A psychological interlude

As my mind was racing last night after a whirlwind Christmas holiday, I decided to glance through my notes from the beginning of my thesis journey. Besides getting even more confused about what I want to do, I may have stumbled upon the overall meaning of my work.

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut on a standard parcel of land somewhere in the backcountry. We barely interacted with our neighbors, and my parents seemed quite content about that (they grew up in the bustling neighborhoods of the Bronx, so maybe the peace and quiet was ideal for them). On my road there wasn’t a community in the sense that people waved to each other and chatted about their kids, borrowed cups of sugar, or planned holiday get-togethers. I didn’t have a group of neighborhood kids that I could run outside and play with anytime. My brother and sister are ten and twelve years older than me, and they were off to college by the time I was eight. I grew up feeling like an only child, and even though I had a lot of friends from school, time for play dates had to be well-planned.

Greenwich is a beautiful town, but once I moved to the city when I was twenty-one, I realized how much character the streets, buildings and neighborhoods could have. Since New York is a very pedestrian city, I was constantly impressed by the street art found on the walls of old buildings, and hidden doorways and various nooks and crannies found in the older settlements. Greenwich, like most suburbs, consists of long main roads and shorter side roads, and you need to take the car to get anything done. While the town has a character of its own and I lived there for twenty-one years, it’s not something I grew a strong attachment to.

Both of my parents passed away by the time I was twenty-one years old, and settling in the city was a way to grow roots somewhere. The city became a constant character in my life, and I’ve grown an attachment to it that I can’t fully explain. Thus my intention with thesis work is to tell a better story about what I love about New York City, and to offer alternate ways to experience it. My attachment to the city’s landscape and character has also activated a fear – the fear of losing anything that makes New York what it is, whether it’s the authenticity, energy, or diversity.

The conclusion I finally come to after all of this thesis stuff is finished will have nothing to do with preserving the way things are, or nostalgia for the way things were. New York City is constantly being transformed – rebuilt and recreated by its people. That may be the thing I love the most, and the thing that makes New York City what it is today.

SOME THINGS THAT MY THESIS IS NOT ABOUT:
While corporations with out-of-place branding is deplorable in historic neighborhoods, that is not something I want or need to tackle. I feel that corporations like McDonalds and Dunkin Donuts should have flexible branding strategies for their retail outlets, in order to connect with the community and enhance the beauty of the built environment, but this is something that needs to happen at the top levels of management. Many neighborhoods welcome chain stores because of the economic contribution, or convenience of easily grabbing a latte, gadget, or cheap shoes. Only a few community boards will completely block chain stores from opening in their neighborhoods, and some will place strong restrictions on signage to maintain visual integration.

The greater issue is the lack of historical and contextual awareness of retail stores, but costs would skyrocket if research and attention to context were required for every outpost. The responsibility is with the corporation to make a meaningful contribution to the community they enter, and many already have policies for employee volunteerism and grant programs. In this new age of social responsibility, maybe every globalized behemoth will make an effort to integrate visually and also with their community. In fact, it may even bring in a new customer base.

Also, I’m not trying to place meaning where there is none. Branding is a giant industry that tries to create beauty from the banal; to create meaningful experiences from trivial ones. I’m not interested in making the everyday beautiful, just to understand that the quotidian is enough. I’d like to uncover the truth in what is already there, and find my own meaning in the city I’m surrounded by every day. Maybe once I find truths hidden in the cracks and shadows of New York City, they can be applied to other cities around the globe.

So there you have it – a quick psychological interlude. Also it’s my personal context that helps explain where I’m coming from and the color of glass that I’m peering through.

Recap of Fall 2010 final projects

I started reading again today (after recovering from final critique and having limited mental functioning for about a week), but then I realized that I haven’t had a recap of all the feedback and information I’ve gathered for the last few weeks. I pulled together my final projects and was really happy with all three… here’s a quick recap of how they turned out and next steps.

