photography, poetry, code, social posts, and blockchain tokens — weaves creative nonfiction into autobiographical insights told from a third-person omniscient viewpoint.
Its illustrated pages tell the story of a terrestrial odyssey across public spaces and computing platforms. Acting as the annotated companion to a series of 263 photographs shot during regular walks throughout Belgium, Europe, the book captures both visual and emotional landscapes. It's the online culmination of an eight-year project by an exiled artist, pioneering a digital artwork that integrates all timestamped drafts into one open-source and free edition.
| ARTIST STATEMENT | artist-statement.md |
| READING GUIDE | reading-guide.md |
◈
Made in the Kingdom of Belgium
An Undocumented Artistic Product Of Afro-Surrealism,
By An Undocumented Artist On The Land of Surrealism.
32 Pages — ENGLISH — Black & White Digital Photography| IMPRINT | imprint.md |
| APPENDIX | appendix.md |
Disclosures and essential information written in the first and third person
This project was born in my spare time, developed independently in the open, and evolved at the pace of a turtle. Countless public drafts and serene long walks have shaped it into its present state, akin to a therapeutic exercise.
The project’s lines of code first appeared online in November 2017, four months after the summer debut of walking and photographing. Since the beginning, the creative process was intuitively, leisurely, or swiftly, from time to time, offline or online. Until it was terminated with an emphasis on narrative writing, visual storytelling retrospectively, artist’s book formatting, and public timestamps.
Below is the HTML code of a Frequently Asked Questions webpage, preserved exactly as written. Note the optimistic “5 year lifespan” — the A Walk, A Day art project ultimately spanned eight years. The project outlived its intended lifespan because survival itself kept being deferred — each asylum appeal extending the legal limbo that sustained the walking practice.
a-walk_a-day.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<!-- Last modification: 17/11/2017 17:17 -->
<title>FAQ | A WALK≡A DAY</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, I'm very glad that you have discovered A WALK≡A DAY !
</p>
<p><strong>INTRO</strong>
<br>Born out of simple boredom and burst of creativity, A WALK≡A DAY is a black and white visual arts project.
<br>Since then, every long walk ends with a collection of b&w photos snapped on-the-go by using a smartphone camera.
</p>
<p><strong>WHEN?</strong>
<br>The first image was published on Instagram (@all.day.walking) on July 19th, 2017.
<br>At least one picture is (or should be) posted on a daily basis.
<br>This art project's lifespan is 5 years.</p>
<p><strong>WHY?</strong>
<br>A single motivating quote essentially inspired the creation of the project : "The Sun is up and running, everyday, for you."
<br>In a global trend of fast-paced urbanization, generations of kids are growing without a sense of curiosity of their surroundings and adventurous drive in the unfamiliar landscapes.
<br>Instagram, with 400 million daily active users, was selected as the most compelling internet platform to host such a street photography gallery that would target millenials and inspire them to creatively join a well-being movement.
<br>Taking long walks and snapping lots of pictures along the way both became complementary in my regular young adult life and I can't refrain from recommending this kind of endeavor to other fellow youngsters.
</p>
<p><strong>HOW?</strong>
<br>Images are shared in black and white format with a white wide frame.
<br>All pics are taken from an Android phone and later, edited in Snapseed.
<br>The hashtag #awalkaday is attached to every post and can be clicked on to view in bulk similar posts shared by the Instagram community.
</p>
<p><strong>WHERE?</strong>
<br>Photos are mostly taken at any time of the day from the streets and hidden alleys of Western Europe.
<br>I'm currently based in Belgium.
</p>
<p><strong>WHO?</strong>
<br>The person behind the #awalkaday art movement is Chris-Armel (@daqhris).
<br>He was born in Burundi and has previously traveled to Eastern Asia, Middle East and North Africa.
</p>
</body>
</html>
The three-bar symbol ≡, synonymous with the two-way street sign ↔, piqued my interest as an indicator of logical equivalence and the monetary unit of a currency on the Ethereum blockchain.
The page listing answers to ‘WHEN, WHY, HOW, WHERE, WHO’, titled FAQ | A WALK≡A DAY, was eventually migrated from my personal site at daqhris.com/awalkaday to an independent open-source project. The art project is structured like an organization on GitHub where all the sites built under the umbrella of awalkaday found a safe shelter.
The awalkaday building blocks became once again the focus of my geeky attention and camera lenses from May 2021 onwards. That was right after receiving a developer certification from web coding classes, taught at freeCodeCamp.org, elongated into the timeframes of Aug-Oct 2016 and Dec 2020-Feb 2021.
This book displays a mix of texts copied and modified from about.awalkaday.art — an online page as old as the project’s earliest footprints — with poetic writings narrating a ‘crème de la crème’ artwork, which is illustrated by evocative awalkaday photographs.
Its pages tell the tale of a human wanderer, portray traces of what was seen, felt, done, and lived from an objective perspective, and also hint at what has come to pass.
Peering into photographs devoid of humans, combing through scattered data trails, cleansing away trauma by crying were a weekly occurrence when recalling shattered memories during a life review at the start of 2024.
Traveling back in my mind’s timeline, against my brain’s resistance, was made a breeze by the patronage of a British artist and theatre-maker who provided rent-free housing on the hilltop of an avenue honoring Mount Kemmel in Brussels, at a flat overlooking the Park of Forest where rose up inspiration, for nearly a year and a half (2023-2025).
For an accurate time-stamped record of the book’s drafts, or an analysis of my public edits scribbled down in git commits, please visit the source code repository. A visual chart showing additions and deletions of encoded texts, on a weekly basis and over a long time window, is available here.
