André Lemos is Associate Professor, Faculty of Communication, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. PhD in Sociology, Sorbonne (1995), Visiting Scholar University of Alberta and McGill University, Canada (2007-2008). Coordinator of Cybercity Research Group (UFBa/CNPq) and Researcher level 1 at CNPq. Member of Prix Ars Electronica, Wi. Journal of Mobile Media and Canadian Journal of Communication Board. This Carnet is online since March 1st, 2001.
Interessante texto contando a história da psicogeografia e relacionando com teorias pós-modernas e autores como Jameson, Baudrillard, Debord, Gibson, Zizek, o psychogeography in the 21st century, mostra como o movimento marca a época contemporânea e os atuais desenvolvimentos da cibercultura.
Hoje, artistas usando as "locative media" têm recuperado o conceito e tensionado suas dimensões fundamentais (cartografia cognitiva, uso das ruas, reversão do espetáculo, deriva, mapeamentos...) acoplando experiências "psicogeográficas" com o uso das tecnologias digitais, redes e sensores sem fio. O objetivo é ir além do uso meramente comercial ou militar das tecnologias de localização e criar tensões e reforçar ambiguidades: quais a dimensão política da mobilidade? quais os novos significados do território, do lugar e do espaço em meio a redes sem fio e dispositivos móveis? quais as novas formas de vigilância e monitoramento para além do panóptico das câmeras de vigilância? como ressaltar aspectos sensíveis (sociais, ambientais, políticos) e invisíveis das cidades contemporâneas? Vejam mais posts do Carnet sobre esta temática.
Aqui um vídeo com debate sobre o tema, "Psychogeography: The Landscapes of Memory: Roundtable discussion with Andre Aciman, Vito Acconci, Russell Epstein, and Matthew von Unwerth."
Algumas frases do texto do blog "paramodern studies":
"Psychogeography is an aesthetic and political strategy discovered by the Surrealists and elaborated by postmodern avant-garde groups like the Lettristes, the Situationists, Tiqqun, and the London Psychogeographical Association (the LPA)."
"In Debord's essay (...) psychogeography is defined 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.' Debord claims that this idea originates with Ivan Chetcheglov, who he also credits as the inventor of the psychogeographical technique called the dérive (or drift)."
"(...) Chetcheglov declares, 'We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That?s lost.' Chetcheglov presents the dérive as an aesthetic technique that reinvests the city with its lost identity or constitutive absence, and unveils the consumerist illusion for the magic trick or "phantasmagoria" (Walter Benjamin) it is."
Vídeo sobre realidade do espaço e psicogeorgrafia
"Psychogeographical research entails a new perception of the city ? made possible by various techniques like the drift ? that transforms the city into a series of "varied ambiences" with "contours, [...] constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones."
"The psychogeographical map, or affective map, is a hybrid of objective topography (surface features, the "representable"), and subjective topology (the real, subjective undercurrents or "vortexes" projected onto the surface)."
"The drifting subject follows a path or trajectory that transgresses the boundaries of 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 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."
"Gibson's vision of the future is a more accurate map of contemporary urban space than any "objective" cartography. Postmodern reality is a fusion of the real, illusion, spectacle, fantasy, and simulation, so only a collagist technique ? like the literary one Gibson employs ? can represent it faithfully."
"In his recent novel Spook Country (2007), 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."
"Gibson's use of ubiquitous and wearable computing reminds us that the entire space of the postmodern subject's reality (his or her umwelt) 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.
Ontem poste minha psycogeografia pessoal nos percursos marcados por um GPS na série CiberFlânerie. Como postei anteriormente, em agosto de 2007, começa dia 19 de junho, em Manchester, uma série de eventos (exposições, conferências, performances): "TRIP, Territories Reimagined: International Perspectivas". O evento propõe intervenções urbanas sob o signo da "psicogeografia". Esse é um dos temas importantes de projetos "bottom-up" e artísticos com as mídias locativas, como tenho destacado nesse Carnet. Trata-se de um retorno às práticas situacionistas e dadaístas de deriva e apropriação artística das ruas. Sobre os situacionistas aconselho o livro de Mario Perniola (tenho a versão espanhola, "Los Situacionistas. Historia crítica de la última vanguarda del siglo XXI). Vejam mais informações sobre o evento aqui. O programa pode ser baixado em PDF aqui.
