Psychogeography

Psychogeography is the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters which charge environments.

The term originally goes back to Thomas De Quincey's dreamy, druggy treks of the nineteenth century and Walter Benjamin's excursions around the Paris streets of the 1920s, fusing Jewish messianism, Kabbalism, Marxism and visionary Surrealism.

But after Internationale Situationiste #1 1957, the term evolves again, indicating the study of the effects of geographical settings on mood and behaviour.

The Situationists were rebelling against the way the urban planning had dumbed-down individuals' connection to their surroundings by locking residents into prescribed patterns of movement. Through there walking ''drifts'' the Situationists sought to reconnect individual with environment. Going on a flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur, which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer" which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". 

                            Guy Ernest Debord

Debord co-founded the Situationist International, which shaped the Paris student protests of 1968. Photograph: AFP

                     

Guy Ernest Debord (December 28, 1931 - November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . 

                   

Situationist International - The Situationist International was an internationalist European revolutionary group founded in 1957, and which reached its peak of influence in the general strike of May 1968 in France.

With their ideas rooted in Marxism and the 20th century European artistic avant-gardes, they advocated experiences of life alternative to those admitted by advanced capitalism, for the fulfillment of human desires. For this purpose they suggested and experimented with the "construction of situations," namely the setting up of environments favorable for the fulfillment of such desires. Using methods drawn from the arts, they developed a series of experimental fields of study, including unitary urbanism and psychogeography.

                                Richard Wentworth

                               

Wentworth was an artist and he specialized in sculptures using everyday objects, which changed the way we perceived the world.

He can describe his work better than i can so here is is description: 

'I have always been very puzzled about the raw and the cooked. Am I sitting on a tree or is this assemblage of wood a chair? What draws me in is how things are convertible and how humans give meaning. There is something about mutability that I have always been attracted to. I mean, what is a television that is sitting on the roadside miles away from the electricity supply? Is it still a television? It's something to do with being dead yet alive. It's the small human acts that reach out to my way of seeing. Without someone being able to raise a brick and deposit the right amount of mortar then there would be no walls. That's all a wall is really - a lot of brick raising. A little human act multiplied. A half brick raised, though, can be a murder weapon.

My work is also attached to the limits of purposefulness. If something is discarded you can read that and see that it's been rejected. To me, there is something terribly beautiful in that. Formal things are incredibly important to me. I always see the crack in the glass before I see the window. I have always had this "sickness". I am interested in the aberrant.'

                                    Will Self

                   

Here is an extract describing Will Self and his work (from http://critical-regionalism.com/2011/03/27/introducing-psychogeography/): 

Although psychogeography has never left the field of theoretical practice per se, it has continuously blended into the background.  Will Self and Ralph Steadman have brought the concept of psychogeography firmly into the 21^st Century with their articles in The Independent combining in publication to produce the texts Psychogeographyand Psycho Too.  Here Self introduces psychogeography as a concept with his detailed account of his purposeful and deliberate walk from Stockwell in south London to the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Self provides the reader with his reasons for the walk, and subsequently what separates his notions of psychogeography from earlier examples such as J.G.Ballard and Iain Sinclair.  Self asserts his reason for walking to New York was, ‘because I had business there, to explore; and, also, because in so doing, I hoped to suture up the wounds in my own, divided psyche: to sew together my American and my English flesh.’ Here it is clear that Self believed that this journey as a physical and psychological exploration would result in a clearer, more unified sense of self.   Ralph Steadman’s artwork  which accompanies Self’s writing not only enhances Self’s deeply reflexive prose but can also be considered as a text entire.  He visually and aesthetically represents the complexity of relationships between individuals and their locality through a modern form which displays his immediately recognizable cartoon style. By creatively representing countries, buildings, monuments and the natural landscape of cliff edges, deserts and coastlines (to name a few) emphasizes how the environment delivers an  enormous impact on the individual, molds their experiences and the tensions and fluidity that envelopes both land and person resulting in a sensual and spiritual relationship.