A list of 15 chapters and 17 subchapters showing on which numbered page each one appears
COVEROUTLINEFRONT-1
FRONT-2123
7
11
17
21
25 ANNEX-1
ANNEX-2 BACK-1
BACK-2 Say hello to awalkaday.art, a collection of 263 photographs created by daqhris and published on the Ethereum blockchain since springtime of 2023.
This is a series of black-and-white photographs depicting captivating sights observed in the landscapes of various Belgian regions during regular walks that began in the summer of 2017.
Near the physical endpoint of the digital odyssey, a select number of snapshots were assigned unique names and identification tokens on a public blockchain, guaranteeing that they are authentic, traceable and collectible for everlasting time.
What if we embarked from our individual spots in the wired world on a visual journey through which the solo mission goes beyond pixels to ignite a passion for the great outdoors?
Beyond a fine appearance, this collection is an invitation to embrace the rejuvenating power of nature, to enjoy the fresh air, to be captivated by the surroundings and to cultivate well-being thanks to regular walks, whether short or long.
In an age of fast-paced urbanization, sedentarism and hyperconnectivity, many humans feel disconnected from their local environment and lack the inspiration to explore unfamiliar landscapes. The habit of walking, one of the least tiring yet most rewarding physical activities, remains overlooked.
At first sight, through the photographer’s lens, awalkaday is just a series of photographs and a visual diary of sorts. On a second look, it is a testament to a lasting passion for photography and a vessel sailing his creative skills across oceans.
Architected in computer code languages, a web gallery and a smart contract were openly developed and seamlessly interlinked to ensure effortless navigation for whoever wishes to marvel, from anywhere, at the travelogue in a visa-free setting.
The wanderer’s burden lightened by rudimentary equipment: Nokia as Air Force, laptop as command center, and libre software as darkroom
awalkaday 23-2022 → Railway tracks converge toward the horizon; a highway bridge crosses above them. The image was made through a window — its reflections still visible, a layer between lens and landscape. All the tools described here traveled this way.
The collection revolves around locations in Belgium and explores a diverse range of scenes that include streets, landscapes, architecture, and nature.
The monochromatic scenes document sightings of eye-catching real-life environments, and preserve the visual memories of a human wanderer, exiled from his homeland, on a quest propelled by regular walks.
These photographs were captured during walks through the streets and alleyways of Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels regions. The photographic process was stretched in duration to six years, 2017-2018 and 2021-2022, tied up by a gap of two blank years in-between.
In 2020, traveling on foot became a grounding habit following the outbreak of a global pandemic. Therefore, the artist resumed his leisure activity, and morphed it into a therapeutic mobile quest.
A minimalist technical plan was adopted to reduce the lingering fear of losing electronic tools — stolen, damaged, or malfunctioning — and to fuel a quest progressing at the rhythm of both frequent and abrupt moves around a terrestrial territory seen as the land of adoption and refuge.
At the beginning of the travelogue on Western soil, between 2017 and 2018, a Xiaomi smartphone, acquired in Beijing around 2015, was the tool of choice for capturing and editing still images.
In early 2021, a smartphone, operating under Android One software system, was purchased to meet the need for a dedicated mobile camera. Its technical appeal was receiving secure software updates from an American corporation, Google.
The low-cost computing machine, manufactured by a supply chain for a Finnish corporation and bought at a Belgian chain of stores, was equipped with two rear cameras which were endowed with a 13-megapixel primary sensor and a 2-megapixel depth sensor.
The Nokia’s longevity and endurance earned it the merit of being compared to a cheap handheld Air Force One in the hands of a moving target of celestial attention and protection.
The smart device was cryptographically identified and verified as his by him on a cyberspace board in the summer of 2022. In a stunning turn of events, a few weeks later, the handheld computer was attacked by more than a single cyber-roaming intrusion, deniably sponsored by weaponized powers, as strong as a nation-state’s.
The Android One’s circuits were penetrated by an illogical force in the last season of 2022, then again in the first season of 2024. Such were unreported cases of traumatic events that, year after year, comically proved one’s resilience to ill-willed interference, and tearfully washed away hopes of mercy.
All photographs were edited by using Android software applications before being sent off to cyberspace, namely Snapseed (uncolouring into greyscale), White Border (wide white framing), and Scrambled Exif (removal of native metadata). All of them were manually processed, in a sequential manner, to attempt escaping from global mass surveillance and third-party sabotage of equipment.
Overall, the two cameras had basic features to balance highlights and shadows in photographs, and produced decent details in well-lit conditions. They assisted with scene recognition and optimization, but all cameras were obviously unprivileged by their mediocre sensors.
awalkaday 28-2022 → A church on an island where the Moselle splits in two, Metz, France. Its metadata was stripped before reaching this page. The photo knows where it was taken. The file no longer does.
A laptop computer, branded as Hasee God of War and acquired on the Asian continent, was very useful for coding sessions while building the online gallery on top of digital foundations.
The computing device was one of the few items, in addition to engineering textbooks, and personal belongings of emotional value, that he was able to stealthily keep or ship out to North Africa after being arbitrarily detained by Chinese authorities in June 2016.
Once upon a snowy day of 2015, enriched by acting in the background of state-produced war movies in the Far East, he allocated a handful of electronic money, pocketed via a social network’s wallet, for a Singles’ Day online sale in celebration of his birthday. The online deal’s golden feature was the hardware’s visual computing horsepower, which is graphically attuned to workloads handling imagery as well as machine-built inside factories tasked with Nvidia’s outsourcing.
