Guy Debord : The Naked City

 

When writing Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Guy Debord was seeking a new way of life in the observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets:

“The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; 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 which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling character of certain places – these phenomena all seem to be neglected.” ¹

Debord observed how he could extract urban areas that had been drawn through and delineated by the emotional and behavioural responses to those spaces that conformist town-planning would ignore. His psychogeographic map entitled “The Naked City” (illustration) shows the fragmented experience of pedestrian wanderings, where meaning is found through walking the streets instead of motoring through them, where it is the pedestrian who creates a mental ordering of the cityscape instead of the city forcefully imposing its structure upon the individual character of these experiences.

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¹ Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, in Les Lèvres Nues # 6, September 1955

 

Resource : http://www.ctrl-n.net/journal/archives/introduction-to-a-critique-of-urban-geography-guy-debord/

Stephen Walter & Sohei Nishino : The art of mapping as a subjective vision of the city

 

Stephen Walter and Sohei Nishino are two artists who are exploring the subjectivity of the map. S. Walter has draw two gigantic maps of London and Liverpool in a sort of report of Situationist drifts (derives) experiencing the psychogeographies of those two cities. His maps are mostly constituted by doodles and words that places various neighborhoods and its characteristics but also his autobiographical feeling about those places when he went there. Space’s representation and narratives are then completely colliding in one documents and makes S.Walter’s maps absolutely fascinating.
Sohei Nishino is using photographs to compose his maps which oscillate between aerial views and maps using a technique that became famous by David Hockney which consists in assembling pictures together despite their different vanishing points. S.Nishino chose some very generic photographs from main monuments of each city to make the map more recognizable but one could imagine his work with an approach more similar to Stephen Walter’s that would assemble pieces of life brought together with pictures that would eventually constitutes the city.

Resource : http://thefunambulist.net/2011/04/21/fine-arts-the-art-of-mapping-as-a-subjective-vision-of-the-city-stephen-walter-sohei-nishino/

Ingrid Burrington : The Loneliness Map

 

Psychogeography, as defined in the 1958 Internationale Situationniste #1, is “the study of the precise effects of geographical setting, consciously managed or not, acting directly on the mood and behaviour of the individual.” The Loneliness Map by Ingrid Burrington is a precise example of psychogeography, mapping out the missed connections of lonely individuals in the city