Tim Reynolds
Yosi Horikawa’s “Bubbles”. Listen to with headphones on and enjoy.
In my contemporary art course I recently learned about psychogeography, defined by Guy Debord (leader of 60s avant-garde movement Situationist International) as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Psychogeography, in parallel with Freud’s study of the subconscious, intends to reveal the way one’s environment affects one’s behavior simply by the way one feels, consciously or subconsciously, while immersed in it. In order to explore the effects of a geographic location on emotion, desire, interactions, and identity, the Situationists exercised what they call the dérive:
“A dérive is an unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surroundings.”
Basically, the dérive permits urban wandering, a riddance of all normal motivations for movement (including work and leisure), with the intention of creating a brand new, authentic experience. The wanderer has no destination and chooses his or her own path based on desire, instinct and spontaneity.
This exploration of space can be looked at as an exploration of oneself, one’s own subconscious, as one explores what draws them to certain places when there is no design or plan. No rational reason to go this way or that.
“The dérive grants a rare instance of pure chance, an opportunity for an utterly new and authentic experience of the different atmospheres and feelings generated by the urban landscape.”
On a larger ideological and political level, the Situationists considered dérives an essential tool to escape the mundane, robotic path of late-capitalist society:
“The need for the dérive is necessitated, according to Situationist theory, by the increasingly predictable and monotonous experience of everyday life trudged through every day by workers in advanced capitalism.
The term is literally translated into English as drift.”
(quotes via Wikipedia)
Yago Hortal
Jeff Soto
"My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me"
-CG Jung
http://i.imgur.com/FICyI.png
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