Unfortunately, the gaming computer first mysteriously crashed in the winter of 2017, but was resurrected the next year, and finally, relapsed four years later, during a malware analysis in the winter of 2022. The nearly decade-old computing device, still alive and undiagnosed in his care, eventually regained basic functionality under Ubuntu-flavored linux software.
A second-hand lightweight laptop — made by an American enterprise esteemed for Second World War efforts from a one-car garage — was bargained out of a gamer friend’s hands in exchange of cash from a land-based construction job in the spring of 2023. The HP Elitebook laptop, a military grade computer, helped the mobile photographer to finish off the mission of cloud-based construction from Brussels, post-tokenization of photos on Ethereum.
The gamer friend of African origin had been hosting a first birthday party on Belgian soil, gathering daqhris and other fresh off the boat friends, when A WALK≡A DAY commits and intentions were initially encoded on a public webpage, from a corner of a dorm room party, in the cold days of November 2017.
It’s worth pointing out that most of the creative tools and works were more than once rescued, recovered or revived thanks to pieces of computer software, linux & git, brought to life by a Finnish-born American inventor who walks when working.
A timeline lining up bits and pieces of the scaffolding and the milestones marking progressive moves of data flows on a cyber terrain
awalkaday 71-2022 → Two paved roads diverge from a single point somewhere in Belgium. The photograph did not intend an allegory. It became one.
The awalkaday photo collection evolved since its launch along two pathways that the photographer rarely named as such, because naming them would have required seeing them both at once — and survival, as a daily practice, does not permit that kind of distance.
The first pathway was artistic: walks taken, photographs made, code committed, tokens minted, galleries built. The second pathway was legal: forms filed, interviews endured, appeals submitted, decisions absorbed, silences waited through. Both pathways demanded proofs of documentation — pieces of evidence about a life genuinely immersed in Belgian landscapes. The art practice produced that evidence without knowing it was needed. The asylum procedure consumed it without knowing it existed.
Running alongside these two, other parallels accumulated. Physical exclusion and digital inclusion moved in opposite directions at the same speed: every door the administrative system closed, a distributed network held open. Equipment losses and legal rejections arrived in clusters, each cluster followed by recovery. Two identities — one civic and contested, one digital and immutable — developed simultaneously, the second growing more permanent as the first grew more precarious.
Both roads, from where and when awalkaday 71-2022 was shot, lead somewhere outside the frame.
The visual art practice, reinforced by web surfing, began in July 2017, when a photo was posted on Instagram with the following caption: ‘Don’t watch the clock. Do what it does. Keep going’.
The first and last photographs, preserved in the collection on the blockchain, appeared online respectively in November 2017 and September 2022.
The Internet domain awalkaday.art was officially registered in May 2021.
One year later, a meaningful milestone was reached when selected photographs graced the virtual walls of the MONOLITH Gallery inside Sellen Hall in July 2022.
As of September 2023, the awalkaday.art smart contract and its contract deployer are labeled by a major search engine and browser for blockchain data, Etherscan.
A congratulatory message citing the virtual exhibition hall of the photo series was posted by the .ART web domains registry on two social media networks in February 2024.
According to traces of footprints found in public records, the photo odyssey was revived in the Francophone city of Bastogne. The small town, deprived of a train station, had on its main street an electronics shop. A shopkeeper facilitated human access, without asking for proofs of human identity, to an automated banking machine exchanging paper bills with blockchain currencies.
After verification at the end of 2020 of token conversion operations nearby a tax heaven kingdom, what the photographer dreamt of was earning banknotes in cash form. His greedy dreams used to take place on a king-size bed, adjacent to a smoking chimney, below the wooden roof of a six-person Burundian family that was naturalized as Belgian by laws of the 20th century.
Throughout months of unemployment, little to no free time was wasted away from executing entrepreneurial moves across public networks of cyberspace or wandering kilometers of walkways built on dismantled railway tracks, RAVeL. As soon as the Sun rose up on his November birthdate in 2021, romantic ties woven in French were severed by a Belgian girlfriend who battled everyday an autoimmune hindrance to her walks in the city of Verviers. The last surprise du jour unwrapped a present: a digital stack of ENS governance tokens parachuted into his public wallet.
awalkaday 173-2021 → An old cobbled road in Bastogne, shot from near ground level looking up toward sunlight breaking through clouds. The angle refuses to survey the territory. From down here, the road and the light are the same thing.
As a reward for earlier transactions using an Ethereum protocol to name his account’s numerical identifier as daqhris.eth, the equivalent of a European engineer’s four-months salary was granted all of a sudden with no strings attached. Out of his freelancing pocket, end-of-year donations followed suit within the Bitcoin network and a crypto-assets growth fund established to further the next milestones inside the Ethereum realm.
By keeping in mind the unrelenting spirit of a town associated with a USA-led victorious offensive during the Second World War, Chris expanded the range of skills to be hired as a local handyman who can do-it-all. One job here, one call there, on call all four seasons, until landing an offer from the city’s computer boutique in the spring of 2022. The promise of employment carried benefits: a business owner’s letter to support the regularization of the geek’s legal status.
To the astonishment of his social network in the provincial town, the delayed response from a Brussels tower housing a federal office governing non-Belgians smashed down the financial offer for community integration through computer repair in the summer of 2022. Then, despair showed up again in a fog of dark emotions, uncolored digital snapshots, mental screams for bank-free miracles, and pedestrian retreats into the Ardennes forests.
