Metered by our own beating hearts..

Resident Alien. Part 18.

Psychogeography. Part 5.

“On Saturday evenings I have had the custom, after taking my opium, of wandering quite far, without worrying about the route or the distance in search of an occult Northwest Passage, allowing one to cross London unhampered”. — Thomas de Quincey, Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater, 1822.

In this world where everything seems like it must have a purpose from the onset, to truly be able to drift through a city on foot, without notion or direction, is actually a very difficult endeavor to undertake. Psychogeography, as a practice, has been my own personal revolt against such purpose and Guy Debord’s dérive has been the technique I have used to achieve it. 

Whether a purpose be self imposed or from an outside agent, the dérive offers the photographer an opportunity to side-step the ex-clusive thinking of purpose and to instead indulge every distraction from it. By surrendering one’s own personal guidance systems (or algorithms) in favor of chance encounters and unexpected events is to invite the possibility of also making new and authentic work and to discover alternative approaches to connecting with our own environment.

It's true that to dérive is actually not just difficult to accomplish psychologically, but it is also difficult (and sometimes just not possible) to navigate an urban environment on foot these days. In many modern cities the pedestrian has taken second place to the automobile and walking in such areas can not only be considered dangerous, but also, on occasion, illegal too. 

As a result the urban walker has been marginalized by the city planners into using officially designated public footpaths which offer the full spectrum hamster-wheel circuit tours of all The Spectacles highlights. The wild and well trodden wasteland game trails made by the local humans have been intersected by chain-link fences with no trespassing signs attached to them. These inter-zones are now being reclaimed by their native scrub of dock leaf, stingy nettle and graffiti and the wait for future developments can be measured in the height of their growth. 

As a photographer I have discovered by engaging in this practice of the dérive is a purpose will inevitably surface from the very act of the dérive itself. I believe, by walking through a space with a camera, by simply following light or letting one photograph inform the next, new ideas and alignments between our experiences and encounters along the way will start to form their own connections. 

As these seemingly disparate elements begin to develop relationships, first between one another and then with ourselves, I have found that the impulse to make a photograph is actually my own emotional response to it, like a dialogue. It is this consciously observed emotional awareness that is key to psychogeography as a practice and also to myself as a photographer.

The dérive engages the photographer in a stream of consciousness narrative where memory (and photography) become informed by the passing of time through a space. It is really a picaresque journey where our photographs are metered by the rhythm of walking and by our own beating hearts. In this way the dérive could also be considered a meditation by way of it keeping us present and aware of our surroundings. 

If we happen to venture out on a dérive with our camera but return without making an interesting photo, this time is not to be thought of as lost because we have spent that time engaged in the rigorous practice of active observation, not just of our environment, but also how our perception has interacted with it. Any successful photographs made during a dérive are, in this way, to be regarded as psychic breakthroughs. They are like grounding charges that have built up over a period of continued conscious attention and then earthed by the tripping of the shutter. 

The drifting psychogeographer will also discover that some places seem to accumulate a sort of gravity around them and are points of concentrated psychic energy. These are what photographer Joel Meyerowitz calls “The Zen Bell” - that which alerts the self to our own awareness and results in the lifting of our camera. These places can take the form of repeated symbols within the environment, cultural or historical markers, the locations of past-life events, or even present day poltergeist activity. The attuned landscape photographer will feel this energy most strongly and you will likely hear the sound of their tripod legs being extended as phantom civil war musket fire begins to crackle inside their heads.

Some places are in continuous transition as they clatter down through the decades, supported by scaffolding with its population in a state of perpetual anxiety. Other places have remained stable across time and have become rooted in tradition as their gargoyles are slowly choked by ivy. Other spaces have maintained their identity for a long time (either culturally or as a utility) but have since undergone some form of swift and radical new development, leaving its locals out in the cold. 

This disembodied sense of loss can be felt as we walk through these spaces and it can be seen in the faces of those that pass us on the street and it will also show up in the photographs that we make there. This public grief for a place that is gone but still yet to become, is a hard one for a community (and us) to shake and these ghosts will follow us home, trailing behind us at the end of the day, jumping from shadow to shadow, until finally taking their leave, later, through our dreams. 

