What the Situationists left behind: Psychogeography
Dina Deitsch
Psychogeography: The study of the effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals
Dérive: a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient ambiance. Also used to designate a specific period of continuous deriving.
In 1953, or thereabouts, psychogeography developed amidst the broad boulevards of Haussmann’s Paris in the work of the Situationists International. Equipped with maps and the roving notion of dérive, the group set out to study the city through chance and happenings and thus performed a surrealist-inspired critique of urbanization. Fifty years later, in the wake of site-specific art, armed with GPS technology and the woven network of the internet, artists are practicing psychogeography on this side of the Atlantic. This time it is less about the specificities of the city and more about the ever-expanding and fluid concept of place–be it public or private, virtual or physical.
A group of such artists, loosely collected under the umbrella of Glowlab will be setting up shop this October in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Art Interactive. Founded by Christina Ray, Glowlab is a self-described psychogeography lab where artists can meet and collaborate, as in any laboratory-type situation. The lab materializes in the form of an online magazine, annual conferences and festivals called Conflux, and, of course, site-specific "moments," i.e. exhibitions, in which artists share their urban research with the public in more explicit terms. The October show, Glowlab: Open Lab, will focus on the site of Cambridge and the greater-Boston area as both subject matter and workspace. Each weekend of this eight-week show will feature artists-in-residence leading walks, offering workshops, and presenting interactive projects within and around the gallery.
Boston by Chance, by Brian House, Gese Henselmans and Jake Hobart is perhaps one of the more directly psychogeographic artist-in-residence projects. Seeking to make the familiar strange again, Boston by Chance asks gallery visitors to follow a computer-generated route through the city. By submitting to the will of technology, a participant can potentially be freed, or at the very least shaken, from his/her routine movements within the city. The "Explorers" are then asked to take a photograph on their journeys and contribute to an online cartography of Boston that acts as "a kind of guidebook or archive of Boston… a game ready to play at any time."
Using the urban cityscape in conjunction with cyberspace seems to be characteristic of much current pyschogeographic work. Foundcity.com, another development of Ms. Ray’s with co-founder John Geraci, allows visitors to create personalized maps through phone cameras and virtual tags. The project involves multiple cities, including Boston, and fuses personal experience with a public sense of the city.
In fact, it is the reliance on the internet that both differentiates and connects current psychogeographers from and to their predecessors. As in all impermanent artworks, such as Happenings, performances, and site-specific installations, the remnants or evidence of the work, be it photography, video, drawings, often become vital for its reception and longevity. Think of the images of Spiral Jetty as the land mass lay under water or the catalogue of Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum long after the show had closed or Allan Kaprow’s photographs of piles of tires–a trace of a reccurring Happening. Documentation, in many cases, has become an inextricable part of such work and an increasingly common mode of experiencing experience-based art.
Whereas these modern-day psychogeographers rely on the internet to complete their works, they also use it to document and communicate their projects, adding an interactive dimension to a traditionally unidirectional mode of recording. Cyberspace affords the opportunity for dialogue and lends agency to the viewer. Boston by Chance becomes a forum and tool for future city wandering while Foundcity collects documents to overlay a communal map with the deeply personal. The works are thus given the ability to extend beyond an immediate experience and, over time, become reincarnated in new forms–a guidebook, game, or map.
By spanning projects from a specific physical/urban space into cyberspace, the artists, in effect, propel the Situationists’ method of derive–to designate a specific period of continuous deriving–into the 21st century. Bridging virtual and urban landscapes, the psychogeographers offer us an integrated view of our current environment that fluctuates between real, hyper-real, virtual and physical.
Glowlab: Open Lab will be at Art Interactive, 130 Bishop Allen Drive, Cambridge, MA from October 14 through December 11, 2005