1. I created a sound installation for tech studio – an experience of the city in audio form. I had four tracks playing simultaneously in four corners of a small room, each one with ambient sounds and interviews from a neighborhood in nyc. At first I wanted to find out if you could recognize a neighborhood based on it’s sound alone, but then I became more interested in giving spectators the opportunity to “stop and listen” and to shut off the visual sense completely. The visual sense dominates with an overwhelming amount of sensory information in the city, so I wanted to explore how much more we experience/learn about the city by isolating the sense of hearing. Like my other work, this project is also about how our surroundings communicate to us (with conversations and other ambient sounds).

A couple ideas to explore with this project:
+It could benefit from completely shutting off the visual sense (i.e. no lights, blocking out windows).
+Also, I would like to try spacing out the audio collages even more so that when all four play simultaneously, there is the ebb and flow that I achieved with each individual one. Right now when all four play it sounds like one unchanging level.
+Technical aspect of audio installation – how to make each neighborhood audible individually at each corner while the others fade out? Have the volume increase as person walks towards it, or have a piece overhead (or headphones) that you can enter and be fully immersed in sound.
+A couple professors would have appreciated the audio at ear level, but others appreciated the upward movement of sound (similar to the experience in the city).

Everyone I talked to made me think a lot about looking at installation work and trying to go in that direction for my thesis exhibition. Michelle emphasized thinking a lot about how the viewer walks through the space – watch what they do and make adjustments based on that.

2. For the final Visual Language project I took my images from 23 Wall Street (the site of the 1920 bombing), collaged them and created a three-dimensional hanging sculpture.

These images give an idea of the process. The 3-D object explores the site of this terrorist attack from different angles, demonstrating that one story can be understood from many different perspectives. This project is also part of my ongoing investigation into how the built environment communicates to us, and the meaning we derive from it.

A few notes on this project:
+There needs to be more of an explosion, the type and composition is still relatively quiet (even when I try to make a political statement, it’s polite and diplomatic. ugh)
+Until I explained what it was about, it wasn’t easily understood. The main point is that the damage from the 1920 bombing is still visible on the marble walls of the building, and people were missing that. How to communicate the bombing more? How can I let the viewer figure it out? Tell the story so that the important parts are accessible but still in a subtle way. For example, if some layers had news articles and other information on it. Maybe think of it as a Museum of the City of New York installation.
+It could have more portability and not be so dependent on the wall space.
+Or it could be a large-scale installation piece and the viewer could literally walk through it. In that case the other side of the fragments would have to come into consideration – they could be the interior of the building or another component of the space (i.e. people).

What I’m thinking of NEXT looks a little bit like this:

This is a designer named Rachel Stomel, who was featured on Dwell’s Youngest Guns site. The installation I would like to create for thesis exhibition has my drawings and then flashing layers of text about the place. How? I do not know! At this point it’s all in my mind (and on this blog).

Words that I needed to define

The following definitions of the symbol/index/icon triad are interpreted from Charles Sanders Pierce’s analysis and Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

Symbol: Something that stands for something else. A symbol has a convention-based relationship with object it signifies [alphanumeric symbols]

Index: Something that leads to one particular fact or conclusion. An index is directly influenced by an object [weathervane, thermometer]
           -Can be further broken down into tracks [pawprints], symptoms [fever], or designations [pointed finger]

Icon: A pictorial representation. An icon has specific properties in common with objects [portraits, diagrams]
          -Can be further broken down into image, metaphor [representing a parallelism in something else] and diagram [subway map is a diagram of the actual subway]

More words I’m compelled to define before I have one more conversation about my thesis.

Convention: A usage or custom especially in social matters; a rule of conduct or behavior; an established technique, practice or device.

Semiotics: A general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages.
           -Comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics

               –Syntactics: Formal relations between signs or expressions in abstraction from their signification and their interpreters. Syntax is concerned with structure in a sentence.

               –Semantics: The study of meanings. Semantics is concerned with meaning to a sentence.
                  -connotative: to imply [usually more emotional associations]
                  -denotative: to indicate [usually to describe in a more literal way]

               –Pragmatics: The relation between signs or linguistic expressions and their users and the environment in which they occur.

Legibility: Refers to how easily one letter can be distinguished from another.

Readability: Refers to the relative ease with which a typeface can be read when characters are laid out in works, sentences, and paragraphs. [thank you Edvin Yegir – my thesis advisor – for clarifying that for me]




And more words I had to define after reading Jan van Toorn’s essay “A Passion for the Real”.


