Todd Shalom is an American artist, writer, and performer whose work connects poetry, sound, walking, public space, participation, visual art, performance, and the collective experience of cities. Trained in writing at California College of the Arts, he began with poetry and sound before developing participatory works that moved composition into streets, parks, museums, neighborhoods, and other shared environments.
Shalom founded and directed Elastic City, a nonprofit project that produced more than two hundred participatory walks and events from 2010 through 2016. The project commissioned artists across disciplines to translate their practices into guided walks. Shalom also developed work with Niegel Smith through Willing Participant, taught participatory art at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts, and presented projects through institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, ISSUE Project Room, and Stanford University.
Two Poems
The archive preserves an entry titled 2 Poems from Shalom’s earlier literary period. The individual poem texts are absent from the current record, so their wording remains unreconstructed. The surviving title still documents an important stage in a practice that later expanded poetry into soundwalks, participatory scores, public actions, and site-responsive performance.
Shalom has described his early poems as strongly connected with sound and with the experience of hearing language. That emphasis helps explain the later movement from page toward performance.
The broader guide to poetry offers a useful context for how voice, rhythm, sound, image, address, and sequence can migrate across media while retaining literary force.
Poem off the page
Shalom’s participatory walks developed from a poetic question: what happens when the compositional logic of a poem is applied to an experience shared by moving bodies? A walk can have sequence, pacing, repetition, pause, surprise, refrain, transition, image, sound, and shifts of perspective.
The city becomes a field in which those elements already exist. Traffic signals create rhythm; storefronts offer visual language; conversations arrive as fragments; architecture controls sight lines; weather changes mood; footsteps establish tempo.
John Mercuri Dooley offers a neighboring route through poetry where visual structure, spatial movement, multimedia form, and the physical arrangement of language shape interpretation.
Elastic City
Elastic City began in 2010 and grew into a seven-year experiment in participatory walking. Artists were invited to create experiences that asked participants to attend differently to streets, neighborhoods, sounds, strangers, buildings, histories, movement, and one another.
The project expanded across New York and into cities including Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, Reykjavik, Mexico City, Montreal, Tokyo, and San Francisco. Its scale demonstrated that walking could become a flexible artistic form capable of carrying poetry, dance, visual art, sound, architecture, social practice, and performance.
The archive’s guide to experimental poetry provides a broad context for literary practices that use instructions, performance, chance, public space, collaborative action, and forms extending beyond the conventional page.
The walk as poem
A walk has a beginning and an ending, yet the exact experience between those points changes according to participants, weather, traffic, chance encounters, construction, noise, and attention. This gives the form a combination of structure and unpredictability.
Shalom’s walks often used prompts. A prompt focuses perception or proposes an action: listen for a particular sound, notice a boundary, alter pace, interact with another participant, observe an overlooked surface, or respond physically to a site.
Such prompts resemble concise poetic instructions. Their value depends on what they make newly perceptible.
Soundwalking
Sound formed an early bridge between Shalom’s poetry and participatory work. A soundwalk treats the acoustic environment as material. Engines, footsteps, voices, ventilation systems, birds, construction, doors, alarms, music, echoes, and silence become part of a changing composition.
Listening also changes spatial awareness. A sound may reveal an alley before it is seen, establish the scale of a room, mark distance, or expose activity behind a wall.
Ruth Lepson offers another route through poetry where sound, music, performance, collaboration, and voice give literary form a strong temporal and acoustic dimension.
Brighton Zaum
Shalom’s soundwalk Brighton Zaum used the neighborhood as a site for acoustic attention and sound poetry. The title invokes zaum, the transrational language associated with Russian Futurist experiments in sound beyond ordinary semantic expectation.
In a city environment, such an idea becomes physically immediate. Language mixes with traffic, multilingual speech, machinery, ocean sound, commerce, and accidental rhythm.
Jonathan Pickering offers a neighboring route through poetry where sound, altered linguistic expectation, repetition, semantic instability, and verbal materiality guide the reader.