"(...) Over the past century, psychogeography has played an increasingly important part in the radical re-thinking of urban space. From the Situationists who were active in Paris during the 1968 riots, to major London novelists of the 1990s like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, to many of today?s leading urban designers, psychogeographic experiments continue to produce unusual and provocative approaches to the city.
For the first time in the UK, TRIP brings together psychogeographers from all over the world, to show new work, exchange ideas, and create new energies. TRIP explores the many and various directions in which artists, performers, writers and theorists are taking psychogeography in the twenty first century. TRIP is a new event, combining an art festival and a conference, alongside a parallel programme of fringe activities. Activities are taking place at various venues in Manchester, including URBIS, Green Room, the Royal Exchange Theatre, and Manchester Metropolitan University. TRIP's academic conference is organised by Manchester Metropolitian University and takes place at the John Dalton Building, Oxford Road. Its programme of papers includes several speakers who will produce artworks or performances for the public.(...)"
Evento Joyce Walks Call convida para psycogeografias no "Bloomsday", no próximo dia 16 de junho. O Bloomsday é o dia em que se passa o romance Ulisses de Joyce narrando a epopéia de Bloom por Dublin. Pessoas são convidadas a gerar mapas de suas andanças em qualquer lugar do planeta a partir do site Joyce Walk (do artista de Dublin, Conor McGarrigle). Trechos do Post do Networked Performance:
"(...) 1000 Joyce Walks is a participatory global intervention which aims to create a day of psychogeographical exploration with 1000 interventions in 24 hours across the globe. The project uses the Joyce Walks project to remap routes from James Joyce?s Ulysses to any city in the world to be used as the basis of walks which navigate urban space in a new and unexpected way. Based on the Situationist Dérive Joyce Walks is a participatory spatial tool which overlays virtual layers of meaning over real space enabling the user to create temporary location based interventions and social spaces which tactically insert themselves into the urban environment inscribing a new set of meanings onto the very fabric of the city.
Participation is easy.
- Use the Joyce Walks website to generate a walk in any city of your choice - invite your friends and peer group to join you on your walk and - document the experience simply with some photos and/or videos, - use the Joyce Walks site to generate a googlemaps mashup of your walk to be shared on the Joyce Walks site or embedded on any webpage - most importantly - have fun!"
Artista Crhistian Nold realiza psicogeografia em Paris para a exposição "Sensitive Map", na galeria Ars Longa em Paris. Como outras, essa experiência coloca em pauta as ações situacionistas atualizadas com as mídias locativas. Para a experiência os participantes usam GPS e sensores nas mãos para indicar reações emocionais nos deslocamentos pela zona leste da capital francesa. Nold já havia realizado outras "biometrias psicogeográficas" ("cardiogramas aplicados às paisagens", como explica Nold). Vemos aqui a possibilidade de uso e apropriação do espaço urbano usando sensores que interagem com o meio ambiente criando mapas sensíveis dos percursos, permitindo outras leituras dos lugares (via Ecrans ).
Biomapping de l?Est parisien, données transcrites dans Google Earth
"(...) Les 19 et 20 avril, il animait un atelier à Paris à Ars Longa, dans le XIe arrondissement. L'objectif : dresser une carte émotionnelle collaborative de l?Est parisien. Le dispositif imaginé par Nold combine la localisation géographique et la réaction de notre corps à l?environnement. Chaque participant est équipé d'un GPS et d'un capteur fixé sur deux doigts de la main qui enregistre la réponse galvanique de la peau, indicateur utilisé dans les détecteurs de mensonges. Sous l'effet d'un stress ou d?une émotion, l'épiderme sécrète une micro sudation qui va améliorer la conductibilité de la peau.
GPS dans une main, capteur dans l?autre
Ainsi harnachés, les participants se sont dispersés et ont arpenté la ville durant une heure. Nold a récupéré les données des volontaires de retour de promenade et les a retranscrites dans Google Earth, permettant de visualiser chaque itinéraire, alternance chaotique de pics, de creux et de plages plus calmes. Nold invite chacun à faire le récit de son trajet et à l'annoter pour tenter de trouver une explication à ces variations brutales. Certains motifs sont récurrents, comme ces pics quasi systématiques lorsqu'il s'agit de traverser un gros carrefour, ou encore ces vagues régulières qui semblent caractériser l'état du promeneur absorbé dans ses réflexions, insensible à ce qui se passe autour de lui. Ce samedi-là, certains s'étaient promenés du côté de République lors de la manifestation prochinois, se frayant un chemin au milieu des slogans, klaxons et banderoles, un stress traduit dans les successions de pics sur la carte.