Dialectic: The discussion and reasoning by dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation.


Dialogic: Of, relating to or characterized by dialogue.


Didactic: Designed or intended to teach.


Polemic: An agressive attack on the opinions of another; an aggressive controversialist.


Polyphonic: Relating to a style of musical composition employing two or more simultaneous but relatively independent melodic lines.

Side note: While I was working on this I was reminded of a project my friend Betsy did. She took the actual pages of the dictionary and removed all unnecessary content with a black marker from the definitions she needed. When I was looking these words up I realized how much superfluous language there is in dictionary definitions, and you have to really dig and reinterpret in order to make sense of it all.

Marian Bantjes on plastic over-packaging

“We don’t need to be protected from every surface, and every surface does not need to be protected from us. It’s as though we have completely lost our minds.”

In her entertaining Design Observer post.

So true. I’ve posted about the environmental impact of plastics before, and packaging is a huge culprit. Designers do have a responsibility to simplify packaging and create the argument to only use what is necessary.

Oh, right. Blogging.

Three projects in the works right now:
1. Designer’s statement and process book (which would be more fun if I didn’t have less than a week to complete)

2. Visual interpretation of the wall street bombing of 1920 – I’ve found a way to tie my plexiglass idea in with a project that actually communicates something, which is good. It’s always good to communicate something, especially when you’re a communications designer.

This project is an exploration of how the city’s built environment communicates to us. What we project onto our surroundings to make it more legible for ourselves, and then creating symbols to represent that knowledge and make it accessible for others. A symbol system will uncover the hidden meaning of a historical location on Wall Street, and tell a story of the place through abstraction.

I want to make a physical object made out of many layers of removable Plexi to create a new space within the existing space of the everyday world for people to enter freely and see a location in a new light. This is a long story, but I will try to sum up:

America’s First Age of Terrorism
At noon on September 16th, 1920, a wagon passed by lunchtime crowds on Wall Street in New York City. It stopped across the street from the headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank at 23 Wall Street, on the Financial District’s busiest corner. Inside, 100 pounds of dynamite with 500 pounds of heavy, cast-iron sash weights exploded in a timer-set detonation, sending the slugs tearing through the air. The horse and wagon were blasted into small fragments. The 38 victims, most of whom died within moments of the blast, were mostly young and worked as messengers, stenographers, clerks and brokers. Many of the 143 injured suffered serious wounds. The bomb caused over $2 million in property damage and wrecked most of the interior spaces of the Morgan building. It was the worst terrorist attack in New York until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.
The J.P. Morgan bank had emerged as the single most powerful financial institution in the world, and both the firm and its principals had been under increasing attack since it arranged a huge loan to help the allies keep the Great War going. The Morgan building was believed to be the target of the attack but only one employee of the firm was killed, and nearly all the bank’s employees were back at their desks the next morning, some bandaged and bruised. Crews cleaned up the area overnight to allow for business to operate normally the next day, but in doing so they destroyed physical evidence that might have helped police investigations. The bomb was an immeasurably cruel device that blew people apart where they walked outside, but it merely pocked the firm’s impenetrable marble walls. As with most terrorist attacks, most of the victims were innocent bystanders who made a modest living and did not symbolize American capitalism at all.


I took these photos EARLY this morning. The damage is still visible on the building, which is crazy since the bombing was in 1920. It makes me realize that that wasn’t actually that long ago relative to all of history. The characters in Boardwalk Empire are more like us than we’d like to think. Maybe these original terrorists are more like current religious radicals than we’d like to think.

There are many similarities in the motives and outcomes of this first terrorist attack and 9/11 and each similarity teaches us something about the current age of terrorism. Symbols are an accessible way to bring this information into the built environment.

3. Audio collages – game for people to match the audio recording to a neighborhood based on spliced together fragments of conversations and ambient sounds. I’m putting this up on a website at some point in the next week – it won’t be anything fancy, just a place for people to go and play the game. That may mean I will have to program a form on the site and a submit button. Hm. Never done that before so I will have to discuss with Mark tomorrow.