Later, the blockchain publication of the photo collection was achieved in subsequent steps. First off, the creation of an eponymous smart contract occurred in August 2022. The contract creation was followed by the registration of awalkaday.art as an Ethereum domain name in September 2022.
About half a year onward, in the midst of his desperate migration to a nomadic lifestyle sheltered by refugees in Brussels, 263 WALK tokens were minted on Ethereum in February 2023, marking a significant moment in the history of the photo series. A month prior, the artist’s wallet had left behind its digital fingerprint at a cryptographic ceremony when contributing a random number to secure the future of Ethereum’s upgrades.
In the virtual realm of blockchain-based art platforms, the artist created a profile on behalf of his work, then listed artworks on Coinbase, Foundation, Rightclick, The Hug, Zora, SuperRare, Manifold, Highlight and OpenSea starting from the second half of 2023.
As an artist, coder and hacker with published work on a blockchain, he participated in a 3-day international hackathon and gathering of Ethereum software developers organized by ETHGlobal and held for one time only in Brussels, Belgium (July 2024).
It’s uncertain if the Goddess of unpredictable fate and luck had to intervene for an undocumented person tethered to one country, in order to gift his timeline with three last-minute acts of good fortune. Firstly, the relocation of large-scale events out of Paris due to lodging reasons linked to concurrent Olympic Games.
Secondly, the recovery of a biometric passport requested for event attendance, which was discovered by the ex-girlfriend in a discarded bag under her queen-size bed. The passport was kept at all costs from being withheld by agents working for advanced nations on his exile path from East to West, and was the keeper of years-old records about entry into the Schengen area.
Thirdly, weeks before ending on a colorful note the visual art project, a tri-colored jacket made for cyclists attracted his shopping eyes at a second-hand clothing store in Les Marolles, the artistic heart of the capital city. With Bastogne printed at the back of the sportswear worn during the last day, different kinds of eyes could notice the hilarious exporter of Belgian pixels walking around swarms of hackers.
Since then, after honing his skillsets as an Ethereum app developer and overcoming the learning curve of hackathons, his next blockchain-based artistic projects began: Zinneke Rescue Mission, to be preceded by Mission Enrollment.
Five territories map out nomadism from one computing platform to another in search of visibility, transparency, presentation, discourse, or permanence
Since July 2017
Instagram enables users to showcase their creativity and to connect by affinity to imagery and visual storytelling.
The monochrome photographs were originally posted on Instagram by @walk.day (managed by @iamdaqhris), on an almost daily basis, continuously for years. Each photograph is accompanied by its city location and a timestamp.
In total, 454 photographs have been showcased on Instagram. They all carry the hashtag #awalkaday, as envisioned in summer 2017. This has been consistent all the way back to the first social media post.
Since November 2017
GitHub offers a collaborative environment to programmers in addition to version control, codebase hosting, and project management tools.
The underlying codebase supporting at least three pillars of the awalkaday series of photos — gallery, book, shop — is hosted and runs on GitHub, where every single committed modification can be tracked, retraced, or audited in real time.
In the winter of 2017, when free attendance to French-spoken lectures was just starting inside the Namur-based computer department of a Jesuits-affiliated public university, their testing phase began at github.com/daqhris/awalkaday by use of a computer-readable language.
One month later, a series of French-written law-abiding decisions knocked down rights to attend a ground-based university, like a domino toppling. Thus, daqhris was rewarded, with a two-times university drop-out trophy on two of Earth’s continents, without a drum roll announcement, during the early chilling days of 2018.
The public code repositories in git format contain all commits attached to a digital signature and code changes from the beginning at github.com/awalkaday.
Since May 2021
Once the art project was resumed in the spring of 2021, a limited number of the salvaged photos began to be steadily uploaded to a purpose-built web gallery, awalkaday.art, which ultimately hosts a catalog of 263 photographs from the collection in a custom-designed, interactive and responsive gallery.
The web gallery prioritizes a smooth and random order of display for each visit, allowing for ease of navigation and discovery of photographs by surprising visitors with fresh-eye perspectives every load time. The gallery’s code enforcing mathematical randomness in JavaScript dates from February 2023.
awalkaday-art/tree/master/assets/js/main.js
// Main.
var $main = $('#main');
// Thumbs.
$main.children('.thumb').each(function() {
var $this = $(this),
$image = $this.find('.image'),
$image_img = $image.children('img'),
randomPos;
// Set random background position.
randomPos = Math.floor(Math.random() 100);
$image.css('background-position', `${randomPos}%`);
// Shuffle the elements.
$main.children('.thumb').sort(function() {
return Math.random() - 0.5;
}).appendTo($main);
A 3D exhibition hall, constructed since the springtime of 2023, welcomes all digital visitors at oncyber.io/awalkaday.art. The virtual exhibition, which caught the attention of silicon-based reality promoters at launch in the spring of 2024, remains open to this day.
Since November 2021
X allows users to share short-form media works while fostering real-time engagement in public conversations. Over time, it became a habit to navigate the digital sea of information, and to flock around inspiring figures twittering about a myriad of topics.
News and viewpoints related to the photo collection have been broadcast on X, where the artist posting via @awalkadayart, connects with a diverse audience, announces key milestones, and builds relationships with artists, researchers, supporters, and collectors.
When his body no longer laid down on a soft bed in the snowy year-end of 2022, his Twitter account became a speakerphone broadcasting a near-bankruptcy effort to sell valuable assets amassed in the ethereal world of a blockchain. Back then, the live-tweeted photo of a popular newspaper played the role of a spokesperson relaying his inhumane misfortune on February 2, 2023.
