A step by step glide through psychogeography
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” It has also been defined as “a total dissolution of boundaries between art and life
From lockdown we take a phantom stroll with Jimmy Fox, inspired by Walter Benjamin, who, drawing on the poetry of Baudelaire, made the Flâneur an emblematic archetype of the modern urban experience. The Flâneur of course evolved into the psychogeographer via Guy debord and his theory of the derive
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities.
Iain Sinclair
Peter Ackroyd
Patrick Keiller.
Walter Benjamin,
J. G. Ballard,
Nicholas Hawksmoor.
Will self
Thomas de Quincey.