Part of the inspiration for this project came from the book Image of the City by Kevin Lynch (1960). In it they compare three cities – Boston, Jersey City and Los Angeles – and go through a very scientific process of interviewing residents to gather their visual impressions of the city. They were only concerned with the physical characteristics of the city and how the legibility increased for certain areas. Also, they studied how the legibility of the city created more of an attachment to certain neighborhoods.

Reading this definitely made me think of the city in a different way – in terms of the layout of the streets, contours and symbols that make a neighborhood distinctive. I’ve interviewed nine or so people so far and these are the questions I’ve been asking: (they change based on the direction the conversation goes, because I sometimes ask follow up questions when they bring up interesting points. Also different neighborhoods bring up different questions)

1. What first comes to mind, what symbolizes the word(s) [their neighborhood] for you?
2. Please draw a quick sketch of map as if you were making a rapid description of the neighborhood to a stranger, covering all the main features.
3. When you are commuting to work or doing errands in the neighborhood, describe the sequence of things you see as you picture yourself making the trip.
4. Do certain streets have a particular feeling? Do you enjoy walking down some streets more than others and why?
5. What parts of [their neighborhood] are most disctinctive?

Since all of my work so far has been visual, I wanted to see what happens with the isolation of only one sense – the sense of hearing. By recording the many layers of sound in the environment maybe there is a lot that can be learned about the city. Can you define and recognize a neighborhood based on it’s sound? Do different neighborhoods have distinctive or iconic noises? Can you capture the character of a community through sound alone? And can otherwise hidden aspects of communities be revealed through sound?

I chose four neighborhoods to explore: Chelsea, West Village, Lower East Side and Downtown (FiDi). Besides the fact that they have very distinctive populations and are/have been going through major transitions, I was interested in the difference in street pattern. Downtown was the earliest Dutch settlement, and looks like more organic like the medieval cities of Europe. The Lower East Side has shorter rectangular blocks, and the grid in Chelsea creates extremely long rectangular blocks. Greenwich Village pattern is a mess, almost on the grid but streets intersecting at random intervals and angles.

It’s been a really interesting process so far speaking with different residents of these neighborhoods. I’ve learned a lot about the differences in community, and especially people’s thoughts on gentrification. I didn’t even bring it up myself, but nearly everyone mentioned it at one time during the interview.

And I forgot to mention, we have two weeks to complete these projects for final critique and set up our presentation. Actually one week for #1, which suddenly changed from two weeks for some reason.

Making progress – final projects for the semester

All of the roads are leading to the same place now. I think for a while I was exploring many different directions and I feel like now I’m on only one path, which is good!

I have an idea that’s still being formed, but it involves a shape/symbol/index framing some part of the cityscape.

Here is the sketch of this idea. The shape frames an otherwise hidden aspect of the street and is an index to the underlying form in our surroundings.

I also took one photo every minute for an hour to capture a slice of community in time and space. Here are a few of those photos – I should put them into a video, but I’m still trying to figure out where I think that’s going. It’s probably something I can use a little bit down the road.

I set up the camera under an overhang on the eastern section of Rivington street. I have to say, it was really boring to stand there for an hour especially when I’m not even sure what I got out of it. My favorite part of the progression is the hard line between sun and shadow that moves east along the building where ABC No Rio is located. To take it further I could also splice the photos together to create a collage that describes the whole hour.

Ok, here are ideas for final projects this semester:
I’m working on the definition of a neighborhood in New York City. What is a neighborhood? My attempt: A neighborhood is a place with defined boundaries that communicates a distinct essence – unique to that area. How are they defined differently by residents and visitors – what are symbols, landmarks, boundaries, distinct paths? What neighborhoods have strong visual organization? How does each neighborhood communicate to people differently – with ads, storefronts, contours, colors, architecture? How does the visual organization and communication effect the strength of mental image of a place and how does that effect the attachment people feel to neighborhoods?

One project I’m working on for Visual Language incorporates the history of the place as well. I’d like to compare three different locations and create a system of symbols to describe the hidden meaning and story behind them. So far I’m interested in looking at Wall Street, Greenwich Village (or Lower East side) and Chelsea. I chose these neighborhoods because of their unique characteristics and distinction from other areas of the city. They all have distinct communication as well. I need to narrow down the options by taking a walk through the different areas and documenting the forms/signs/sounds I observe.

