Psychogeography & personal maps
September 22, 2008 – 10:07 am
1.When all comes together
“Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery.”1
When writing my project, I had no idea it was Psychogeography (among other things) I was interested at. The term, which seems a bit too scientific, specially for someone that had once scored a round 0 in the studies of Geography, is not so complicated.
The idea of Psychogeography was employed in the mid-20th century by the Situationists, a Parisian group of artists, poets and adventurers that had Guy Debord as their self-proclaimed leader. In their revolution where imagination (not men) were to seize power and art would be part of everyday life, they devised playful methods of responding to serious issues of the time such as postwar conformity and the ways in which urban planning forced us to navigate a city.
Their efforts in altering the way that one navigates through an environment aimed at defamiliarizing the city and making it newer and more flexible. “People are quite aware that some neighborhoods are sad and others pleasant. But they generally simply assume elegant streets cause a feeling of satisfaction and that poor street are depressing, and let it go at that. In fact, the variety of possible combinations of ambiances, analogous to the blending of pure chemicals in an infinite number of mixtures, gives rise to feelings as differentiated and complex as any other form of spectacle can evoke.”, says Debord in his essay “Introduction to a critique of Urban Geography”.
Their experiments were based on different strategies: a set of algorithms (walk 3 blocks, turn left, 2 blocks, right and so on), color codes (start at a point and follow all the red you see), “wrong” mapping (guiding oneself at a place using the map of the other), and so on.
Today the new-psychogeography appropriates from the technology of the gps and wireless for all sort of new projects. We won’t go deep into that subject, since it will be of no use for this project, but the website www.conflux.com is a good starting point for who is interested. No matter if in the new or old Psychogeography, all of them have the flaneaur as their central character, one that aimless drifts through the city, guided not by randomness, but by this organized chaos - or chaotic set of rules.
This new “discovered” city is filled of mental references which will be recorded, in most cases, in a much larger amount than physical locations. Recording the memories of such meandering is the basis of mental mapping, a method consisting of creating spatial references for non-spatial information (mental references).
Everything can be mapped. A map is a visual representation of an area, which is usually geographic, but it also can represent any space, real or imagined, without regard to context or scale: sentiments, body, feelings, thoughts, images. And all these areas can be observed closer and closer in detail, providing the cartographer with new information. Regarding this relativity of scales, John Ruskin sparks in me the will of mapping a stone: ‘The fineness of Nature’s work is so great, that, into a single block, a foot or two in diameter, She can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as She needs for her mountains on a large one; and taking moss for forests, and grain s of crystal for crags, the surface of a stone is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill.’2
No matter how deep we go into an investigation, maps will always be incomplete3. In order to make it possible to visually represent information, it must highlight some aspect of an area. This “incompleteness” must not be seen as a floss; instead, it requires that the reader fills in the blank space with his/her own imagination, bringing new layers of interpretation. “What the map fails to supply, the human mind (or human yearning) sometimes has the power to conjure.” 4
We don’t see maps as intrinsically personal and emotional documents, but they are the proofs in our belies in exploration. They take us to places, they transport us to imagined locations, they guide us to knowledge.
In this project I am creating maps and guides that encourage the discovery of feelings instead of touristic spots. How can that be done?
Both psychogeography - the experiments, methods and the results of unconventionally coordinated wanders in the city - and personal mapping - maps, diagrams and schemes of intangible information - have had their attempts. The ones that worked as inspiration for my project are in this document.
1 Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Debord, Guy-Ernest. Les Lèvres Nues #6 1955
2 John Ruskin - Modern Painters (Volume IV Chapter XVIII)
3 Only the 1:1 scale would be 100% faithfull to reality, but in that way, it’s not a map anymore, but reality
4 Hall, Stephen. I, Mercator. In Harmon, Katharine. You are here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. 2004. Princeton Architectural Press. New York.