The dérive offers a chance for us to approach these environments with our uncertainty intact and with a purpose that is yet to be determined. By inviting the creative free association of photography with us on a dérive, we are also granted a rare opportunity to gain an insight into the secret arcane logic of our own image making. Whether it be for the first time or in the re-discovery of a place that is already familiar, by leaving a trail of photographs behind us we will begin to map these spaces properly, from the ground up and from the inside out..

Psychogeography has been central to my photography for over a decade. It forms the backbone of my Resident Alien project (which all these photographs here are part of) and it sits at the heart of the work I am presently engaged in. With an enthusiasm for chance and for what could be argued as a foolhardy desire for getting (purpose-fully) lost, I have found myself traveling roads I would have otherwise avoided, lived a life I could never have predicted and seen an America that I could not have imagined. It is in this way the dérive maintains its original position as a form of personal protest, holding firm its demonstration against the established order of The Spectacle with a radical insurrection of the self.

Hocus-Pocus F16 at infinity focus..

Resident Alien. Part 17

Psychogeography. Part 4

In the shadow of The Spectacle.

Illustrated by Gavin Bragdon.

In 2011, in the early days of my interest in psychogeography I planned a trip to Florida with the intention of exploring how The Great Swamp Spectacle of Orlando was contained. I had this idea about going there, but not entering through the main gate, but to instead spend my time walking around and photographing it from the outside. I had no idea what I expected to find there or what this perimeter actually looked like or even if it had one at all. I did little or no research before I left, preferring to dérive (drift) wherever my camera decided to take me and I would respond to that rather than a pre-planned schedule of activities. I had my flight booked, a hotel room, a rental car waiting and a day ticket to The Spectacle itself and the rest I was going to play by ear once I got there.

Like all photo expeditions I have taken in the past, I spent the weeks leading up to it trying to anticipate and carefully pre-visualize the sorts of photographs I might find myself making once I arrived. What was I expecting to see? What ideas about the place would I be bringing with me and where had I got these ideas from in the first place? It has taken a long time for me to learn to pay attention to these questions and to let go of everything else. I understand that nothing can truly prepare me for the actual reality of spending time in a place I have never before visited with my camera because context is always subject to unforeseen juxtapositions which will materialize in the moment they are created (ie, life). Any expectations I might have are really nothing more than wishful thinking anyway, a leaning personal bias filled with an unhealthy dose of anxiety. Truth is always stranger than fiction after all and any successful photographs that I ever returned home with were all previously inconceivable to me while sitting on the couch driving myself crazy thinking about it all beforehand.

During these times I can generally feel my creative influences (whatever they may be at the time) rise to the surface and let their presence be known, especially if the photo expedition is based around a location, rather than a person or event. Locations can be extremely evocative for me, with visions bathed in William Eggleston light, Mark Power views and with the bright wit of Martin Parr everywhere. This heady mix of photographic masters can be a struggle to get to grips with at these times as they push and shove for possession of my psyche. They represent my most aligned visions and personal aspirations for my own work and hold both my sweetest hopes and most secret fears for it too. 

The relationship we have with our influences runs deep in all of us and they can be private and complicated relationships too and for these reasons I do my very best to keep them all at home (chained up in the basement) before I leave. If anything at all can have a bearing on what photographs I will end up making, it is of course, myself, and the attitude I decide to take with me will be my strongest influence in any given moment and will be forever present in the photographs I make. On one hand I wholeheartedly trust in the falling photographic tarot cards of destiny and the fates, and on the other hand, I can be an emotional spinning top who needs to take a moment and breathe before lifting the camera. 

And so the serenity prayer ignites again in a cold blue flame and burns down to a dirty black ash on the tin foil then blows away as I begin to weigh up my past-life karmic-debts against any future photographic mojo conjurings of hocus-pocus F-16 at infinity focus.. 

Magical thinking is what all this really is and photography for me, is filled with it.

