Psychogeography

Psychogeography, which began in avant-garde cultural criticism but has since influenced the diverse practices of conceptual art and town planning, is another potentially useful tool for examining enchanted landscapes. The term, which dates from the early days of the Situationists in the 1950s, was first defined - in their journal in 1958 - as: "the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood or behaviour of the individual."[5] A more recent, and slightly amended, definition has been proposed by Maddox. This reads: "the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters which charge environments; the lost social ley-lines which make up the unconscious cultural contours of places"

An urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.

Situationism

The Situationists were a revolutionary, oppositional group, and psychogeography was one of the weapons in their armoury. As well as having a propagandist function, its principal active tool, the dérive, or drift, was used to demonstrate that buildings, junctions, streets and areas provoked different emotional responses, and people undertaking a drift made choices of route based on these feelings.

Robust character traits are rare or do not exist. To a significant degree, it is not character traits but situational factors that determine our behavior (e.g. whether a person tells a lie, does not depend on if they have the character trait of "honesty." Rather, more often then not, if someone tells a lie will depend on minor situational features. For example, if they found a dime on the ground that afternoon).

The Situationists, led by film-maker Guy Debord and artist Raoul Vaneigem, used the technique of experimental dérive, or drift, to explore the psychogeographical contours of urban Paris. The dérive was defined, again in the journal of the Situationists in 1958, as "an experimental mode of behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society; a technique for hastily passing through varied environments". It involved groups of people travelling through Paris, making choices of direction based on the feelings invoked by structures, boundaries, landmarks and other features of the urban landscape.

Situationist refers to a member of the Situationist International (SI), a very small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, anarchism and the early 20th century European artistic avant-garde. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. In the 1960s it split into a number of different groups, including the Situationist Bauhaus, the Antinational and the Second Situationist International. The first SI disbanded in 1972.

The first issue of the journal Internationale Situationniste defined situationist as "having to do with the theory or practical activity of constructing situations. One who engages in the construction of situations. A member of the Situationist International". The same journal defined situationism as "a meaningless term improperly derived from the above. There is no such thing as situationism, which would mean a doctrine of interpretation of existing facts. The notion of situationism is obviously devised by antisituationists."

Key ideas

* The Situation: this concept, central to the SI, was defined in the first issue of their journal as "A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events."

* The Spectacle: The Spectacle was an analysis of the logic of commodities whereby they achieve an ideological autonomy from the process of their production, so that “social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.”

* Recuperation: "To survive, the spectacle must have social control. It can recuperate a potentially threatening situation by shifting ground, creating dazzling alternatives- or by embracing the threat, making it safe and then selling it back to us"- Larry Law, from The Spectacle- The Skeleton Keys, a 'Spectacular Times pocket book.

* Detournement: "short for: detournement of pre-existing aesthetic elements. The integration of past or present artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu. ". One could view detournement as forming the opposite side of the coin to 'recuperation' (where radical ideas and images become safe and commodified), in that images produced by the spectacle get altered and subverted so that rather than supporting the status quo, their meaning becomes changed in order to put across a more radical or oppositionist message.(Culture Jammers including Adbusters). The two fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element — which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense — and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.

Dérives

Excerpts from "Theory of the Dérive" By Guy Debord

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition.

People undertaking this activity will notice - as Debord wrote in 1955 - "the sudden change of ambience in a street within the space of a few metres" and "the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres".[8] The dérive, which was envisioned as a group activity, has two aspects: ludic and analytical. Debord and his drifters saw it as both a playful interaction with one's surroundings and a way of analysing them.

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.

Chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes.

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state.

In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he
observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.

Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.

Psychogeographic maps

One result of the dérivistes' playful interaction with the city was psychogeographic maps. Debord and Asger Jorn produced "The Naked City" in 1957, and the non-geographical map, expressing the closeness of areas by feel and not feet, came to prominence. This psychogeographic map shows the city - Paris in this case - as fragmented and discontinuous, and yet integrated and unitary, bound together by emotion and feelings. Rather than imposing order on the city, as topographical maps are intended to do, this new style of mapping was intended to "put the spectator at ease with a city of apparent disorder".

Psychogeographic maps can reveal that some areas are linked to others through ambience, that some paths are more popular than others, that some monuments or sections are more attractive or repulsive than others. Possibly there are as many maps as there are people, or maybe there is a broad consensus on the trunk roads and landmarks of the urban area. Since psychogeography, as its name implies, attempts to bring together subjective and objective modes of study, we should not be surprised if its methods produce a wide range of equally acceptable results.

PML: Psychogeographical Markup Language

Psychogeography is a non-academic field of knowledge production that inquires into the nature and forms of the vast range of effects and sensations that betray the instinctive reaction of the human mind to a landscape. 'Psychogeographical Markup Language' is one proposed framework to document the findings encountered during psychogeographic experiments.

PML is a unified system to capture meaningful psychogeographical [meta]data about spaces which can be used to compose psychogeograms: diagrammatic representations of psychogeographically experienced space.

PML is the base layer for a psychogeographical content management system that can:

1) Be used to transform a mass of subjective data into an objective representation
2) Be used as an engine that, after being fed certain parameters, generates new psychogeographical drifts
3) Be used to develop further a cartography that negates the territory
4) Be datamined to uncover never suspected patterns in the urban fabric
5) Be fired up into a new mythology for urban space
6) Be used to take the fingerprint of a city

7) Take us places both physically and conceptually

PML incorporates work done in locative media like annotated space, geo-tagging, mental mapping and collaborative mapping but is different in that it aims at the absurd.

http://socialfiction.org/PML.html