'J'ai choisi des cartes parce qu'elles parlent un langage qui nous est familier, comme d'autres visualisations scientifiques telle le cardiogramme. Quand les médecins regardent un cardiogramme, ils cherchent des pathologies, repèrent ce qui ne va pas. L'idée de Biomapping, c'est un cardiogramme transposé sur le paysage.' Biomapping est une sorte de psychogéographie appliquée, telle que la définit l'Internationale situationniste en 1958 : 'étude des effets précis du milieu géographique, consciemment aménagé ou non, agissant directement sur le comportement affectif des individus.'
Depuis cette époque, la ville a beaucoup changé, les technologies sécuritaires sont devenues omniprésentes : 'L'individu est constamment surveillé, via les caméras ou la biométrie, manière d'essayer de faire dire des choses à notre corps en mesurant le stress de la voix, la manière de marcher etc. Plutôt que de subir ces technologies, j'invite les participants à se familiariser avec, à s'approprier leurs données corporelles intimes, à les partager avec d'autres, et à les interpréter eux-mêmes', dit Nold qui souhaite ainsi responsabiliser les citadins/(...)"
O festival Conflux de arte e tecnologia explora novas dimensões da psicogeografia em NY, "for creative exploration of urban public space". As submissões de propostas podem ser feitas aqui: Conflux Festival | Submissions
Interesse em processos psicogeográficos tem voltado com o surgimento de projetos em mídias locativas, tomando a deriva e a flânerie como formas de apropriação do espaço urbano, tendo a cidade como "espaço de jogo".
Vejam a chamada abaixo:
"Participants in Conflux share an interest in psychogeography. Projects range from interpretations of the classical approach developed by the Situationists to emerging artistic, conceptual, and technology-based practices.
At Conflux, participants, along with attendees and the public, put these investigations into action on the city streets. The city becomes a playground, a laboratory and a space for the development of new networks and communities.
Here are examples of events we feature:
* exploratory drifts/dérives on foot or by bike, subway, bus or other transport * walks with experimental mapping or navigation techniques * social/environmental/urban research and fieldwork * workshops and classes * temporary outdoor installations/interventions * interactive performance projects * street games * mobile-tech/locative media projects * micro-radio, podcasting, vlogging and other broadcast proposals * alternative use/re-use of public space * projects proposing alternative/experimental/DIY cultures, economies, communities, and artistic initiatives * lectures, multimedia presentations and panel discussions * short film/video works * live audio/video projects and musical performances for night events
For examples of past Conflux events, visit our archived 2007 site. Please note that we?re not accepting proposals for traditional visual art exhibitions of paintings, photography, sculpture, etc. at this time."
Interessante mix de realidades em Sidney onde mapas impressos são colocados (presos em lugares públicos) a disposição para exercícios de psico-geografia em áreas de Sydney. Impressões são enviadas por email. Ressalto aqui o uso de mídias analógicas (e e-mail a posteriori) como um exemplo de mídias locativas. Vejam post do cityofsound:
"Adrian Lahoud of UTS writes to say, 'Thought you should know that as of last week 200 psycho-geographical maps have been pinned up around four routes through the Sydney CBD, with invitations for use and comments at archurbanism at gmail.com...'"
Site com projetos ligados à psicogeografia Crystalpunk, principalmente .walk. O projeto recebeu uma menção honrosa no Transmediale em 2004 e é desenvolvido em Ultrecht, Holanda. O projeto combina midias locativas e psicogeografia. Segundo post do "Invisible Objects":
.walk in London
(...)"Participants of .walk left the doors of the gallery to follow a randomly generated path through the city, thereby, according to Social Fiction, 'calculating' the city as though it were a 'peripatetic computer.' (...)"
Tenho insistido no potencial psicogeográfico e de deriva das mídias locativas, e isso para além dos formatos comerciais que estão surgindo a cada dia. Discuti em recente artigo esses processos de desterritorialização (a deriva, a perda de controle) e de "territorialização" em jogo com as tecnologias digitais móveis. Tenho mostrado em papers e nesse Carnet projetos "bottom-up" de produção de mapas e croquis, abrindo possibilidades participativas de escrita e leitura do espaço. Post do Masters of Media "Can Google Maps set us free? From dérive to (collective) intelligence" mostra bem esse processo.
