A blog about the influence of the urban landscape on the human mind.
I came across this blog because they put out a journal called psychogeographic field reports. I ordered it yesterday, so I can’t say if it’s any good. the blog though is worth reading. check it out!
Also it is set in Utrecht and often about Utrecht which gives it geolocational relevance to this here blog.
a picture regarding my previous post #psychogeography (uploaded with Streamzoo.com)
i left my phone at my friends appartement yesterday. i usually have it with me all the time. listening to music while walking through the city adds a layer of abstraction. i also feel the urge to check my e-mail and twitter feed every few minutes, so it felt strange not having it with me for a day. but it was just today, on the subway from university to the main station, the moment the train went underground, that i realized that i often look at the city by means of phone and wlan coverage. i experienced this many times: asking myself, as the train decends in the tunnels under the city, if i should have refreshed my twitter feed or opened a website to be entertained underground, where there is little to no coverage. having a book in my hands today, as i passed this point of transition, these very thoughts passed through my head and seemed absurd and got me thinking. there are many places that trigger this thought pattern for me. for example my way home from work, from garrath to the main station. i have a data connection in garrath, a moment of loading/refreshing in benrath and then the next stable data connection is in oberbilk. this constitutes a certain ritus on my commute. i have to ask myself if i want to load that picture someone tweeted or rather read a preloaded article on the train, which will possibly keep me entertained longer. the same goes for the trip i undertake right now, to retrieve my phone from my friends appartement. the trip from düsseldorf main station to köln süd. a 40 minute train ride where i will lose my coverage in benrath, can refresh in leverkusen and then have to wait till köln mühlheim for a stable connection. visiting my paerents is also tricky in that regard. they live in a small village in the middle oc nowhere with almost no wireless coverage. i can check my tweets and e-mail under the roof, in a corner of my sisters old room. but only if the weather is right. otherwise it takes a 2km hike up a hill outside the village to get a lousy connection.
so sitting in the subway, with all this passing through my head, i found myself with a map of wireless coverage blindspots and points of transition i didn’t consciously knew i had.
-posted from my phone
i walked past this the other night. i remember it being a different restaurant. chinese if i’m not mistaken. where the crucifix is from i don’t know. perhaps it’s been a funeral home in the past, too.
Today, 19:45 on BBC Radio 3
Synopsis
For several years now, “psychogeography” has been a word worth dropping into conversation if you want to impress with your cultural street smarts. More interesting than the oxbow lakes of your own school geography, and more hip than the human geography your own kids do, psychogeography sounds edgy, which it might be, if you could work out what it was. It was invented by was invented by drug-influenced French situationists - who described it as “pleasingly vague” - as they wandered round Paris in an attempt to escape the banalisation of the “spectacle”. But British writers like Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home have made the term almost mainstream - a way of making familiar landscapes seem exotic, sometimes by injecting a dash of magic and mysticism. Travel writer Ian Marchant wanders along the ill-defined frontier between punk and rambling
Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.
via @concretpost on twitter
This blog constitutes the Düsseldorf Psychogeographical Society!
It is inspired by the Cairo Psychogeographical Society on which you can read here. This too starts today as a one-man-project and shall hopefully become more one day.
I plan to summarise derives, post pictures of the city i live in and of the cities i’m visiting. it should be a bit about theorie now and again and a bit about the history of the places depicted and described.
So far for what is planned, let’s see what will actually happen here…
