review
AMBLING THROUGH THE PSY.GEO.CONFLUX
"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."
Guy Debord1
These words echoed down the streets of New York, inspiring its wanderers, flâneurs, peripatetic philosophers, and any other urban adventurers you can think of, during this year's Psy.Geo.Conflux.
A gathering on the Lower East Side that took place from May 13th to 16th, this was the second such Conflux organized by artists Christina Ray and Dave Mandl.
The growing attendance reflects not only a mounting interest from academics in the situationist project and its disciplines, but the giant breadth of artistic works that can fall under the rubric of the psychogeographical - Debord's "pleasing vagueness."
The situationist influence was palpable in about half of the various activities at the conference, which were divided into some six categories: "Navigate", "Play", "Sense", "Show", "Speak", and "Strike".
On the one hand, there were talks and (what by now must be called traditional) avant-garde activities.
David Pinder gave an excellent lecture on "dis/orienting psychogeographies" and circuitous prerequisites for proper dérives (drifts); Peter Lamborn Wison, occasionally known as the anarchist author Hakim Bey, spoke on the "Sacred Sites of Ulster County"; and, in true situationist custom, there was an attempt to navigate New York with a map of Copenhagen.
At the same time, as the punctuation in the title of the conference would indicate, there was a large focus on new media and web arts.
What follows is a meandering account of a selection of the latter works.
There was such an abundance of prospective goings-on that I have pared down my selection here to a manageable number of events.
Some of these endeavors exist solely on the web; others are integrative, bringing new technologies out into the street.
In every case, there is an attempt to interact with the city in a lively and new way.
In the spirit of things, I spent the four days of the Conflux relying solely on bipedal transportation.
Doing so, I experienced a section of the city I wouldn't have otherwise, but I also annexed boroughs apart from Manhattan - Brooklyn maybe, Queens no.
I feel no shame in admitting that I frequently lost my way, a difficult proposal in the grid of New York. (Walter Benjamin advised practicing this purposefully, developing the skill of losing oneself in the urban sprawl.)
Other non-native participants at the conference did not have this mixed blessing, as many of them traveled with their mobile phones or PDAs. (Especially mobile phones - more than any conference I have ever attended, there was an incessant, disruptive ringing at the Psy.Geo.Conflux.)
These devices were frequently fitted with GPS technology, capable of checking a map as their owners sauntered.
This brings me to one of the more interesting proposals of the Conflux: Nick West's Urban Tapestries talk and workshop. Before attending, my view of PDAs and the like, considered as psychogeographic tools, was that they are contrary to the point of a good drift; knowing precisely where one is reduces the element of surprise, producing Psychogeographically Disaffected Agents bearing their similarly acronymic PDAs. Nick West's talk, despite a rather unfortunate powerpoint component, changed my mind somewhat.
The Urban Tapestries project is concerned with using PDAs and similar locative media to annotate the city. Just what "annotating" entails was a subject of discussion, but the general idea is that if PDA users have their device with them in a given neighborhood, or specific place within that neighborhood, they can annotate pictures, text, or audio relevant to the location which would then be obtainable by a later PDA user at the site.
The content of the annotation would be site-specific; so, to hypothesize an annotation, one might have a picture of a building that was present before condominiums were built over its ruins, or a forgotten history of a local character on a specific street. Later wanderers of this part of a city would have access to previous annotations.
Broadly, Urban Tapestries sounds a good deal like the Toronto-based [murmur] project, also in attendance at the Conflux. With [murmur], city-dwellers, upon seeing a sign at a certain spot indicating a [murmur] tale, use their mobile phone and call in for a story about the location. Not only is the project attempting to change the nature of public space in urban environments, it's attempting to humanize the mobile phone, a device that the art director of [murmur] says he finds "isolating and cold"2. This sort of reconciliation of private and public space, and recognition that mobile phones are not for everyone, differentiates the venture from both alienating GPS technology and frequently illegible graffiti, two comparable phenomena; [murmur] straddles the functional with the decorous. The venture is not without its drawbacks, however. So far, a major hindrance for both [murmur] and Urban Tapestries to overcome is the unavailability of these devices to the less affluent. As interesting as [murmur] sounds, for instance, I have as yet been unable to try it - this despite a local Montreal version, [murmure], that was launched at the last FCMM (Festival des Nouveaux Cinémas et des Nouveaux médias de Montréal).
While the first, obvious, use of such projects is historical, or curatorial, in practice the annotators of Urban Tapestries have not limited themselves to the documentary as [murmur] has - and a good thing, too: the city-as-museum would be an unfortunate consequence of such an interesting proposition, and definitely does not encourage the requisite psychogeographic interactivity. On a test-run in London, the PDA authors-of-the-city attempted historical fiction, recording "when the U-Boats came up the Thames and destroyed St. Paul's cathedral"; others wrote personal confessions, such as the individual who noted down the arguments they had had at various restaurants around the Bloomsbury district, where the experiment took place. The potential for the project is broad. Future advances might bring annotated "buddy" lists, in which the PDA allows only annotations from certain users so as not to overcrowd the remarks for a popular site. (Imagine having to scroll through everybody's thoughts and stories about, say, the Eatons Center: abysmal, and likely as psychogeographically disheartening as an experience with the place itself.) Or, as an audience member at the talk brought up, the audio component could play a song through the PDA that progressed depending which way one turned from street to street. Another possibility would be to selectively annotate a liberal history such as Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography3, containing as it does such obscure, site-specific psychogeographic information.