Teoria da Deriva, na fot movimentos de estudantes do 16th arrondissement de Paris (do Moon River).
"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. 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."
Theory of the Dérive - Guy Debord.
Vejam trechos abaixo do post do Masters of Media:
"Dérive is a notion used by Guy Debord in an attempt to convince readers to revisit the way they looked at urban spaces. The concept means to aimlessly walk, or drift, through the city streets being guided by the momentum and space itself. A modern practice of Dérive is roaming the streets of your city through the satellite photographs in Google Maps and more recently Google Street View; a new feature of Google Maps that allows one to view and navigate high-resolution, 360 degree street level images of various cities (in the US). Google?s maps distinguish themselves from traditional printed maps in the sense that the user is able to interact.
The basic premise in Debord?s theory of Dérive is that people are trapped in the practices of everyday life, by looking at the city by following their emotions they can break with their daily route, routine and enclosed space. Cities in fact are designed in ways to direct and control its publics.
(...)
Bringing an inverted angle to the world can make people assign new meanings to familiar places, produce new forms of social interaction and make public space a place where one stops to look.
(...)
Similarly the satellite photographs in Google Maps changes meaning and memories attached to common places; it gives the user an experience of re-familiarity. Street View on the other hand draws on the recognizable element; the photographs are taken from street level and thereby rediscovering is substituted for virtual sightseeing. The user can now wander through New York while staying at home; moreover, the user can zoom and alter the view at any time. Instead of looking up the fastest route or determining ones location, the function seems to have shifted in the direction of roaming and aimless wandering.
(...)
A wide variety of peer-created extensions are freely available augmenting the information and increasing the amount of knowledge, such as the Wikipedia extension ? which provides a sense of temporal accuracy in Google Earth because information is provided about history and coming into being of a particular place, complete with specific dates, adding to the hyper-real situation. The practice of contributing to the medium opposes with traditional one-way media institutions. Google Earth allows users to act upon their creative skills and knowledge by offering possibilities to co-create the product and make it available to anyone, also outside the community. Google Maps API is a tool which users of Google Earth can use to include whichever information to existing maps offered by Google.
(...)
Currently maps are circulating in 3D or data tips containing personal information or photographs taken by users from a street level (which consequently changes the perspective of the original design). Information visualization tools such as maps enable greater understanding of reality, our society, life, and in short our existence. The accessibility and popularity of dynamic digital maps should make academics and interaction designers wonder how new ways of wandering can educate, emancipate, and enlighten the masses."
Bom texto/projeto sobre mídias locativas e a criação de mapas "subversivos", forma de anexar informação, criando mapas com "unofficial landmarks", como formas de "détorunement", "psicogeografias", apropriações do espaço urbano. O texto refere-se a projetos que buscam essas experiências. Vejam trechos do texto Subversive Cartography (Via "Space and Culture"):
"Cell phone cameras, video phones, video surveillance cameras, wireless web cams, and the ever-shrinking digital camera capture multiple layers of city spaces-from the banal to the breathtaking. At the same time, the invisible signals of urban geography such as Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and wireless Internet hot spots are being made visible through location-specific art practices that alter their intended use and create alternate urban narratives. These practices are known as location-based media, and are works whose central focus is a specific location.
The emergence of these new technologies has facilitated a resurgence and expansion of the theory and practice of psychogeography. Psychogeographers have been experimenting with cities for over forty years, but only recently has this theory manifested in ways other than in texts. The new wave of psychogeographic artists and practitioners-following (literally) in the footsteps of psychogeography's early enthusiasts, the Situationists-are interpreting its ideas in a tangible, inclusive way, and creating projects that are accessible and even fun, bringing psychogeography to a much wider and more popular audience.
This new generation of practice, which includes numerous websites, art collectives and conferences, is committed to the "mental mapping" of physical civic spaces-that is, mapping the versions of places as they exist in our minds and are represented by our emotions. These projects range from those using technological devices that leave geo-markers (precise coordinates of where something is located) to the graffiti tags left behind by unknown artists. Buildings poised for demolition or lonely bus stops-these sorts of things are worthy of attention from the psychogeographic gaze. This is a new kind of cartography, and it rebuilds and alters the way we represent various urban environments, blending new, often personal, elements into these maps that challenge the so-called "objective" institutional representations of cities. (...)
