From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Ridin' Newcastle
*Ridin' Newcastle* is a digital work by C. W. Smith engaging Newcastle, New South Wales as a site of embodied movement and subjective reflection. Part of Smith's broader practice of psychogeographic investigation across multiple media — alongside Weather Window and Play Newcastle: Gregson Park''' — the work treats location not as mere setting but as a space where motion and consciousness intersect.
The title's invocation of riding and cycling connects to Smith's recurring interest in navigable space and the relationship between movement and place-memory. Newcastle functions throughout Smith's oeuvre (Antinomicity, essays such as Landscape Within Landscape) as a site of return and recursion — a "bite-sized labyrinth" in the framing of A Complicated Surgery Will Take Place on the Beach Tonight.
*Ridin' Newcastle* participates in Smith's sustained investigation into consciousness, place, and the persistence of self — the ways landscape becomes interior, and movement becomes a form of recursive return.