Going forward, in synchronized motion with his teary eyes, his smartphone camera turned a blind eye to interior tearings and exterior walkways in favor of preserving only a digital façade connected to peers through networking.
5:49 pm · 2 Feb 2023
I'm selling in order to be able to rent a convenient place to live.
At the moment, I'm living in a squat in Brussels ("Paleis"/"Palais des Droits").
Since December 2022, I'm stuck trying to be productive and creative while living in this hell-hole.
(https://www.bruzz.be/tag/palais-des-droits)
Since August 2022
For the final leg of a trek on digital platforms, daqhris publicly minted the set of 263 photographs, which he had miraculously recovered after another chaotic winter.
Blessed by the angelic support of a cryptocurrency wallet, that had been activated in 2017, bootstrapped in 2021, and put to use in 2022, he preserved them for the long run as non-fungible ERC-721 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that allows developers to deploy self-executing code in the form of smart contracts and applications. The artworks were wrapped in a smart contract, recorded in the public ledger as awalkaday.art, and self-published so that they can be preserved, collected and exchanged. The smart contract address is 0xE31801C2E58b151C3deD2cB29dA56147b7f27eB1 and its source code has a file on-display below. Its ASCII art depicts the awalkaday logo encoded in the contract itself.
Contract Source Code — File 1 of 5 : WALK.sol
// SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT
pragma solidity ^0.8.0;
/// @title: awalkaday.art
/// @author: manifold.xyz
import "./ERC721Creator.sol";
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
// //
// //
// //
// w ┌└ .╔ //
// ««M" "┤«╓ //
// │∩ Y //
// "√, ,~"""w //
// ▄█▀▀█▄ (¼┴w ┌" y //
// █▌ .█▌ M"└. .┘ //
// ╙▀▀╙ //
// ░░ßßßß░) ▄███▓▄ //
// ╠∩ #∩ ╠L ██ .╓╓█▌╓╓╓╓╓╓ //
// ╠∩ ╠∩ ╠L █∩ ██ ██ ╓ ╠∩ //
// ╠∩ ╠∩ ╠L ▐█ ██ ╫█ (╠ ╠∩ ║╙╙╙╙╙╙╙╙╙╙╙║║ //
// ╠∩ ╠∩ ╠L ╫█ ██ ║█ (╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ╔, m │╠ //
// ╚ ╚ ╚∩ █▌ .█▀ ▐█ (╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ╠L (╠ │╠ //
// ß░ßßßßßßßßßßßßßßßß░█▌ß██ßß║█¬(╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ╚ÑN ÑßM │╠ //
// ║░ ,, ╓ ╓ ,╖█─┌█∩ ██ (╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ │╠ //
// ║░ ╙╠ ╠∩ (╠ ╚╫█ ██∩╓███ (╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ║L (╠ │╠ //
// ║░ ╙╠M ╠░M (╠M≈ │██ ╙╡▒█Ö▐█ (╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ╠░, (╠, │╠ //
// ║░ █▌ █▌ (█▌(╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ │╠ //
// ║░ ⌠░ ░∩ (░ ╔█∩ ███ (██(╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ╔, ╔ │╠ //
// ║░ ╙╠ ╠∩ (╠ ║█ ┌█▌██(╠█▓╠ ╠∩ ╠∩ ╠L (╠ │╠ //
// ║░ `└└ º└" └└" ╫█└ ██└"▀█▄ ██ ╠∩ ╠∩ ║░ß ║░M │╠ //
// ██ ▐█ ╙█▌ ▀█▄ //
// █▌ █▌ ▀█▄▐█n //
// █▄██ ▀▀▀ //
// └▀╙ //
// //
// //
// //
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
contract WALK is ERC721Creator {
constructor() ERC721Creator("awalkaday.art", "WALK") {}
}
The monochromatic snapshots were assembled, named, and minted during a wintertime stay as a homeless person. The location: the ironically-named Palais des Droits, a state-owned financial building which had been converted into a squalid squat. He publicly safeguarded them on a financial network of computers on Valentine’s Day in 2023, fortunately one day before a scheduled eviction from the infamous shelter in Schaerbeek.
Once released into a sovereign financial ecosystem, the fear of losing the awalkaday photographs vanished into thin air, transcended the confines of his last encrypted device — the Android One — whose secure updates had been halted near the end of 2022.
After landing on a blockchain terrain in a batch series, each photo began to carry a name, similar to the title of a page in a logbook, for example: awalkaday 185-2022.
Each name is a string of words and numbers that begins with the artistic theme awalkaday, then ends with a computer-calculated day of the year, linked by a hyphen to the year of when the photo was first dropped online without a parachute, and crossed the radar of cyberwarfare forces without a travel visa.
Reframing version control philosophy as artistic methodology through transparent iteration, public refinement, and trails of GIT commits
git is a version control system that tracks changes to computer source code with speed and efficiency in a distributed way. Version control is a technique that helps maintain a record of all changes throughout the development process.
git commits are snapshots of code changes in such a version control system at a particular point in time. Each commit captures modifications made by the developer(s), cryptographically signed for verification. They are like notarized timestamps — each edit is witnessed by a global network of servers, making the archive tamper-proof.
The creative process was treated as a series of iterative steps that rely on public git commits. The awalkaday commits were produced openly, secured with cryptographic signatures, and organized in a linear sequence within a lightweight file.
