The first hairline fracture to my psyche..

Resident Alien. Part 15.

Psychogeography Part 2.

"Psychogeography is the study of precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals". —- Guy Debord, 1955.

I discovered Psychogeography in 2010 not long after I moved to the USA. At that time I had just begun a personal protest against having to need a car to do absolutely everything and I had taken up walking everywhere instead. I was so serious about this protest that I had even quit my job at UPS to work in a grocery store that was only a 10 minute walk from my apartment. I had been living in America for about 2 years at that point and although I had taken a few significant road trips, I had simply had enough of all the local driving involved in my day to day city life when I was home. I felt like I knew the city of Tucumcari in New Mexico (which was over 600 miles away) better than I did my own home in Overland Park, Kansas. I’d even taken more photographs in Tucumcari than I had done in Overland Park and I had only been a tourist passing through. 

This demonstration against the use of an automobile was not concerned with any noble cause such as protecting the environment, but it was instead a protest that had been initiated out of a profound sense of dislocation that I had been feeling about my surroundings.

It was as if I had suddenly become overwhelmed by America’s sheer size and scale, having seen just enough of it to sustain the first hairline fracture to my psyche. I had found that in a car I was essentially unable to connect the various micro-destinations of my daily errands around Overland Park with the apparent non-places between them. Traveling from the library to a coffee shop, via the Mall, for example, became a hugely disorientating experience for me. These inter-zones were filled with all the familiar signs of American life, but appeared somehow absent of any living soul, except that is, for those souls that surrounded me in their own vehicles, separated from the world and separated from each other with their blank faces forward facing and ready to lurch to the next traffic light the moment the signal turned green. 

Sub-division followed sub-division, punctuated with fast food restaurants, gas stations and churches in a CGI landscape that was remote, manicured and as alien as the minds that I imagined to have designed it. Unreachable spaces to me somehow, like movies waiting to begin. And from my own paused life idling at the stoplight I could feel that old time prairie settlers' fear of infinity creeping into the comfortable 21st century confines of my air-conditioned Honda.

I found that these transitional spaces were measured (locally) in the time taken to cross them and not by the actual distance in miles, so depending on traffic and weather conditions this travel time (time travel) could obviously vary a lot. As my GPS bleeped me across the great motherboard city grid of Overland Park, Kansas, I obediently obeyed its every electronic command and headed in a direction that was never really clear to me. Every destination on my errand list was psychically located on the same flickering dream corner of the city. I could clearly visualize these destinations in my mind's eye, but I was absolutely clueless as to where they were on a map and how to get there without programming it into my GPS first.. 

This is what I meant by dislocation and I decided that the only way I was going to be able to orientate myself was to lose the car altogether and scale everything in my universe back to the neighborhood where I was living. So one morning I set out on what would be a series of long pre-planned walks with my camera..