In a New York borough, a group of walkers meanders through the city. They stop and look around. They close their eyes. They listen. They are participants on a walk with artists from Elastic City, a conceptual walk organization founded by CCA alumnus Todd Shalom (MFA Writing 2004). Lauded by the New York Times, the Economist, and even illustrated in the New Yorker (that's how you know you've really arrived!), Elastic City has organized walks from Brooklyn to Brazil.

Shalom's title at Elastic City is producer and director. He designs and leads some walks, and also commissions other artists to create walks. The walks focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening the senses, uncovering the poetry of everyday places, and creating new group rituals in dialogue with public space. Each walk is an artwork. Lucky Walk, by Shalom in collaboration with Juan Betancurth, revealed lucky and unlucky traits within New York architecture. It encouraged participants to engage in rituals to eliminate bad luck and bring forth good luck. Homesickness by the urbanist Einat Manoff examined the group's physical surroundings as a mirror into its collective homesickness, testing possible interventions in space and discussing the theoretical perspectives offered by urban theory and environmental psychology. Other 2011 walks included City Island Hop by Andrea Polli, Love Spells by Emily Tepper, and Total Detroit by Niegel Smith. In this last, participants started out walking in LaGuardia Airport in New York and then took a plane to the Motor City, where they continued the 56-hour performance.

Life could have turned out very differently had Shalom followed his father into the family business. "My dad sells steel. I was going to sell steel. That was in the cards for me." But in the middle of a business degree at Boston University, he realized that his métier wasn't metal. "I called my dad freshman year, practically crying. 'I don't think I'm made for the steel industry.' My dad told me to stick it out ('It'll be good for you'). I ended up concentrating in marketing, which I loved, because it's all psychology and there's room for creativity."

After an internship at the legendary indie record company Rykodisc, Shalom moved to New York to get his foot in the door of the music business. "I was working for lawyers at Sony Music. It was when Napster was taking off and I was working for the Man. And then right about that time, I came out. And I thought, What am I doing? I was empowered and knew that I had something to offer. Even if I didn't know what it was, I knew it wasn't in the music industry."

With the encouragement of a close friend on the West Coast, Shalom moved to San Francisco, enrolled in CCA's MFA Program in Writing, and dove into video making, poetry classes with Kathleen Fraser, performance studies with Lynn Marie Kirby, and Barney Haynes's courses in technology and new media. "It was my first experience with art school. The program was new and there were a couple of moments when I felt my New Yorkerness -- specifically I worried that, in an effort to create good community, some people weren't telling me what they really thought in critiques -- but overall I credit the program with giving me the flexibility to find my way.

"There was real freedom to work within and outside of the school to connect with people who'd be most helpful to my practice. For my thesis, I wanted an interdisciplinary committee, so I chose Lynn Marie Kirby, who works in performance and film; Roy Tomlinson, a painter; and Joseph Lease, a poet, who was also a helpful reader of my work." Shalom took advantage of other Bay Area hubs of creativity, enrolling in classes in poetry and sound and working with mentors including the composers Laetitia Sonami and John Bischoff.

It was in San Francisco's Mission District that Shalom led his first walk. "It all grew out of my interests in poetry, performance, and sound. How can I make a sound poem? I believe that music is as close to godliness as it gets. I'd worked in the music business, and I'd begun learning about the composer Robert Ashley, and also the acoustic ecology movement in Vancouver in the 1960s. Using sound, I thought, could bring out the poetry of a walk."

Shalom repeated the experiment in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, and then in Tel Aviv during a nine-month stay in Israel. But it wasn't until a trip to Peru in 2007 that he realized that his walks could become a vocation. In a 2011 TEDx lecture in Brooklyn, he explained his realization: "I wanted to get the same sense of exploration and wonder at home as I did in traveling." Elastic City walks, Shalom says, are designed to highlight conscious or unconscious coincidences. They are structured to be political and poetic, educational and experiential, to make participants feel vulnerable and then empowered. They mirror, in a way, Shalom's discovery of his own path over the last 15 years, from a young New Yorker frustrated at business school to a confident cultural entrepreneur whose work has personally touched many individuals and has been read about by many more. Along the way Shalom has turned missteps into rehearsals, mistakes into refinements, welding together his various interests to pioneer a new genre dedicated to changing people's perceptive capabilities.

Shalom is currently in the process of registering Elastic City as a nonprofit. In addition to running the business and leading walks in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and sometimes Buenos Aires, he also holds a teaching position at the Pratt Institute, where he leads an undergraduate poetry class called The Walk as Poem. "Now is the time to throw everything out there," he tells his students. "In five years, you're not going to like the work you're doing now. Might as well explore and see all the different possibilities that are available."