23.3.05
These are exciting times for psychogeography
To be read at the psy geo conflux festival in NYC
(a quick draft that was not really used for the actual talk. Because it is a nice summary it is included here anyway)These are exciting times for psychogeography. In the last one or two years or so the discipline of psychogeography has found new breath, it has ripped itself free from the body of academic thought where it was slowly decaying into an obscure theoretical subculture.
Of course in England a few psychogeographical groups operating in cities like London, Manchester & Nottingham have kept the spirit alive & over the years they have developed a unique framework that combines radical politics, the occult & the composition of the urban environment into a coherent & slightly paranoid ideology.
Since the Hot Summer of Psychogeography 2002 also outside the British isle's countless new psychogeographers on the block have rediscovered the walks or rather the Dérives of the French post Freudian avant-garde movements like surrealism & lettrism which culminated in the well know consortium of European groups called the International Situationist who managed quite falsely to secure the term & the practise psychogeography in the eye of the public as their own invention. Psychogeography however is practise as old as human civilization itself. In the 14th century the Italian humanist poet Petrach climbed the Mont Ventoux for no other reason then to find out how the view from the top would affect him, a strangle exploit for which he had to seek anecdotes from to past to make it look sane to his contemporaries. In ancient Greece there was the peripatetic school of Aristotle who developed their philosophy while walking: for them thinking or rather contemplation & movement where indistinguishable.
Psychogeographers, which combines the previous examples have always been interested in history: the city is an artefact, a product, of history itself. But, as the Psy Geo Conflux festival will show it's also very much concerned with exploring new the spaces created by technology, by science: using algorithms, databases, GPS systems, PDA's, Lap-tops, Minidiscs, mobile telephones, psychogeographers are now annotating space, rediscovering their own neighbourhood, are mapping invisible spaces like open nodes in Wi-Fi networks, the city is used as a chessboard or as a logic gate. Psychogeography is a strange hybrid between walking & technology, between DIY & high tech, between philosophy & engineering.
I'm still not sure what a definition of psychogeography might look like: nobody can't tell you what psychogeography is & what it's not, therefore you should not trust people who say they know. This is important because psychogeography as it's exist today is a process. Every few weeks I get e-mails from new groups all over the western world, who are all doing their own thing for their own reasons, it's very exiting, & it's relevant in many field. Psychogeography can be practised as artistic practise, as a branch of urban exploration, as a form of social commentary & often it's all these thing at the same time. Psychogeography also has it's own paranoia in the sense that it believe that any environment can induce behaviour. Perhaps you remember the main character in Albert Camus' novel The Stranger who commits a murder for now other reason than the way the ocean reflects the sun in his eyes. This is a very clear & powerful example of a psychogeographical effect, an effect that can be consciously engineered in the composition of the city.
William Burroughs tried to expose subliminal messages in newspapers by chopping them up, psychogeography as a city space cut-up does the new thing: it tries to find out what's out there, encrypted beneath the surface, by navigating through it in unusual ways.
The design of the city, of public space, is very much in vogue right now. Psychogeography has always taken an active approach to these topics. A psychogeographical walk is meant to create your own environment: by exploring it, by breaking free from daily habits, by adding your own technology, our own creativity to the environment.
These are exciting times for psychogeography. In the last one or two years or so the discipline of psychogeography has found new breath, it has ripped itself free from the body of academic thought where it was slowly decaying into an obscure theoretical subculture.
# posted by alvaro @ 2:31 p. m. 