Public space
Public space is shaped by rules, habits, architecture, surveillance, commerce, transit, accessibility, ownership, and social expectation. A participatory walk can expose these structures by asking people to use a familiar space differently.
Walking slowly where people normally hurry, listening where visual attention dominates, or gathering where movement is expected can reveal hidden assumptions about behavior.
The broader field of modern poetry provides a useful context for artistic practices that absorb city life, public language, performance, architecture, and everyday social systems.
Participation
Participation changes the relation between artist and audience. The participant becomes one of the materials through which the work exists.
This requires careful design. A prompt must be clear enough to create shared action and open enough to allow individual response.
Shalom’s practice repeatedly treats the audience as active interpreters whose choices influence pace, atmosphere, interaction, and memory.
Katina Douveas offers a neighboring route through poetry where direct address, performance energy, public language, bodily movement, and audience timing animate the work.
Prompts
The 2019 book Elastic City: Prompts for Participatory Walks preserved forty-eight prompts from artists who had created walks with the organization, along with material about developing the form. A Spanish-language edition followed in 2022.
A prompt can function like a miniature score. It holds potential action in compressed language and waits for a participant to realize it in a specific place and time.
This structure connects walking with poetry because both forms can create large imaginative consequences from a small verbal unit.
Walking and composition
Walking naturally produces sequence. One block follows another; a turn reveals a new view; distance changes the soundscape; fatigue alters attention; weather accumulates across the body.
Shalom uses these ordinary facts as compositional resources. The route becomes a line unfolding through space.
Charlie Rossiter offers another route through poetry where roads, travel, geography, performance, and movement turn physical passage into literary structure.
Willing Participant
With Niegel Smith, Shalom developed Willing Participant, a project built around urgent poetic responses to public events. The work brought performance into direct contact with contemporary civic life.
Urgency changes composition. The artist responds under temporal pressure, and the resulting action enters a public situation while its meanings are still developing.
Dana Teen Lomax offers another route through poetry where documentary material, public events, collective memory, institutional language, and performance become active literary forms.
Teaching the walk
Shalom taught participatory art at Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. Teaching the form requires translating intuitive artistic decisions into concepts another person can test.
Students learn to consider route, duration, group size, accessibility, risk, sensory focus, invitation, pacing, and the social meaning of a site.
Julie Kizershot offers another route through poetry where teaching, experimental traditions, literary programming, critical reading, and the transmission of artistic practice across generations remain central.
Cross-disciplinary practice
Shalom’s career moves through poetry, sound, visual media, performance, social practice, and participatory art. These categories meet through shared compositional questions: what receives attention, what happens first, how long an action lasts, how people relate, and how a work changes when its setting changes.
His MFA in Writing provided one foundation for this approach. He has credited poetry with teaching him compositional flexibility across media.
Lewis LaCook offers another route through poetry where page, sound, digital work, collaboration, and changing media remain parts of one sustained creative practice.
City as material
A city offers endless material because it is already layered with language and movement. Street names, signs, advertisements, transit maps, architecture, sounds, smells, regulations, histories, and encounters all coexist.
Shalom’s work asks participants to enter this density with deliberate attention. The familiar city can become strange through one changed instruction.
The broader field of American poetry provides a useful context for writers and artists who turn urban vernacular, movement, public speech, and local geography into compositional material.
Reading Todd Shalom
Shalom’s literary identity emerges through poetry, sound, walking, participation, prompts, public space, performance, visual attention, teaching, and the transformation of audiences into active makers of experience.
Within contemporary poetry, his practice shows how poetic composition can travel beyond the printed page while preserving sequence, rhythm, image, sound, address, and formal attention.
The strongest route into Shalom is to follow the prompt into the city. Notice what happens when listening becomes a score, when walking becomes composition, when another participant changes the work, and when a familiar street becomes newly perceptible through one precise instruction. His practice makes poetry a shared way of moving through space.