So, was The Great Spectacle of Orlando going to be surrounded by tall unscalable walls topped with leaning razor wire? Were there intermittent guard towers along these walls, manned by our favorite cartoon characters in Kalashnikov silhouette? Was the Spectacle a castle island perhaps, surrounded by a swampy Everglade moat and stocked with starving Alligators? Or maybe the moat was an asphalt one where The Spectacle leans up against the sky like a great jagged quartz stalagmite, rising up through the centre of a massive parking lot, packed to the hilt with the steel, glass and rubber of vehicles and boiling with tar beneath it, while the thick Florida sun beats down relentlessly on everything and from which there is no shade or shelter? Maybe..

Acknowledging expectations (photographic or otherwise) from the on-set has been an integral part of my practice as a psychogeographer because these expectations will be the platform from which my first encounter with The Spectacle will take place. They must be made conscious and regarded as they are, because they can help sharpen the intuition later. 

My interaction with The Spectacle will also refer back to these expectations and it is in this space, in the dialogue between both, where some of my most personally meaningful photographs have been made. My own crude and initial psychological mappings of these phantom territories, not yet visited or photographed, exist only as dream-scapes, inside of me, and often stand in stark and ridiculous contrast to actually being present before The Spectacle itself. 

Just like The Spectacle’s image of itself, my ideas about The Spectacle are like that of a child’s. They are left handed crayon drawings scribbled on the walls of my psyche, full of prejudice and preconceptions based on hearsay, reputation and its ancient myths and legends, while the images self-generated by The Spectacle of The Spectacle short circuits my imagination with a scientific glamour that is not designed to fade.

 

A detailed and fearless inventory of these expectations and ideas about a place must be made before departure and jotted into a notebook, so they can be seen outside of one’s own head and committed to a time in space. They represent the original points of orientation within the drift-zone, from which all further coordinate points will be measured and plotted against and psycho-geographically speaking, will inform you that, “You - Are - Here”.

The drive across The Specacle’s undeveloped land is through lucious tropical vegetation on a perfectly paved parkway with frequent signposts and on every signpost there are cameras mounted. It is impossible to get lost on the property of The Spectacle because you are always being followed and the cartoon character in a security guard uniform sitting in a small dark room can point to where you are, at any given moment, as you pass from one monitor screen to the next as the live feed shows you taking a piss behind a bush. A tiny camera mounted on the back of the friendly Cricket sitting on a blade of grass records the whole thing in 4K HD for your own personal protection. 

The Spectacle sits in the middle of 43 square miles of a property containing 3 other satellite Spectacles which, I imagine, from above, forms the constellation of Orion. The ways in and out are carefully curated to avoid any unscheduled, out of the car, photographic driftings to take pictures of things The Spectacle would rather not let us see -

- such as the cloud-busting atmospheric conditioners, the size of apartment buildings. The valley of the meat pods. The vast cooling lakes of boiling mercury. The roaring industrial furnaces stocked 24 hours a day with all manner of legal documents pertaining to itself. The ancient sky chimneys, shielded by tall evergreens, that bellow thick noxious smoke under-cover of darkness and out across the face of a full piss moon. The smell of sulfur at the end of every breath is ever present in these spectral Interzones and lest ye be met out there, off path and in the dead of night, by one of the snarling youths that are always waiting behind every tree with Walkie Talkie and immaculate Kaki’s and “here to help”, for—-ever. 

“It's 4pm!” a toothless drone rasps, “turn on the rain and set the timer for 20 minutes”.

The Spectacle may well be the image-symbol personification of capitalist consumerism dedicated solely to the preservation of the continued and sustained illusion of its own image, but I am not really interested in all of that. The Spectacle can keep all its secrets as far as I am concerned. I am interested in what writer, Will Self, calls the “free association of place and space”. To be drawn with my camera by whatever inclination and chance encounter that might arise and to explore and interact with the “latent or repressed psychological content of the spaces themselves”. I am interested in spinning parallaxes where history splices with the memories of images recalled from dreams on drugs. I believe that it is in the connective tissue of these liminal spaces, in the shadow of The Spectacle, where I can begin to form my own relationship to it and then, by making spectacle of what is not, attempt, with my camera, to understand what is really there and what is really going on.