So I have two different projects going on:
1. An audio experiment to capture the essence of visual form through community perception. I’d like to create a game online where people can play the different audio clips and guess which neighborhood they are listening to or hearing a description of.
2. Describing the hidden meaning of a place/uncovering the history through a symbol system. For this one I want to insert the symbols into the physical environment (like the photo sketch above) in many layers. I like Plexiglass for this project because you can place a symbol on the glass and maintain clear view within and outside the symbol, then it would make the multiple layers possible with sheets of plexi sliding out to reveal a different story. I need to figure out where the text would be written so it’s easy to read but out of view.

So for the audio project I need to figure out who I’m going to interview and what questions to ask. I’m thinking that the interviewees need comparable profiles for each neighborhood. So long-term residents and then visitors/tourists plus just the ambient sound of the street. I will ask what their impressions are of the place – what symbolizes this neighborhood, what are common landmarks, paths? Maybe ask what is one word to describe how it feels.

For the history symbol project, I need to do some research into events and interesting anecdotes about buildings in these neighborhoods. Coming soon!

These threads they are so fragile

I just found this random photo I took last year for the texture phase of Type 1 with Tom Dolle. I didn’t use it in my book but now I find it oddly interesting. I was going through my color phase (now I’m going through a black and white phase) – is that symbolic of my general mood? Side note: as I was going through the old photos of my husband and I, I started missing the time when we actually had a life. Now all we do is work – he’s studying for the GMAT and me in grad school. Soon enough things will be back to normal!

Anyways, back to being self-absorbed in my work. I’m excited about a few connections I made today. From a previous post: “I’ve decided that for my final project in tech studio I’m focusing on the audio aspect of the street. I can use the wavelength of an audio clip from the ambient experience of the street, then map that with visual information or doing a light or color analysis with audio. There are sound processing freewares that can do this. I’m interested in the alternate ways of experiencing an environment.” My proposal for tech studio bombed on Tuesday (don’t even want to talk about it), and it leads me back to this idea (I had forgotten about this idea, which is why I didn’t mention it in class). How can I combine the idea I have of mapping the meaning of community interactions with this audio project?

Tomorrow I’m setting up a camera on a tripod to record the time-lapse experience of Rivington street. It will be a mini investigation of time, space and community by showing different communities at different times of the day, and also how shadows transform the experience of the street. I’m doing once a minute for an hour, then another time I’ll do once an hour for 24 hours. Possibilities include: splicing the time-lapse photos into different compositions, or cut different objects out of the photo and examine how that changes the experience.

What does the visual information in our city-scape say about our society? How can we shut off the noise in order to have an inner journey instead? I’m taking photos of the busy nyc landscape and removing all signage. Also possibly adding lines to show hidden contours, shapes and patterns.

Speaking of shape abstractions, I also have an interesting project in the works using those but that needs to be developed a little bit. Warning: it might involve Plexi.

So I’m happy to report that my thesis is STILL about telling a better story about a place but my projects are getting more specific/less abstract.

What is all this psychogeographic stuff?

In the hopes of learning through making, I’ve explored a few possibilities for maps of my own.

This isn’t really a map but I wanted to include it anyways because when I started writing this post I was reminded of it. My friend Betsy asked me to contribute to an exquisite corpse project she was working on for the Michael Rock lecture, and this is what I sent (above).

I handed this out for my presentation today – a map of my ideas in a Situationist style. I realized that psychogeography is an umbrella topic for many different things:
a. the personal experience of the street
b. the alternate experience of the street enabled by another person (artist/performer)
c. an artist who aggregates many people’s experiences.

The experience can include emotions, atmospheres, encounters with people, play, and letting the contours of geography guide you.

Another topic entirely is the memory map – recording all of the associations you have with a place.

