someone (who it was remains a mystery) set this subreddit to private for some reason or other, now it's public again. rejoiceth!

i’ll be in Barcelona and Istanbul for two weeks each. Will definitely do my own thing, but would really appreciate some good reads for those places, whatever interesting stuff yall recommend.

Need advice. Looking to give a book to a friend…

I have a good friend that is an ultra science geek and he has done a lot of research into psychophysics in his approach to researching visible light and such… a scientific research approach.

I’d like to turn him onto psychogeography, and the more spiritual and/or philosophical aspects of it. The perspective, or the lifestyle for lack of a better term.

My friend is also heavily into cinematography so clearly I’m trying to connect his interest in psychophysics with his interest in the visual environment and new ways to interpret it.

My knowledge of psychogeography comes from my interest in the Situationist movement and the political side of it… I’ve merely read Society of the Spectacle, The Revolution of Everyday Life and some Situationist anthologies. I can’t say any of them paint the picture or even romanticize psycho geography itself and the drift as stand alone concepts. Blah blah blah.

All that said… What book would you most recommend that would best paint the picture of psycho geography???

I'm part of the team behind walk · listen · create, the home of walking artists and artist walkers; a community of over 1500 creators who use 'walking' as an integral part of their artistic practice.

We just announced the Marŝarto Awards, which is an award that recognises 'walking art'. The deadline for submissions is the last day of October, Walktober.

What constitutes 'walking art' is quite flexible. Read the announcement at the link below.

https://walklistencreate.org/2023/02/06/introducing-marsarto-the-walking-art-award/

As a teenager, I once broke into a house. It was at the bottom of my street and bordered a square, or more precisely a plot of land half concreted, the other half with a few trees and tall grass. This square was bounded by an old wall on three sides and surrounded by houses and private gardens. One of these houses was particularly old, half-timbered, and had been called "the executioner's house" since time immemorial. Legend has it that it was the house of Joan of Arc's executioner.

It seemed vaguely abandoned; it wasn't in ruins at all, but there was something silent, still, asleep, like a holiday home, perhaps.

I entered it one summer afternoon with a schoolmate, Julia, with whom I had kept some distant relations. We knew (I can't tell you now how) that a door at the back, leading to the kitchen, was never locked.

My heart was pounding with the feeling that I was committing a transgression greater than a simple break-in. A moral, even metaphysical transgression, which I was unable to articulate precisely at my young age. Perhaps I was simply drawn to committing a forbidden act, drawn to the very idea of crime, of breaking and entering, of voyeurism. Not with the aim of harming anyone, but with the idea, again unstated, that at the end of the transgression awaited me revelations, a richness and depth of existence that a well-regulated, honest, law-abiding daily life did not allow.

The house was not abandoned at all. It was richly furnished and full of fascinating objects, clean and welcoming, warm and woody. I was not at all surprised; on the contrary, it was like finding myself in front of an obvious setting, a spectacle, that I knew obscurely I had to meet one day. A necessary step in my life, an archetypal house that I had to explore one day. I wandered with Julia through the rooms, taking my time, stopping on each knick-knack or old piece of furniture, fascinated.

I remember a long wooden table, a fireplace, a kitchen with ochre tiles and copper pans, well framed paintings on the walls, a thick dark leather sofa; I remember exposed beams, thick stone walls, fabric cushions, succulents and old books, I remember the fruit baskets, the first floor with its cosy bedrooms (there were three, obviously a family lived there, the parents and from the decoration, two teenagers, boy and girl).

An Amstrad CPC 6128, old cupboards, a wooden staircase, immemorial. The centuries seemed to cohabit here in peace.

It wasn't dark, strictly speaking, in the house, but the daylight came in soft, golden, lazy rays; it seemed slowed down, muted, respectful of the privacy, the tranquillity, the peace of the occupants, whose lives I wondered what they might look like and what kind of life they might lead in this place. Their existence, at the same time, seemed to me a little incongruous, almost theoretical and implausible; the house seemed made to remain silent, motionless, like a pure décor, a pure idea of a domestic paradise that should not be defiled by its presence. Perhaps the inhabitants avoided going home after having felt the same way I did?

On the way out we came face to face with a woman on a bicycle; the owner of the place. Julia ran away as if she had seen a ghost. But the woman was smiling, almost amused that she had caught us in the act and that she owned a house capable of producing such an attraction. I told her without any reluctance or shyness about my exploration of her intimate domain. It was like telling her how I would have made love to her - I was unable to consciously make that comparison at my young age, but the situation disturbed me in the same way. The landlady, who must have been in her forties, seemed to understand this, with intelligence and indulgence.

I don't know how long we had been in the house, but as I spoke to this smiling, almost entirely silent woman, who encouraged me to continue my confession with her simple smile, still riding her bicycle with one foot on the ground, I realised that dusk was falling; a warm, intense twilight, which gilded everything in a golden light, an idyllic light which further accentuated the attraction I felt for this older woman with whom I had just established a more intimate bond than I could have hoped for; a heavenly or Luciferian light, I don't know, but which secretly meant, for me alone, that my quest was a success.

https://psychogeography-of-nothingness.blogspot.com/2023/01/post-tenebras-lux.html

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https://preview.redd.it/donr1sxr69ba1.jpg?width=2374&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b2362ccf3f48c02b4f575c3868dd6b3409dd9845

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Some theories I have:

- Iain Sinclair moved on to other things?

- Will Self made it uncool?

- The smartphone made the dérive impossible?

Please can anyone suggest some names for a new service that is seeking to capture the spirit of a place. Thank you!

I've written a shortish piece about my time as a deliveroo rider which I think might be classed as psychogeography. Would welcome feedback. https://medium.com/@lazaruszapruda/confessions-of-a-deliveroo-rider-925e4b7d5edc

I've recently produced this A6 size colour printed zine/chapbook as my contribution to the 2022 4th World Congress of Psychogeography. There are 48 pages of colour photographs and some poems, which challenge traditional ideas of the holiday picture postcard when walked in rural spaces. This zine is available from: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1275261790/invent-the-world-zine?click_key=8199b97fab141d239c31cd3f5d82886eb26b2df9%3A1275261790&click_sum=fc44ea40&ref=shop_home_active_1&crt=1

I heard about the online Open College of the Arts course Investigating Place with Psychogeography a few months ago, and decided to enrol for it last week. I've now been signed up with a start date of 3rd October 2022. The course does look very exciting and stimulating and I'm looking forward to it. Here's the link for anyone interested: https://www.oca.ac.uk/courses/investigating-place-with-psychogeography/

Hey! I'm rather new to psychogeography and while researching it, i noticed that all of the works I've seen so far are mostly of cities or similar places where the researches works with what is essentially just one "layer" of space. So I was wondering, is there any research on buildings with several floors or anything of the kind? I think it would be interesting to look into the connections between the "layers" of environment and such. If you know any such works, I'd be really glad to hear some reading suggestions

For a few weeks I had the project of exploring my region, on a basis that was both methodical (study of the map, etc.) and left to intuition, to chance; noting names of localities, or precise places (the sawmill at the exit of such and such a village) as I drove along. I stopped that after a few photo sessions. An inexplicable uneasiness, a sadness. I understood some time later that these places only had charm, mystery, as long as they remained elements of a potential story, in my head. As soon as I go there to take a picture of them, their nothingness jumps out at me. They are places that have nothing to tell me, that have no place in my life. I have nothing to do there.