Accompanying the Urban Tapestries talk was speaker Michelle Kasprzak from Teletaxi, a Toronto based exhibition that takes place in a number of functioning taxicabs.
The Teletaxi group purchased automobile installations that were originally used in a doomed advertising project: a screen in the back seat would force ads upon the trapped fare, alongside a GPS map with an image of the cab motoring along, letting the passenger know just how slowly they were going.
The Teletaxi artists have resuscitated and rethought the devices and put their potential to good use.
Taking their cue from the GPS, a different short video loops depending upon which neighborhood the taxi rides in.
So, from one street to the next you might get images of correspondent passing buildings in Montreal, or an ode to tributaries, or even the creation of CIAC's Electronic Magazine contributor David Jhave Johnston, much-discussed at the Conflux, Gridlock. Gridlock uses an interactive touchscreen with which the passenger can trace and inspire patterns, but, as the name suggests, the piece is only available when the cab is not moving. Thus the unlikely equation becomes: unlucky in traffic = lucky in art. Teletaxi is slated to come to Montreal, so next time you have the inclination to dérive, reconsider - take a cab.
That said, the understandable and unanswerable critique leveled at Teletaxi spoke to the nature of the Psy.Geo.Conflux: in a cab there is very little interaction with a city.
No such complaint may be made of such similar web-based projects as Walking in the City or New York Snap Exchange, two simple, urban-participatory undertakings that exist solely on the web.
The Walking in the City site linked to above is a Psy.Geo.Conflux-dedicated, perfunctory version of a larger work in which Kabir Carter, the author, moblogs (posts to the web with his mobile) descriptions of sounds he hears while out and about in New York.
While the simple list of sounds makes for rather dull electroacoustic reading, it reflects an engagement with the city lacking in Teletaxi and a hopeful technological possibility where many could post sounds directly from city to computer.
New York Snap Exchange is rather more inclusive - accurately categorized in the "Play" section of the conference - and is nicely described on the site as a "round-robin, massively multiplayer street photography game."
Participants in the game post a photographic dare on the website ("Photograph something that smells good next to something that smells bad"; "Take a picture of a type of food that is not eaten much where you come from") and others fulfill them. Judging from the site, so far the response to the game has not been huge. But, it certainly has potential on a much larger scale, and compels people to explore their city in an investigatory way, which is a happy result for a psychogeographic conference to have.
The pinnacle of the multi-media work for me was the Conflux's organizers' contribution, One Block Radius, which interacts with the city with a documentarian's eye, or, more apropos, an explorer's stride. One Block Radius, which they rightly subtitle "A Psychogeographic Documentary," hopes to be a time capsule of a part of New York that will soon be irrevocably gone when the New Museum of Contemporary Art builds its mammoth new facility there. On the website, a project that can only stem from love, one finds a rudimentary map and a choice of categories. By selecting a given category (they run alphabetically from "ads" to the "unknown," and encompass much in between), locations on the map where examples of the category have been documented appear. In clicking on a location, one is shown the text, picture, video, or audio specific to that theme and place. There is such a profusion of life - and the mundane-wild detritus that accompanies it - on this New York block, and the contributors have documented it in such detail, that one can pass a very long, enthralled time exploring the intricately designed site.
In the talk that Christina Ray and Dave Mandl gave, they referred to One Block Radius as a "hyperdocumentary," which, if one follows the line of thought, silently implies hyperrealism. And though one may think of Baudrillard, it is not Baudrillard's hyperrealism one finds; a better association might be Laurence Sterne, who documented minutiae in his books with such affectionate obsession that "reality" became nugatory, the source transformed. This allows for some splendidly absurd moments on the One Block Radius site. The entire "religion/spirituality" subsection, small though it may be, reveals such erratically placed devotional imagery as a giant cross at the back of a dingy alley. More exhilarating is the strange beauty of the From a Balloon video clip, where they have seemingly attached a digital camera to a mini-dirigible and drifted it around the neighborhood at a great height. A melancholy feel pervades all, however, as the site is something of a last testament before an architectural operation (with unforeseen results) takes place. Their talk was the best-attended part of the Conflux that I visited, and deservedly so.
My account here is limited to less than half of the many activities of the conference - some of the best components had nothing to do with new media or web art - and yet they display a joyous approach to urbanity that was typical of the whole. One might call the occasion a renaissance of the psychogeographic notions that the situationists proposed some fifty years ago; moreover, it is simply a nascent experiment with the capability of certain technologies as they intersect with the city. In the coming years, one can expect the disciplines of psychogeography to keep expanding and the Conflux to grow concomitantly. If psychogeography is a utopian science, as many believe it to be, the Psy.Geo.Conflux plays a pivotal role in an essentially transformative endeavour.
Notes
1 : Guy Debord. "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography", Situationist International Anthology. Ed. Ken Knabb. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981. 5-8. 
2 : Sam Toman. "[murmur] Whispers Sweet Something in Your Ear."
3 : Peter Ackroyd. London: The Biography. London: Vintage, 2001.
Patrick Ellis
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![[murmur]](images/compterendu3-murmur.gif)