By improving upon the way that creators of works of art used to refine their artist’s proofs, the awalkaday project evolved incrementally by leaving behind an intact, public and historical trail of its development. This incremental evolution, documented by public git commits, mirrors evolutionary biology’s principle about change occurring gradually to result in a traceable lineage and a fossil record.
An open source ethos which embodies principles such as transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development was embraced with open arms.
To gain exposure to software-powered innovation, daqhris was an active contributor to the Free and Open Source Software Developer Conference in Brussels every year since 2020. The annual conference enabled him to stay connected with the European software developer community, despite being legally barred from university enrollment and professional employment.
As a volunteer, one of his most memorable acts was standing onstage, in front of a packed amphitheater in February 2023 while homeless in Brussels, to introduce a scientific talk on ‘Open Source Software at NASA’, presented by an American astronomer, when celebrating 25 years of open-source next to volunteering and attending peers.
In the second half of 2024, daqhris began to ingeniously craft an online artist’s book, book.awalkaday.art, which spotlights various aspects of his git-dependent artistic practice, and meets the public eye from a technical documentation platform, GitBook.
The oldest git commits pushed up and signed by daqhris date back to February 2016. They may be seen as the remnants of an extracurricular passion that infused an innovative spirit into a student’s life in the East. A lifestyle sponsored by an undergraduate scholarship, split between on-campus or off-campus landmarks, spent crossing over the Great Firewall of China, and bypassing man-made virtual walls through private tunnels to wave hello to the world.
Much earlier fragments of his public code contributions were likely archived inside the GitHub-sponsored Arctic Code Vault in February 2020, among notable human-crafted software artifacts, for over a thousand years.
Looking way back, an initial foray into a central hub of GIT repositories in May 2011, at the age of nineteen in Bujumbura, Burundi, seems comparable to planting a seed of innovation in the fertile soil of a burgeoning digital platform.
That seed has since blossomed into a time-stamped nomadic odyssey — rooted in cyberspace, sustained by a wandering slender figure, and grounded on Belgian soil — awalkaday.art.
A portrait of a Burundian assembled from fragments of darkened memories: Beijing to Brussels, war filming to refuge seeking, engineer-in-training to undocumented
Chris-Armel, digitally identified as daqhris, is the artist, photographer, and software developer whose binary footprints formed the awalkaday.art Photography Collection. He shouldered a heavy artistic load during the second half of his twenties, while living, wandering, and gazing at landscapes of Belgium.
awalkaday 202-2021 → A first-person view: legs on a bench, dappled grass, white-barked trees receding into the distance. The page asks who he is. The photograph answers from the perspective of someone who has, for a moment, stopped walking.
Born in 1992, raised with a spoon feeding his mouth on East African soil, Chris was educated in his teenage years at a state-funded public school, and another one backed by a Jesuit institution on the territory of Bujumbura, Burundi. The two public schools were named in a religious manner after the Morning Star in Latin as Stella Matutina, and the Holy Spirit in French as Saint-Esprit.
Around the global debut of Instagram’s cyber conquest, Chris decided to learn photography without knocking on any teacher’s door. To kill time in Beijing’s streets, he began clicking on the shutter button of a Canon camera that was bought with his student’s savings, circa 2012.
daqhris.me (stored on GitHub since 2017)Beginning in 2013 with accelerated dual immersion — in a Chinese urban culture and an American online network — until the season of his sunrise portrait on top of the sacred Mount Tai (Spring 2016), he was scientifically studying computer engineering at an elite technical university. The institution for higher learning was located on a road that is memorable as 学院, a two-letter Mandarin translation of a school within a university, and a homophone of xué yuán, meaning ‘officer cadet’ in the People’s Liberation Army.
On the holiday marking the end of the Chinese New Year celebrations, he did not skip holding a brand-new computer on his lap. Instead of lighting lanterns on a festival day, 乔里斯 ‘Qiao Li Si’ used his coder name daqhris to release GIT commits inside a cloud environment of foreign computer servers. The commits of February 22, 2016 were effective at merging a #1 request for code changes into his hello-world repository on GitHub. A plain-text comment was hooked to the commit Finish README, scribbled down in Markdown language during school vacation to say what’s next.
Few bits of details about myself, don't bother reading, pass it on to your kids! Cheers to restraining your ego. 😄
hello-world/README.md
# hello-world
Amahoro!
This is my Hello World project. It is a made of results of my first GitHub tutorial. I am officially taking my baby steps into a new community. Followed instructions can be found here https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/
This winter is wrecking my bones and brains. Therefore, I am cheerfully answering a hotline bling call to pick up on the fingers and nerves break dance! (just don't wanna miss my college grad bus :D)
Later on, his artistic style cheaply improved upon digital photography techniques, aided by open-source computing software, playgrounds in public spaces, and dormant engineering knowhow. The awalkaday photographs are monochrome with a 1:1 aspect ratio, and capture fleeting memories recorded during walks geofenced to Belgian and, in part, broader European landscapes.
Accompanied by his mother, who flew back shortly after, he landed in Brussels in the winter of 2016. The kindred separated following a summer-autumn stopover in Cairo, where his parents and siblings had settled in the prestigious district of المهندسين — ‘The Engineers’ in Arabic — before his departure, across the sea, seated on an Egyptian airline, to the executive capital of Europe.
His aims and dreams in Europe — beyond pursuing university education again — included seeking safe haven away from persecution by his motherland’s diplomats and their Chinese counterparts while studying abroad two seasons earlier.
