Readings

1 November 2011 • readings
tags: aesthetics, articles, books, comics, death, hauntology, history, imagination, machines, noise, novels, phonography, psychogeography, robots, science, television, texts, vampires, zombies

• Technology and the novel, from Blake to Ballard [read]
Tom McCarthy, The Guardian, Saturday 24 July 2010

• El elogio de la sombra [leer]
Jun’ichirō Tanizaki

• Lenore #1-13
Roman Dirge

• Psychogeography [read]
Merlin Coverley

• Words Made Flesh. Code, Culture, Imagination [read]
Florian Cramer

• Jacques Attali, author of Noise (1977). Speaking at the ICA, London, May 2001 [read]

Psychogeography links

24 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cities, psychogeography, situationism, urbanism

All these links are taken from the book Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley [read]:

Association of Autonomous Astronauts
Decadent Action
International Psychogeographic Society
London Psychogeographical Association
New York Psychogeographical Association
Urban Adventure in Rotterdam
Wrights & Sights/Mis-Guide
Psychogeography
Classic Cafes (The Psychogeography of the Café)
Nothingness.Org & The Situationist Archives
Psychogeography Links Collection
Situationist International Online

Eight delegates in a state of semi-drunkenness

22 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, psychogeography, quotes, situationism

“In July 1957 this pre-situationist phase of largely unproductive navel-gazing finally came to an end, as the Situationist International was founded at a ‘conference’ in Alba in Italy. What was presented in typically grandiloquent style, as the merger of the Lettrist International and Asger Jorn’s International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, was in reality eight delegates ‘in a state of semi-drunkenness’ meeting in a remote bar and this pub lunch-cum-party conference was bolstered by the attendance of the London Psychogeograhical Association in the form of its single and only known member, Ralph Rumney. It was from these humble origins that the Situationist International was to emerge.”

Psychogeography
Merlin Coverley

Walking… an act of subversion

20 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cities, psychogeography, quotes, walking

“This act of walking is an urban affair and, in cities that are increasingly hostile to the pedestrian, it inevitably becomes an act of subversion. Walking is seen as contrary to the spirit of the modern city with its promotion of swift circulation and the street-level gaze that walking requires allows one to challenge the official representation of the city by cutting across established routes and exploring those marginal and forgotten areas often overlooked by the city’s inhabitants. In this way the act of walking becomes bound up with psychogeography’s characteristic political opposition to authority, a radicalism that is confined not only to the protests of 1960s Paris but also to the spirit of dissent that animated both Defoe and Blake as well as the vocal criticism of London governance to be found in the work of contemporary London psychogeographers such as Stewart Home and Iain Sinclair.”

Psychogeography
Merlin Coverley

Through aimless drift

18 September 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cities, psychogeography, quotes, walking

“The Situationist concept of “psychogeography” had its roots in the aimless Surrealist drifts through Paris described in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja and in Louis Aragon’s 1926 novel Le Paysan de Paris, and meant a purely subjective, para-scientific exploration of (chiefly) urban spaces through aimless drift. The surrealist drifts in turn were indebted to the romanticist “flâneur,” a wanderer “botanising the asphalt” as cultural theorist Walter Benjamin put it in his essay on 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire.”

Words Made Flesh
Florian Cramer

Readings

3 August 2010 • readings
tags: body, books, fiction, patterns, perception, psychogeography, rain, seitai, space, texts, uncertainty, walking

• Walking [read]
Henry David Thoreau. 1862.

• El cuerpo, su estado y la espontaneidad [download pdf]
Haruchika Noguchi

• The Crimes of the Flaneur
Tom McDonough. October Magazine, Fall 2002, No. 102.

• The Man of the Crowd [read]
Edgar Allan Poe. 1840.

• Théorie de la dérive [read]
Guy Debord. 1956.

• Sensorium
Edited by Caroline A. Jones

Les orages ou les autres espèces de précipitations y sont plutôt propices

29 July 2010 • out of context
tags: psychogeography, quotes, rain, situationism, texts

“L’influence sur la dérive des variations du climat, quoique réelle, n’est déterminante que dans le cas de pluies prolongées qui l’interdisent presque absolument. Mais les orages ou les autres espèces de précipitations y sont plutôt propices.”

Théorie de la dérive by Guy Debord

Watchings

25 July 2010 • watchings
tags: civilization, comedy, documentaries, fiction, humour, psychogeography, space, television, tv series, video, walking

• Nip/Tuck (2003 – 2010)
Ryan Murphy

• London (1994) [watch]
Patrick Keiller

• The IT Crowd. Series 4 (2010)

Le Quartier Sinistre

25 July 2010 • out of context
tags: aesthetics, anguish, civilization, night, psychogeography, quotes, situationism, space, texts

“Le Quartier Sinistre n’aurait nul besoin de recéler des dangers réels, tels que pièges, oubliettes, ou mines. Il serait d’approche compliquée, affreusement décoré (sifflets stridents, cloches d’alarmes, sirènes périodiques à cadence irrégulière, sculptures monstrueuses, mobiles mécaniques à moteurs, dits Auto-Mobiles) et peu éclairé la nuit, autant que violemment éclairé le jour par un emploi abusif du phénomène de réverbération. Au centre, la « Place du Mobile Épouvantable ». La saturation du marché par un produit provoque la baisse de ce produit: l’enfant et l’adulte apprendraient par l’exploration du quartier sinistre à ne plus craindre les manifestations angoissantes de la vie, mais à s’en amuser.”

Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau by Gilles Ivain