project title
Lost in space: dis/orienting psychogeographies
project description
Intoxicated rambling; playing games that displace familiar surroundings; wandering in one area of the city while blindly following the directions of a map of another – such strategies are common in psychogeography, where getting lost has often been something to cultivate. Losing oneself in the city requires a particular schooling, Walter Benjamin once observed. As such, it contrasts with the banality of simply not finding one’s way. This talk follows strands of psychogeography into realms of the disorienting, intoxicating and the labyrinthian. It focuses on the significance of these themes for earlier urban wanderers, especially the situationists for whom they were part of radical efforts to transform city space and everyday life in the 1950s and 1960s. “Life can never be too disorienting,” they once declared, as they envisaged whole cities being built for a perpetual drift. Yet they also attached importance to mapping, navigating and locating in their attempts to confront the alienating conditions of the society of the spectacle. What is the significance of these strategies of dis/orientation in the city? How do they relate to those of other psychogeographical adventurers, including the surrealists before them as well as current practitioners and contributors to this event? What is their interest today in an age of electronic surveillance, global positioning systems and increasingly sophisticated geographical tracking systems? The talk aims to explore some of these questions and open them up for debate. It will be followed by a period of extended discussion to allow issues raised in this and the previous talk to be explored further, including in relation to contemporary experiences of cities and psychogeography.
name
David Pinder
location
London
profile
David Pinder writes and teaches about the geographies of cities at Queen Mary, University of London. He has particular interests in psychogeography and the politics of urban space, and in the ideas and practices of the situationists and other avant-gardes. His publications on these themes include a forthcoming book Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). He is also co-editor of Cultural Geography in Practice (Arnold, 2003), and is currently compiling an issue of the journal Cultural Geographies that focuses on contemporary urban explorations and psychogeographies.