Ok, glad I got that all organized for myself. Here are a few drawings I made with colored pencils based on the symbol exploration (I posted earlier). Using the abstract grid and symbols I recreated my personal experience on Rivington street. So these are memory maps, not psychogeographies. But how can you represent the psychogeography you experience on the street? Through memory, unless there is a way to record it in real time. Oh, video does that. But video doesn’t capture the moods, feelings and energy of a place as well as being there. I’m feeling the limitations of all mediums for this idea but I’m prepared to embrace those constraints. I have a relatively interesting idea for my next project, and I’m excited to see where it takes me.

There are three different types of symbols that I used for these: actual symbols, letters that are similar in form to the symbol, then a “free draw” of what I felt represented the symbol. I’m using the word symbol loosely here, and maybe I should look into other word options.

I’m not going to go much in depth about my critique with Bruce Mau last Friday, but the most important thing I learned was to NEVER say the word preservation in association with my thesis. EVER AGAIN.

Exhibitions and installations based on psychogeography

Of the two festivals that offer installations and performances roughly based on psychogeography, Conflux and AIOP seem to have lost a strong thread tying all of the exhibitions together. The individual installations and performances included in these events are only scratching the surface, but when viewed as a collective festival it infuses the urban landscape with experimentation. Conflux has more of a technology focus, and AIOP is mostly different groups of performance artists set up in different locations in the city. In one performance, a group of artists from the collective Flux Factory wear t-shirts with waivers printed on the back of them. One artist stands across the street and waves to someone walking down the street (they choose specific people to wave at – people in hats, boots, etc). If the person waves back, another artist on that side of the street stops them and asks them to sign the waiver on the back of their shirt. The performance is called Sign a Waiver. I don’t know about you but one of my biggest pet peeves is when someone stops me on the street, to ask me something, hand out something, etc. I’m usually in a rush, being a New Yorker and all, and it bothers me that someone assumes that my time is not that important. If I’m meandering through the city on a derive, however, I probably wouldn’t mind that much. Unfortunately I don’t usually have the luxury of that freedom.

This brings up an interesting point about time, psychogeography and who really cares? I think it’s fascinating that there can never be two identical psychogeographies of an area, because each person will have different memories and experiences in a place. However, who has the time to drift through the city, letting the contours and encounters guide you. The only purpose you have is to keep your awareness open to chance and circumstance and a sense of play and adventure. Is this aimless navel-gazing for jobless people with too much free time? Or is it something that everyone, even people whose jobs and families prevent them from having much freedom, would benefit from experiencing?

The concept of psychogeography is deeply rooted in the theory and circumstances of the Sixties. This new approach to the city was a rebellion against the “spectacle”. In these days, the spectacle is more powerful than ever, so much so that we don’t even notice it anymore. Many of these street installations are surface treatments of a larger issue that is underlying but not mentioned. Or maybe people aren’t interested in making political statements anymore. The closest any of the artists get to making a political statement is Rebecca Nagle who stands in the middle of Times Square with a sign saying “I can’t compete with this”. She attempts to bring awareness to the increasing competing advertisements that make up the texture of our urban environment.

This project is interesting – the artist Todd Jokl proposed to track participants paths on a map of nyc. Each person has a hand-held GPS device that they use to check-in at every Conflux event they visit. The map he draws in the simulation is beautiful, the line quality is organic and each path combines to create this nice visual harmony. When you see the actual results of the project the feeling completely changes. It looks so unnatural and forced. There are 12 lines, some follow identical paths, and others just meander around the small space of the parks. Also, that shaky, natural line quality is gone. Maybe there were technical restraints to actually creating a path on Google maps but I would have liked to see the artist draw the path lines himself then. I’m struggling to see the purpose of this project, beyond trying to make a beautiful composition at the end of the festival.

I just played three of these gnome games and they’re very addictive. The artist’s name is Mateusz Skutnik and he highlights little known or abandoned places by creating a scavenger hunt for gnomes hiding in the structures and behind walls. His images are high contrast black and white, so very expressive and mysterious, and during the game an ominous melody plays in the background. The gnomes themselves are adorable and have so much personality that it makes me so happy to find them. This game makes me smile. Thanks Mateusz!