I left my car at a floating off world satellite parking lot where I boarded the monorail and was shuttled to the entrance of The Spectacle. I remember a great glass cathedral hotel with a tropical air-conditioned panoramic mezzanine with vistas that looked out across prehistoric floodplains in what was for me a genuine moment of pure science fiction wonderment..

I write these words 10 years after my visit to the Great Swamp Spectacle of Orlanda and I am in no doubt that my battered memory has flickered and glitched in its prompting today. But, in this brave new world without context, where facts, history, science and biography are all up for re-interpretation, without fear of reality getting in the way, this shouldn’t be a problem for us. 

What I can absolutely be certain of is every single one of my psychogeographical plans for photographing the perimeter of The Spectacle had been thwarted from the moment I arrived on its property. My visit having already been foreseen a long time ago in uncle Walt’s late night magic mushroom mind and then baked right into The Spectacle’s blueprints the very next day, and thus committing the deterrent of the psychogeographer to The Spectacles ultimate vision of itself at inception.

 

And so, I would return home with only one photograph worth anything but with which made the whole trip worthwhile. 1/250th of a second for a weekend costing, what was for me then, a small fortune and, just like that, is exactly how I resolve my life of photography. Photography having forced me out into the world to engage with it directly with what has felt like, at times, a visceral purpose. Whether there was a photograph to be conjured along the way or not, I’ve followed the possibility that there might be one out there anyway. Perhaps, if I had never owned a camera, I would never leave my house at all and my life would simply continue inside of it, until I’m found, later, in a room gone dark, playing the guitar badly, tangled up in agoraphobia and incoherently muttering elaborate excuses for postponing all my life experiences to an undesignated future time which I have carefully planned to never arrive soon. And, as my restraints are tightened on the gurney, Adult Protective Services wheel me out of the house and into the sunlight, while in the background “Alright Now” by Free, plays softly on a distant radio, again..

All illustrations by Gavin Bragdon with Midjourney.

tune in

Theory of the Dérive. By Guy Debord, 1958.

Resident Alien. Part 16.

Psychogeography. Part 3.

Opening note:

The Theory of the Dérive was first published in 1958 by Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist and filmmaker. The dérive is a concept developed by the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals who sought to create a new society based on radical social change. The dérive is a method of exploration that involves wandering through the city without a predetermined destination, allowing oneself to be led by chance and the environment. The goal of the dérive is to create a new understanding of the city and its spaces, and to break free from the constraints of everyday life. 

I am taking the opportunity today to share Debord’s theory of the dérive in full and I have illustrated it with the recent works of 4 photographers whom I follow with great interest on Instagram. Blake Andrews, Bryan Formhals, Ian Johnson and Kyle Souder. I believe that these photographers (whether they are aware of it of not) are working with the dérive to explore their relationship to their own built environments.

Photo by Simon Kossoff

Theory of the Dérive. By Guy Debord, 1958.

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. 

Photo by Bryan Formhals

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. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. 

Photo by Ian Johnson

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data. 

Photo by Blake Andrews

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology. 

Photo by Ian Johnson

In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher. 

Photos by Blake Andrews

Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.

 

Photo by Ian Johnson

If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.

                            Photo by Bryan Formhals

An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and are thus “truly independent from one another.”

 

Photo by Blake Andrews

At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities that are such rich centers of possibilities and meanings, could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.” 

                  William Burroughs Datson, by Simon Kossoff

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale. 

                           Photos by Kyle Souder

The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.

 

Photo by Blake Andrews

But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.

Photos by Kyle Souder

The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives. 

                            Photo by Bryan Formhals

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with personal disorientation. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.   

Photos by Blake Andrews

In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambience: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).  

The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away. 

Photos by Ian Johnson

In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime. 

                               Photo by Ian Johnson

Our rather anarchic lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game. 

Photo by Blake Andrews

The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draft the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambience, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the earliest navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism. 

                            Photo by Bryan Formhals

Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experiences lead to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression. 

Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment: 

“The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”

(To be continued..)

GUY DEBORD

1958

Photo by Simon Kossoff