Leading up to exile from China and Burundi, his original sin was attributed by Communism-preaching Chinese authorities to a one-week cocktail of arbitrary ingredients in Spring 2016. The confidential cocktail’s ingredients were deposited on a cross-country tabletop, covertly sent over electronic communication rails, and unaccompanied by any legal counsel.
On the torturous path to confining the multilingual man for five, then stretched into twenty-one, nights and days of brainwashed captivity, not all decisionmakers were aware that the ingredients were:
awalkaday 59-2022 → From inside a tunnel, a pedestrian underpass in Namur, everything points toward the opening at the far end. One figure near the light, barely visible. The list above has just ended. The geometry here has only one direction.
Once upon the summer of 2017, Chris had been residing in the Red Cross camp of Belgrade on the outskirts of Namur, Belgium, for almost ten months — since the day of his 24th wintertime birthday — as a newly arrived asylum seeker.
To combat prolonged boredom and physical inactivity, an idea sparkled in his mind, urging him to combine all of his skills — black-and-white photography, visual design, and software coding — to launch an artistic project.
Using rudimentary photographic equipment and online public platforms, coupled with an open-source digital toolbox, he has visually documented a years-long journey that artfully depicts outdoor walks in exile, and logs publicly footprints around a non-native land.
In the absence of photographic evidence of the surreal story — made in and imported from China — a portion of those ingredients ended up being recycled against his appetite during the first course of Belgian legal asylum procedures (2016-2018) served to his volunteering female lawyer.
Until the day his exhausted mind and hypervigilant body gave an incorrect location—his father was in Rwanda, he told the male judge, though this was untrue. Then life spiraled: from the courtroom question «Il est où ton papa?» (‘Where is your father?’) to spinning like a «toupie» (‘spinning top’)—untethered, directionless, out of control.
After half a year of posting on Instagram and coding on GitHub — from the second continent he had discovered in his lifetime — the mission was abruptly halted. His laptop crashed; his smartphone was stolen. Both losses occurred within the refugee camp enclosure in Francophone Belgium, at the start of 2018.
Three years later, during the season of blooming lush gardens in 2020, the photographic odyssey relaunched. Funded by earnings from a painting job, the lonely photo walks were ran from an attic room in Bastogne — near the Belgian-Luxembourg border — until the season of dry skin shivering in 2022.
Since day one, the photographer lacked rights to knock on doors of medical care and health insurance buildings. Step by step, he grew accustomed to refusal of humanitarian aid and expulsion from banking services. His social status and life as an immigrant remained uncertain, hopeless, angst-inducing and precarious.
He faced recurring unemployment despite numerous skills. He walked — burning organic calories instead of emitting gas pollutants — and killed two birds with one stone: environmental virtue and economic necessity. In stark contrast with modern European cultural conventions, awalkaday.art stuck around neither as a state-sponsored artistic endeavor, nor as a brick-and-mortar art gallery.
One question strolled through his mind, circling the nervous pathways during every walk: “What if these walks, these photographs, these commits… what if none of it yields positive results as by-products? What if the State still says no?”
A question answered intuitively by Chronos, the Greco-Roman God of Time: “Fear not. Time will tell.” And then, quieter, the Catholic God whispered telepathically one word — a Hebrew loanword naturalized through Greek to Latin — to his inner ear: “Amen.”
In the spring of 2024, the photographic tool rung like some years ago, as if it were imitating a Church bell, to notify of the State’s final, unappealable, and negative decision. His handheld computer sounded as ding-dong memories from past years of remote intrusions. Weeks later, phone calls rushed in, then were unanswered intuitively. However, the pace of outdoor walks was increased to donate to the Red Cross his body’s lifesaving liquids one year later — in the spring of 2025.
The Englishmen’s adage “a walk a day keeps the doctor away” ceased to be true for the photographer, eight years post-conception of the project, by the grace of a Belgian network of caring women: a doctor, an ex-girlfriend, an anthropologist, a retired nurse, a public agent, a filmmaker, scientists, artists, etc.
These walks became his penance, his pilgrimage, his enterprise for clinging to life. Not winking at courts — they had already judged — but to Time itself.
Convenient methods of contacting the walking photographer were actively run, over an extended window of time, through worldwide optical cables. Due to lack of a sedentary outdoor box which receives letters delivered by Belgian postal services, portable inboxes became the go-to solution for in-and-out exchange of messages relayed by Internet platforms for free or by rented computing storage.
ISBN: ▬▬▬ ▬ ▬▬ ▬▬▬▬▬▬ ▬
This book ID is absent from the Royal Library,
Until the activation of its author’s human ID.
Photos, Writings: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Source Code License: EUPL 1.2
Text-only Edition: book.awalkaday.art/llms-full.txt
Author,
Photographer,
Designer, Producer,
Writer, Editor & Publisher:
© Chris-Armel Iradukunda ↔ daqhris
Online publication of the first draft: July 2024
Last modification of book content: March 2026
Open-sourced by gitbook-bot on behalf of daqhris
If this book has moved you, the photographs that sparked it are available as collectible tokens. Each token preserves a visual proof that someone walked, observed, and documented a human life that did not vanish in our collective memory. Your collection supports the artist and keeps his artworks alive.