This is a lovely audio tour by Jeremy Dalmas that infuses the city with some mystery and adventure. He started in Golden gate park and by popular demand created an audio tour for the southwest part of New York City. You are meant to download the tour on an ipod and begin at the start of the tour. He takes you through back streets and down staircases, through parks, sometimes providing true historical facts and other times embellishing a little. He makes the experience of the street so intimate amidst the hustle and bustle, and even unearths some hidden creatures and forgotten stories along the way. The various music is a rich complement to his relaxing voice. The tour encourages a playful approach to the city and gives the participant a new sense of wonder while walking through ordinary surroundings.

oooooh! I’m starting to get it

Michelle also said something in our meeting on Thursday that made me think. How do I see this work entering the community itself? What do I see as the site-specific application of my abstractions, symbols and drawings? I just discovered a Brooklyn artist who places tape in geometric (mostly cubes and rectangles) shapes in the street environment. This is the description from the Art in Odd Places festival in 2008: “In a city made up of rectangular buildings, windows, and blocks the artist plays with a shape that is symbolic of New York City. In the attempt to draw attention to forgotten dimensions and overlooked layers, he creates reminders and portals with cubes that allow pedestrians to see the lines they are surrounded by in a new light.”

Image from Art in Odd Places.

Aakash Nihalani currently has his first solo show at the Bose Pacia gallery and I’m actually so happy for him it’s as if I knew him as a friend. I feel such a kinship and understanding of the work he’s doing in the street environment, and he also has beautiful abstract paintings.

I’m putting together a presentation for Seminar class that started out trying to define psychogeography and it’s really interesting to track the trajectory of my research. I started with psychogeography on Wikipedia. Apparently the term was coined by a man named Ivan Chtcheglov in the 1953 essay “Formulary for a New Urbanism”. He was then banned from Situationist International (SI) and was eventually committed to a mental institution where he went through shock therapy and eventually died in 1998. It’s horrible how fickle the SI and Lettrist movements were and there was constant turnover in the membership of both movements. Guy Debord seems to be the only constant name throughout, and also the only member with a full theoretical work, Society of the Spectacle. I read this book over the summer after finishing Naomi Klein’s No Logo and was inspired by the lofty language and theory of the former while learning about case studies through the more practical language of the latter. Both books are essentially about the “spectacle” of contemporary society, and not having to accept the way it is just because that’s how it is.

You can see the similarity in beliefs from the biography of Guy Debord on the European Graduate School site: “At the beginning of the SI movement their goal was to transgress the boundary separating art and culture from the everyday and make them part of common life. They theorized that Capitalism has the effect of diverting and stifling creativity, dividing the social body into producers and consumers, or actors and spectators. The SI saw art and poetry as a production by all people, that this was a way to make art the dominant power rather than having power rest in a small group of designated men. They argued for complete divertissement, and were against work. By 1962 they were applying their critique to all aspects of capitalist society, and no longer limiting it to arts and culture.”

It also turns out that Debord was quite the heavy drinker and the SI movement did most of their theorizing in bars around Paris. Not the upscale bars that philosophers like Camus frequented, but smaller, seedier places. Debord tragically committed suicide in France in 1994, at which time the French press memorialized him after never acknowledging or recognizing any of his work before.

Psychogeography began in this way as a critique of urban geography. In the late 50’s and 60’s the French intellectuals and artists that made up SI were contemporaries to the Beat generation in the US. They rejected the traditional experience of the street, which they considered part of the spectacle itself with expressionless, cold modern glass towers. Le Corbusier was their nemesis because of his insistence on homogenous architectural structures and spaces that left little adventure in their chance and exploration. They proposed a more organic and spontaneous encounter with the city landscape. Debord describes the theory of the derive: “In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones”

Chance. That was the theme of the latest Art in Odd Places festival in New York City. It’s surprising that this event (or series of events) is so related to the theory of Dada and Situationist movements but they make not one mention of it on their site. In the opening sentence of the curatorial statement they mention the word spectacle, which is an obvious nod to the work of Debord without literally saying it. As the statement goes on, they suggest that chance gives us the opportunity to move past our cultural conditioning to see the world in a new way. They aim to reveal undetected aspects of the city through performance and sound-based work.

Coming soon: a critique on this event series and also the Conflux festival.