psycho-geography

The production of psychogeographic maps, or even the introduction of alterations such as more or less arbitrarily transposing maps of two different regions, can contribute to clarifying certain wanderings that express not subordination to randomness but complete insubordination to habitual influences (influences generally categorized as tourism that popular drug as repugnant as sports or buying on credit). A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone- Guy Debord.

                                  

          Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955 

Situationist International 

Describing the techniques and practices of psychogeography requires going back in time to the post second world war years. It was described at Guy Debord, writer and philosopher and prominent member of Situationist movement in 1955 as  'The study of precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals'.

The Naked City- Guy Debord

Debord's famous psychogeographical map, The Naked City (1957), was composed of certain areas of a popular street map of Paris. He cut the map to individualize these areas and  registered these areas using arrows.  Debord was a  latter day radical modernist (drawing heavily on Dada and Surrealism) in the post-war era. He had the aim to restore a kind of genius loci to the late capitalist environment. 

The Situationists tried to restore an aesthetic of festivity, play, intrigues, subversions, and games to counter the numbing effects of the "spectacle." In his inspired postmodern manifesto The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord laments "everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation." The city has lost its identity along with the subject, and subjective reality – especially aesthetic sensitivity – is worn down to a faded copy of authentic experience. The "spectacle" is "a social relation between people that is mediated by images." Postmodern space must be "cut-up" to yield its buried presence, as it has been consumed entirely by consumerist space: "The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere." The derive undermines the spectacle's regime, which is essentially optical. The drift technique shifts perceptual emphasis from the optical to the proprioceptive (body consciousness, the sense of one's physical presence). The spectacle, which has become "the focal point of all vision and all consciousness," is an optical regime that separates the subject's consciousness with his or her body: the spectacle is "the culmination of separation," and the "official language of universal separation" that is "the domain of delusion and false consciousness." Reality itself has become a spectacle, another commodity. 

Society of  a Spectacle- Guy Debord

Situationism was a radical leftist response to the perceived end of modernist (or "high") art and culture. When the spectacle takes hold, all material space yields to commercial space: it loses its "soul" or constitutive absence, no atmosphere. Tourism reduces the city to a carnival entertainment, a pre-packaged product to be consumed. It's not that psychogeographical space has disappeared, but rather it has been buried under layer upon layer of the "expressive surfaces" of commercial space (advertisements, prescribed entertainments: any rigid organization of space and communal participation). Psychogeography is the study of the traces, vectors, and affects projected in cultural space. If the spectacle renders social reality to absolute transparency, as Jean Baudrillard claimed in Simulations, then this transparency, or obviousness, or objectivity, is the essential illusion that holds the postmodern in a state of permanent historical suspension. The function of the Situationist drift is to explore the other side of the spectacle, the unmediated (and traumatic) real veiled by the spectacle's absolute objectivity, or mimetic resemblance to the real.

In his recent novel  Spook Country (2007), William Gibson draws on the contemporary psychogeographic practice of locative art to comment on the postmodern, global commercial space where psychogeographical space, or the unified ambiences studied by the Situationists, has been lost. Spook Country tells the story of a cadre of spies, artists, and losers who collide in the roiling turmoil of twenty-first century, destabilized geopolitics. In the novel, a freelance journalist named Hollis Henry is hired by a technology magazine to investigate the use of locative media in contemporary art. Henry encounters a several locative artists who create three-dimensional sculptures in an augmented reality that can only be seen with special VR goggles. These artists represent Gibson's vision of the 21st Century psychogeographer. It is no accident that Gibson's favorite author is allegedly Iain Sinclair, a writer and researcher based in London who has written several books about his psychogeographic excavations of the London underground. For Gibson, to reinvest the postmodern spectacle with its lost presence, or gestaltic identity, is to create a spectacle on top of the spectacle: to externalize the mysterious, unattainable real that inheres in psychogeographic ambiences.

Gibson's use of description reminds us that the entire space of the postmodern subject's reality  is in a sense a controlled surround – a kind of prison cell –that permanently envelops the body, like an aura. It is precisely what cannot be mapped yet it is under structural control.

The Situationists practiced psychogeography in part because it is an artistic practice that anyone can learn and master. It is the only artistic practice (besides Brechtian theatre) that combines aesthetic practices with the potential for real proletariat revolt. 


For Debord, the purpose of psychogeography, and of postmodern revolt in general, is to disrobe capitalist culture, which negates aesthetic sensitivity, censors art and poetry, and discourages intelligence and analysis. To break free from the norm of society.

As Debord said in "Theory of the Derive:" "The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement." 

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John Briscella's projects communicate new spacial concepts for cities by introducing simple ideas into everyday life and surroundings. From the smallest iterations, to large-scale urban compositions, the works respond to experiencing environments in their contextual relationship to the observer(s).