Psychogeography

First really got into this phenomena by reading the novels of Iain Sinclair. Most of his factional books are about 'reading' the architecture, graffiti, local myths and psychological atmosphere of a city, district or a building. In Sinclair's case, it is Greater London which gets an annual poetic and symbolic deconstruction via his non-linear narratives.

I do believe that all geographical spaces - be they rural or urban, town, city, beach, mountain, wood, school, factory, Soccer stadium - each have their own very particular subliminal energy, that is composed of all the mind's of the people who have passed through them. It's like, a person's sadness, grief, joy, hopes at the moments they worked, lived or just passed through these spaces, are impregnated forever into the wood, stone and steel, and can be activated by certain sensitive people who can feel or read the signs.

Guy Debord and the Situationist's made psychogeography into something of a scientific and political idea, as has Raoul Vanigem, but it has antecedents in Baudelaire and the Parisian flaneur.

Basically, Psychogeography is the perfect pursuit for the genteel bohemian in all of us.

Stop and look around you and think of all the infinite lives that have been and will be that haunt the most banal street corner and public park. Read the graffiti on a toilet door or a bus shelter and decipher the city. Mostly Its about being subversive by 'playing' with information that is abundant and free.

Its also of course about how architecture 'shapes' our interpretation of ourselves - how we feel inside spaces where our individual consciousnesses were not taken into account. Are we literally made and thought up by the physical environment?

I think its important to attempt an objectivity initially, as to the energy of certain place's, and how they do or don’t match up with your expectations. Listen to your instincts as you tune in to another language. Some people are more sensitive than others and pick up (to use a hippy phrase) 'vibrations' or resonance’s that others do not. Gaston Bachelard called them reverberations, like cyclic echoes, similar to a chord being strummed on a cosmic guitar and ourselves being the amplifier.

My old tutor at university had a theory about microwave radiation - emitted from people's electrical neurochemistry - being somehow impregnated into the fabric of surrounding objects at times of great joy and stress. These traces could then be activated and 'played' once again by a passing signal receiver - 9 days for example.

Had a female friend who would avoid a certain antique shop in the village. It sold genuine 30's and 40's antiques: clothing, militaria, furniture, kitchen utensils, ration books etc. She said she could feel all these shapes, moods and subliminal whispers passing through her mind like clouds whenever she entered the shop. She wasn't the kind to make it up either - very anti-spiritual person.

I personally always find beaches resonate with something beyond my normal awareness. Where the land (civilisation) meets the wild uncontrollable sea - the source of all life. Its like a magical nexus, a borderland, a separate republic, a curiosity shop for the exchange of ideas.

This is what the surrealist's saw too, especially Dali, a place of transmutation and the bending of time and space. Look at Picasso's beach 'monsters' from the 30's and 40's he felt the resonances too.

There is a really interesting Google lecture by Will Self on Psychogeography - his own love of it and its history.

He talks about the micro-climates that we inhabit in our car, plane, cab, computer mediated world. He argues that the way we properly perceive and navigate space is an essentially physical experience that we are losing after 100's of 1000's of years of feeling the narratives of a journey through our feet.

Capitalism creates an illusion of space and traveling, but is just in fact, a series of brief mediated shuttles between work, home and shopping.

Self recalls the great travelogues or 'Picaresque's' as he calls them: The Canterbury Tales, Pilgrim's Progress, Don Quixote, the Beat's, and how they are essentially about the 360 degree movement through space and the physical enrichment of the soul that creates. He believes we should reclaim the streets, re-appropriate the beautiful, and that walking as a mode of transport is a great social leveller.

Take a stroll and find out for yourself.