Back to index of Nerve 24 - Summer 2014

‘Psychogeography’ - The advantage of a second language

Andrew Millar takes us around Hope Street on a tour of how the environment affects the way we think.

Dance choreographer Willi Dorner has his dancers and performers wrap and jam their bodies into acute angles around street corner and city centre architecture. They find ways of absorbing themselves into the dormant metal and stone and extracting themselves from it. As we traverse and jaunt through and over our city environment, and exert our minds to the act of ‘psychogeography’ we do the same, entwining our thoughts and feelings around the immediate locale. From the kerbstone, the rust tarnished rail fence, colourful traffic sign flourishes, and in the tarmac and glass or the dislodged cable, there is an indication of something other than mere functionality out there. And thank goodness there is, I say!

They sent me out onto Hope Street. To record the distance and scenery like a mnemonic pedometer. I began where the zone ends, where the litter and leaf mulch is heaviest and stained by car tread and traffic fumes. The font of road markings and notices. To Canning, that takes nerve and patience to cross. So much glass in our city routes, it has become a barrier now - has it cropped and hemmed in our viewing depth of field? Our thoughts and cravings reflect back quickly like radiowaves from the receding urban skyline. At the corner of Huskisson, my memories connect; these attachments like cloaks tried on and taken by mistake. Mahonia, lavender, cotoneaster and durable fresh painted black railings. Theodolite camera poles, strangers gauging likelihoods of premonitional tics. The gauze-like containment of zones by the panopticon. Too many cars to cross quickly at the corner of Canning. The city’s Zen landscape in a collapsed building and the pendants of buddleia plants.

Dérive at will!

Dérive means adrift in French. The word was used by the French Situationists, Dadaists and Surrealists to describe a technique of gathering inspiring new information to connect uniquely with contemporary urban life. Simply wander where you feel necessary and let the narrative spontaneously unfold in your own terms. Mobile phones are great for documenting these walks, they are unobtrusive and discreet, and the image size and resolution of photos taken on a phone often seem to bring a curiously personal narrative to a place or object. Un-map the A-Z configurations you are used to, and that you are expected to know like a cab driver. I find psychogeography most effective and understood in the written word, using the blessed interior poetic capability, which I reckon to be my second language. Write it down, record the sound of it and how you sound in it, photograph it, enjoy it!
‘The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few metres; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – all this seems to be neglected.’

(Guy Debord: from ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’)

See the Nerve website for Andrew Millar’s podcast.

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