Category Archives: Psychogeography

The Loiterers Resistance Movement (2006-), Manchester, England

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The LRM (Loiterers Resistance Movement) is a Manchester based collective of artists, activists and urban wanderers  interested in psychogeography, public space and the hidden stories of the city.

We can’t agree on what psychogeography means but we all like plants growing out of the side of buildings, looking at things from new angles, radical history, drinking tea and getting lost; having fun and feeling like a tourist in your home town. Gentrification, advertising and blandness make us sad. We believe there is magick in the mancunian rain.

Our city is wonderful and made for more than shopping. The streets belong to everyone and we want to reclaim them for play and revolutionary fun….

The LRM embark on psychogeographical drifts to decode the palimpsest of the streets, uncover hidden histories and discover the extraordinary in the mundane. We aim to nurture an awareness of everyday space, (re)engaging with, (re)mapping and (re)enchanting the city.

On the first Sunday of every month we go for a wander of some sort and we also organise occasional festivals, exhibitions, shows, spectacles, silliness and other random shenanigans. These range from giant cake maps to games of  CCTV Bingo. Information on forthcoming events is here. We were founded in 2006 by Morag Rose and 2016 we celebrated 10 years of creative mischief with Loitering With Intent: The Art and Politics of Walking at The Peoples History Museum.

Please walk with us, everyone is welcome. Our events are free and open to all: these are our streets and they are yours too.”

Walkspace Collective (2019-), Birmingham, England

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About Walkspace

Walkspace is a Birmingham-based collective of artists, writers, psychogeographers, photographers, creative practitioners and walkers.

It was set up by three friends: Andy Howlett, Fiona Cullinan and Pete Ashton. Each have their own individual walking practices but joined together as a group after being inspired by ‘Walking’s New Movements‘ at the University of Plymouth: a 2019 conference to discuss the latest developments and future prospects for radical walking and walking arts.

What does Walkspace do?

Walkspace exists to bring together West Midlands-based artists and creative practitioners who use walking as part of their practice. We aim to create a community of mutual support and peer mentoring, working as a cooperative collective to support the creation of new work.

We are deliberately starting small and intend to grow organically in response to the emerging needs of the collective. That said, we have some big plans. Along the way we will create a permanent archive of creative walking activity in the West Mids.

Who’s in Walkspace?

Who runs Walkspace?

Walkspace is run by a committee elected annually by the membership. As of January 2021 this is Andy Howlett, Fiona Cullinan and Pete Ashton, the founder members. The committee looks after the administration of Walkspace and keeps it focussed on the mission at hand.

Walks, events and projects are either run autonomously by members with Walkspace support, run by Walkspace as an entity involving members, or something inbetween.

Ultimately, the “formal” side of Walkspace exists to support the membership in their own practice.

We currently receive no funding and are run on a voluntary basis. Of course this is not sustainable in the long term but we have to start somewhere.

What sort of walking do you cover?

This is not an exhaustive list of what we’re interested in by any means, but it should give you a taste.

  • Non-normal walking
  • Art walks
  • Protest walks
  • Social walks
  • Community walks
  • Group walks
  • Solo walks
  • Walking for mental health
  • Micro adventures
  • Walks about ageing
  • Walks exploring pain
  • Guided walks
  • Unguided walks
  • Scored walks
  • Gamified walks
  • Interactive walks
  • Uninteractive walks
  • Walks and talks
  • Stirchley walks
  • Psychogeography
  • Mythogeography
  • Geography
  • Shadow walks
  • Video walks
  • Documenting walks
  • Explorations
  • Mystery walks
  • Dementia walks
  • Walking to combat loneliness
  • Themed walks
  • Therapeutic walks
  • Nature-based walks
  • Sunrise walks
  • Sunset walks
  • Pagan walks
  • Monotheistic walks
  • Slow walking
  • Fast walking
  • Neither slow nor fast walking
  • Camera walks
  • Data capture walks
  • Walks which follow the invisible infrastructure of the internet
  • Weird maps
  • Deep Topography
  • Counter Tourism
  • Guerrilla Heritage
  • Micro odysseys