This project looks at some subversions and reiterations of the institutional map. The three main projects examined here, Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC, Townsend Retraced , and One Block Radius, use maps and government archives as portals into the emotional, non-rational terrain of the places they represent. Their use of institutional maps to question the veracity of institutional mapping is a brilliant form of detournement, one of psychogeography's wiliest tricks. Every Bus Stop in Surrey, BC represents a public transportation system in a sprawling Vancouver suburb in the midst of transition; Townsend Retraced represents a failed 1970s planned utopian urban community on the shore of Ontario's Lake Erie; One Block Radius is an extensive survey of a one-block area of New York's social geography."
Mais um projeto unindo midia locativa e psicogeografia. O Tulca Freedon Trail, criado por Conor McGarrigle, oferece passeios sonoros pela historia do EUA (Boston) remapenado e re-significando sua historia a partir do Boston Freedom Trail to Galway. Vejam trechos do post do Networked Performance.
"(...)November 10, 2007; 3:30 pm - Conor McGarrigle invites you to join him on a guided tour of the Freedom Trail and a free flowing conversation on freedom, art, maps, cultural tourism, situationism and the art of getting lost; leaves from 1-5 Merchants Road, Galway. The Tulca Freedom Trail is a self guided audio tour based on a remapping of the famous Boston Freedom Trail to Galway. Participants equipped with a map and the authentic audio guide walk the route of the Boston Freedom Trail - commemorating the events of the American War of Independence - which has been remapped to the streets of Galway. The tour draws on the historic connections between Galway and Boston, explores the troubled concept of American freedom in the contemporary political climate and encourages the user to see Galway in a new and unexpected way.(...) (...)
Drawing on the Situationalist idea of the psychogeographical dérive the project seeks to gently subvert the experience of cultural tourism by transferring a cultural experience from it?s ?proper place? to another city where it has no specific relevance. This disruption frees the user to experience the city in an unexpected way and may become the basis of another cultural experience independent of the culture industry. The Tulca Freedom Trail is a refinement of a concept first developed in the artist?s Joyce Walks Project."T
Projeto "The Status" mostra a navegacao psicogeografica de Heath Bunting. Como temos discutido nesse Carnet, trata-se de formas de significacao do espaco urbano, criando lugares, na generalidade do espaco urbano. Podemos dizer que um lugar e' um espaco com uma identidade. As midias locativas estao ajudando, pelo menos em hipotese, a criacao de lugares nos espacos cada vez mais impessoais das metropoles contemporaneas. Essas experiencias mostram possibilidades de criacao de sentido tendo como aliadas as novas midias (geotags, mapeamento, producao de conteudo). Essa nova forma de deriva tem como dispositivos fundamentais as midias locativas, como laptops, smatphones, GPS... Dia 29 de novembro sera' possivel acompanha-lo pelas ruas de Nottingham. Para mais detalhest vejam o site do The Status Project by Heath Bunting
"We spend our days navigating both street and institutional status systems. The Status Project intends to make visible these systems and facilitate easy movement within them. We have escapist fantasies of mastering less complicated environments and platforms. But why not master the matrix of our daily realities ? Join Heath Bunting for a Psychogeographic tour of THE SYSTEM on the streets of central Nottingham, UK on November 29, 2007; 5:00 pm. Maps similar to this will be available to guidance."
Projeto interessante na Austrália que mistura literatura, mapeamento, localização e psicogeografia. Trata-se do "Concrete Dialogues", reunindo jovens escritores (de 16 a 30 anos) em Perth, Austrália, de acordo com a sua localização geográfica. Vejam o mapa abaixo e a descrição do projeto. O Link vem do Networked_Performance:
Concrete Dialogues is a collaborative online writing project, created for young writers in Perth, Western Australia. The project organises the creative works of 16 to 30 year olds according to geographic location on a digital streetmap of the Perth Metropolitan region. Submissions are based on specific locations in the city and suburbs, which become hyperlinks across the digital map. The result is a psychogeographic portrait of our city - a mosaic of writing that uncovers the darker doorsteps of the intersections you know, the romances in the parks you drive past, the characters of the suburbs you can?t place."
Mais CiberFlâneries aqui (NEW!)
