From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Empty World Walking Project
This article is about a specific walking meditation tour. For the broader conceptual framework, see Empty World Meditations.
A participant-led walking tour through Newcastle and its surrounding emptied-out zones, following the methodology of Empty World Meditations: a guided second-person voice via portable audio, instructing walkers to move through familiar urban space as though it were depopulated, evacuated, abandoned to "two lovers alone."
The tour reconstructs key sites from Chapter 1 — the car park, the apartment district, the abandoned shopping centre — but never names them, requiring participants to recognize and misrecognize their own city. Voice-over (female, credited only as "Guide") describes "a man in a wheelchair, a woman with red hair, a stairwell that does not end," layering the narrative over lived streets.
Developed by ██ as a response to the meditation sequences described in Smith's essay, the tour has been performed at ██ in 2016, 2019, and 2021. Reception is divided: some describe profound dislocation, others report discomfort, one documented participant refused to complete the second loop. [citation needed] No official recording survives; bootleg audio recordings circulate in fandom archives. A planned immersive-theatre expansion by ██ company was cancelled. [citation needed]