Guy Debord, Drifting / Dérive (1958), Situationists

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Guy Debord, The Naked City

Guy Debord established the Situationist method of the dérive (drifting) as a playful technique for wandering through cities without the usual motives for movement (work or leisure activities), but instead the attractions of the terrain, with its “psycho-geographic” effects. (credit: Walk Ways catalog)

While similar to the flâneur, the dérive is influenced by urban studies (especially Henri Lefebvre). (credit: The Art of Walking: A Field Guide, 2012).

Read a more detailed account of the dérive from Debord’s “Theory of the Dérive,” first published in Internationale Situationniste #2 (Paris, December 1958): Debord-Theory_Of_The_Derive

Definition: Letting go of the usual reasons for walking – and being drawn by the affordances and attractions of the place.

The Drift or Dérive  is one of the basic situationist practices advocated by Guy Debord and others. It’s a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and an awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

Merlin Coverley mentions psychogeography has these core elements: [credit]

  • the political aspect,
  • a philosophy of opposition to the status quo,
  • this idea of walking, of walking the city in particular,
  • the idea of an urban movement,
  • and the psychological component of how human behaviour is affected by place

Recently the idea of the drift has been extended in the practice of Mythogeography, where its characteristics are described thus:

    • Best with groups of between three and six.
    • There should be no destination, only a starting point and a time. A journey to change space, not march through it.
    • To drift something has to be at stake – status, certainty, identity, sleep.
    • In a drift, self must be in some kind of jeopardy.
    • There may need to be a catapult: starting at an unusual time of day, taking a taxi ride blindfold asking to be dropped off at a spot with no signage, leaping onto the first bus or tram you see.
    • There may be a theme: wormholes, micro-worlds, peripheral vision – whatever you want.
    • Be tourists in your own town.
    • Use the things around you as if they were dramatic texts, act them out.
    • “…on a ‘drift’ we found ourselves at a Moto Service Station on the edge of the city. In the restaurant they had a guarantee printed on little cards. They’d give you your money back if you weren’t “completely satisfied” with your meal. So we organised to meet there on our next drift with about 10 other people; we ate big breakfasts and asked for our money back, because, philosophically, a cooked breakfast could never ‘completely satisfy’ a socially and culturally healthy person, not ‘completely satisfy’ all their desires and passions, not a human being. We got the money, but more importantly numerous staff were commandeered to interview us and we turned a restaurant into a debate about desire and fulfilment.” 
    • The drift should be led by its periphery and guided by atmospheres not maps.
    • A static drift: stay still and let the world drift to you.
    • When you drift, use wrecked things you find to make new things (this is called détournement – using dead art and uncivil signs to create unfamiliar languages). Make situations: build miniature wooden villages, giant insects from branches, ritual doorways from burnt remnants, make a small model shed from the wood of a full-sized one and process it from shed to shed until you reach the sea. Construct things from what you find, enact imaginary searches, bogus investigations, gather testimonies for new religions. Just build!!! Leave stories, situations and constructions for any drifters that follow you, they’ll re-make them in their own ways.

Transcript of a Dérive

Credit to Jesse Bell, Notes on My Dunce Cap.

  1. Time/Place begun:
  2. Person/Persons a Party to the Initial Plan:
  3. Description of the Dérive’s Shape:
  4. Misunderstandings Created/ Discovered:
  5. Signed/Dated:
Occupy Oakland protesters (2011) Photo by Noah Berger, Oakland

Occupy Oakland protesters (2011) Photo by Noah Berger, Oakland

Connections to 21st Century

“In addition to inspiring artists, architects and urban planners, the Situationist International’s take-back of public space is credited as catalyzing the The Occupy movement.