A token of gratitude goes to:
Adva Z. & Daan V., AJ (@ajlkn), Anna R. & Christophe M., Agami A. & Grysbok H., Amandine N., Alice D. & Cyril M., Andrée D., Anthony H., Back to Camp - Les Scouts Fédération, Begüm E., Britt H., Cécile G., Christine C., CHU St-Pierre de Bruxelles, Claire L.-M., Croix-Rouge de Belgique, Doc’Riders - Médecins du Monde, Effi W. & Amir B., ETHGlobal, FOSDEM, Hectolitre, Jean de Dieu N., Jovial & Jadès, Karina B., Khadja N., Marthe P., Maison Médicale 1190, Maxime P., Michel D., New Must Computer SPRL, Nicolas G., Obscura Team (Tony, Omar & Wim), Opération Thermos, Ornella V., Sylvie T. & Patrick F., Peter K., Rotary Club Bastogne, Samusocial Brussels, Public Welfare Workers (Caroline R., Nadège N., Tom V., Youssra E.), Ram Patra, Scolastique N. & Anselme N., Simon T., Shila A., Salim, Suleiman Z., Université de Namur, Valérie H. and Willeke V.
Diomède N., Espérance N., Shella I., Nicolas I. & Jobert I.
awalkaday 105-2022 portrays Muntpunt
Lists accounting for the number of all tokenized photographs, split into three categories, and arranged by location, year and season
| LOCATION | Number of Photos |
|---|---|
| Antwerp | 21 |
| Bastogne | 48 |
| Brussels | 42 |
| Gembloux | 1 |
| Huy | 2 |
| Libramont | 8 |
| Liège | 10 |
| Marche-en-Famenne | 2 |
| Marloie | 1 |
| Metz, France | 2 |
| Namur | 116 |
| Nivelles | 1 |
| Waremme | 9 |
| YEAR | Number of Photos |
|---|---|
| 2017 | 30 |
| 2018 | 13 |
| 2019 | — |
| 2020 | — |
| 2021 | 107 |
| 2022 | 113 |
| SEASON | Number of Photos |
|---|---|
| Autumn | 29 |
| Winter | 93 |
| Spring | 39 |
| Summer | 102 |
The total of 263 is a prime number that is irreducible by any number other than itself and one. Like the person who limited the series to an indivisible number, the collection resists administrative subdivision.
Three extra spatial stories about the impact of the Belgian-made pixels on Earth and Ethereum
The photograph on the cover, awalkaday 251-2022, was shot, edited and published online before a sculpture was later installed on the same site inside a public park in Namur (Wallonia, Belgium).
This black-and-white photo captured a fleeting moment. It preserves for ages a romantic outdoor scene: a couple of people sitting in the open air on the grass under a glowing tree.
Sculpted in bronze by Belgian artist Nat Neujean, The Daughters of Water (1951) depicts two intertwined nymphs, symbolizing two European rivers: Meuse and Sambre. The colorful photographs of the sculpture were taken on the 8th day of May 2024, a day that commemorates the Second World War-ending victory of democracy over fascist ideologies across Europe in the mid-20th century.
The two artworks share roots in a 19th century park named after the first Queen of the Belgians, Louise-Marie. Zoom in to notice a pair of beings, humans or deities, photographed in the shade of one slowly aging tree, observed on the linear timeline of Mother Nature. The secret is: Tree of Life.
awalkaday 251-2022 → The tree fills two-thirds of the frame, its foliage nearly white in monochrome. The couple in its shade are small enough to miss on first look. The sculpture installed here later shares the same grammar of scale: figures beneath something much larger than themselves.
Beyond physical locations, digital naming also celebrated Belgian places. Four ENS domains owned by daqhris.eth since the summer of 2022, named after towns and rivers, have been decorated with awalkaday photographs. The local landscape was mapped and displayed on an Ethereum blockchain naming protocol to celebrate a rare week of international conferences: EthCC [7] & ETHGlobal Brussels in the summer of 2024.
Established in July 2021, and signed with a cryptographic algorithm, a personal story inspired the founding of daqhris.eth Cryptoassets Growth Fund, which later enabled all financial steps. The fund’s formal and financial structure (table of contents, definitions, disclaimers) was documented and lives online at daqhris.com/cryptoassets-growth-fund.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
The inability to settle and remain steadily in a physical location
has taught me recently that any physical asset may be seized, stolen,
damaged or devalued by an individual,
a group of persons or a larger entity like a government.
Since the summer of 2015 until now,
I live more or less with few personal belongings.
I have experienced events that forced me to stay on the move
due to safety, poverty, or weather reasons.
At least once a year, an event has occurred that led me to lose access
to banking services or university facilities, or health care systems.
I have given up on owning large or heavy items after life-altering experiences
in detention centers, refugee camps, homelessness, seasonal lodging,
couch-surfing, and lately as an undocumented immigrant.
After repeatedly going through the loss of personal properties, reputation,
material possessions, human connections, and at the end,
stumbling into a slow but steady recovery,
I have only been able to regain a few valuable assets.
Chief among them are some digital assets,
namely Bitcoin and Ether purchased in the Autumn of 2017.
I managed to recover the BTC holdings in the Summer of 2019 and ETH in the Summer of 2021.
How? Well, by regaining access to digital wallet backups!
Although I was not actively managing the crypto wallets,
they remained intact and gained much value afterward.
For a long time, I thought of them as lost property.
But later on, after the recovery of their secret keys,
I understood the high value of global decentralized blockchains
and the related digital currencies.
Thus, I decided to entirely play the long game
and set up a personal crypto growth fund
with the intent of holding long-term investments in digital assets.
In case I earn or receive more paper money than the amount
that is necessary for basic needs (i.e: food, transport, accommodation),
then I will purchase some cryptocurrencies and add them to
the self-custodial wallets of the fund.
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An exhaustive table listing the 263 digital photographs with names, public timestamps and WALK token identifiers