“We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement…One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of the Spectacle. The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme … and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.” – Kalle Lasn, editor and co-founder of Adbusters, the group and magazine credited for Occupy Wall Street’s initial concept and publicity.” (credit)

Exercises:

Credits and references:

 

Surrealism Connections

Definition of surrealism (credit): “A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary”

“As André Breton transferred his alliance [from Dada] to Surrealism, he continued hosting nocturnal strolls. In his 1937 novel with Jacqueline Lamba, “L’Amour Fou,” he evokes the clamour of workers as well as revellers as they linger in the area, along with vegetables and rubbish spilling on the pavements and a profusion of other sensory experiences…past other personal ‘hubs’ in Breton’s sense of the city’s geography.”” (credit; David Pinder, “Urban Encounters: derives from Surrealism”)

Blois to Romorantin

Blois to Romorantin

Walk from Blois to Romorantin

In May 1924 the three founders of surrealism [including André Breton] set off haphazardly on foot on a 10-day stroll from Blois, a town picked at random from a map, to Romorantin (28 miles). Largely they “resolutely followed their lack of itinerary”, composing automatic texts during rest stops, and explored the relationship between waking life and dream life. The trip was peppered with hostility, fatigue, and disorientation, so they cut the erratic journey short.

This and further déambulations, or hypnosis via walking with disorienting loss of control, practised on the outskirts of Paris, were found expression in three novels:

  • Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (1926) – describes two places in Paris in great detail, providing a realistic backdrop for surrealist spectacles such as the transformation of a shop into a seascape
  • André Breton’s Nadja (1928) – “one of the iconic works of the French surrealist movement”
  • Philippe Soupault‘s Les Dernières Nuits de Paris (1928)
  • see also Readux’s A little guide to the 15th Arrondissement, “a playful piece of surrealist flâneurie and psychogeography” by Roger Caillois, translated by Ryan Ruby; see article

“For the surrealists walking was about chance encounters and irrational meetings, an inspiration for their experimental writing (source).”

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Conor McGarrigle, “WalkSpace: Beirut-Venice” (2012)

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As part of THESTATEOFMIND for the Lebanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Art 2011. WalkSpace: Beirut-Venice invites the participant on a drift through Venice guided from Beirut and in Beirut guided from Venice.

The work involves two simultaneous dérives (drifts) through the historic cities of Beirut and Venice, connected in real time to each other and to the world. Two interconnected groups of participants will walk in each city, each receiving instruction and guidance from the other as they wander, get lost and explore the psychogeographical ambience of the city.

The progress of each group will be broadcast as a live video stream via Bambuser, tracked in realtime on a map with Google latitude and tweeted with followers having the option of giving instructions via twitter.

The object is not to create a finite discrete work but to create a peripatetic relational space which can evolve and respond to the situation, the desires of its participants and serendipity, with the work being created through the actions of its participants. The space is furthermore overlaid with a hybrid, networked space connecting both cities and augmenting each space with the absent presence of the other.

Working from a changing set of basic instructions such as ‘describe what you see’, ‘follow that person’, ‘take the next left and then the first right’ or the more loaded ‘take me to the heart of the city’ the two groups will walk in tandem each guiding the other, walking in Beirut as if in Venice and Venice as if in Beirut.

The project draws on early dérives carried out by the Situationists in Amsterdam and Strasbourg which connected groups in different parts of the cities with walkie talkies and Ralph Rumney’s 1957 Psychogeographical Map of Venice.

Participate

We invite the audience to follow us in real time using Bambuser for video, Google latitude for locations and with geotagged tweets. We invited those not in Venice or Beirut to follow us virtually with the following services.

Latitude: We will be broadcasting out location in real time during the event using Google Latitude. To track the event first sign up for Latitude and send a request to share location to allegora.venice[AT]gmail.com, or alternatively email allegora.venice[AT]gmail.com and we will share our location with you. You do not need to share your location to follow us.

Bambuser: To view our live video feed simply visit bambuser.com/channel/stateofmind