On cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.

Mythogeography takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of artists, performers, ‘alternative’ walkers and pedestrian geographers. All Illustrated in full colour by Tony Weaver, who designed the Wrights & Sites’ Mis-Guide books.

The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. ‘Mythogeography’ celebrates that interweaving, its contradictions and complementarities, and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways by Phil Smith is out on 26th January 2010.
Paperback (244 x 170mm), 256 pages. ISBN: 978-0-9562631-3-1

Mythogeography: The Book at Triarchy Press

http://www.mythogeography.com

“The crowd is his element, as the air is that of the birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of the independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.”

Baudelaire, C. (1964), The Painter of Modern Life, New York: Da Capo Press

L’acte de marcher est à l’espace ce que l’énonciation est à la langue: par cette affirmation, de Certeau a attribué à la marche une triple fonction « énonciative » :

• un procès d’appropriation du système topographique par le piéton,
• une réalisation spatiale du lieu, de même que parler est une réalisation sonore de la langue,
• et l’implication de relations entres positions différenciées, des contrats, de même que l’énonciation verbale est « allocution » et « implante l’autre en face ».

« La marche dessine un espace d’énonciation ; elle affirme, suspecte, hasarde, transgresse les trajectoires qu’elle « parle », par les types de relation qu’elle entretient avec les parcours en leur affectant une valeur de vérité, de connaissance ou de devoir-faire. Toutes les modalités y jouent, changeantes de pas en pas, et réparties dans des proportions, en des successions et avec des intensités qui varient selon les moments, les parcours, les marcheurs. » ¹

Alors que pour Bailly, la marche semble être un acte qui mêle le matériel au mental:

« Marcher dans la ville, c’est aller avec sa pensée à l’intérieur d’un réseau qui a lui-même la complexité et la vie d’une pensée : […] ou tout […] est traversé par une mémoire flottante dont nous ne faisons que pressentir les lois. »

Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Clairière, p.76

Ce qui « fait marcher »

« Marcher, c’est manquer de lieu. » Car le sens de la marche suit souvent le sens des mots, dans un jeu sur et avec les noms « propres ».

« La marche obéit à des tropismes sémantiques : elle est attirée ou repoussée par des nominations aux sens obscurs, des vocations ou appels qui tournent ou détournent l’itinéraire en lui donnant des sens (ou directions) jusque-là imprévisibles. Les noms propres y creusent des réserves de signification cachées et familières. Ce sont des mots qui perdent peu a peu leur valeur gravée, s’offrant aux polysémies dont les affectent les passants. Ils se détachent des endroits qu’ils étaient censés définir et servent de rendez-vous imaginaires à des voyages. étrange toponymie, décollée des lieux, planant au-dessus de la ville comme une géographie nuageuse de sens en attente. Ces mots opèrent au titre même d’un évidement et d’une usure de leur affectation première. Ils en deviennent des espaces libérés, occupables. » ²

¹ Michel de Certeau, Récits d’espace, in L’invention du quotidien, Tome 1 : arts de faire, Gallimard, 1990, p.171.

² ibid. p. 155

Sur la démarche créatrice du marcheur, voir Thierry Davila: Marcher, Créer. Déplacements, flâneries, dérives dans l’art de la fin du XXe siecle, Editions du Regard, 2002. Résumé à venir dans une note prochaine.

NB: Studio - Londons Kerning (2007)

Un nom, le nom d’une ville sur la terre, suffit à ouvrir le jeu qui commença sur les atlas de l’enfance. Ce nom, avant d’être un ici, est un là-bas : un motif de rêverie, un buisson d’idées qu’on se fait, d’images mentales relayées par la littérature, les représentations. Puis arrive un jour ou l’on s’y rend et tout le buissonnement confus du « là-bas » s’évapore. L’apprentissage commence : On se rend compte que ce nom, ce qui a fait venir, ce qui a fait rêver, s’il recouvre bien toute la ville, n’en désigne vraiment que le noyau originel. Chaque ville est un ensemble de possibles, prêt à se décomposer en fragments distincts à l’arrivée de chaque nouveau visiteur.

On ne connaît une ville et on ne se l’approprie qu’en la pratiquant – telle une langue. Pour en maîtriser la topographie, la disposition de ses quartiers, il faut plonger dans sa densité kaléidoscopique et entrer dans sa matière. La syntaxe lentement découverte laisse entrevoir sa structure ; Le lexique y prend forme en des phrasés multiples qui se superposent et s’entrecroisent, de façon à la fois réglée et aléatoire, en une forme déchiffrable ou complexe, le long de la grammaire du plan. La ponctuation laisse respirer ses grandes phrases amorphes comme ses éclats lumineux ; Un amas de collages, de parenthèses ouvertes remplies de visions, d’odeurs, d’instants, qui laisse filtrer du sens, ce sursaut d’intensité.

La ville est ainsi une réserve de sens en jachère, de signes que chacun articule, anime, « locute », occulte à sa façon en la parcourant. Une somme d’agencements réalisés, et dans chaque parcours, la réalisation d’un nouvel agencement, d’une nouvelle phrase. La ville, « ionisée » par la démarche qui la traverse en l’explorant, s’éclaire de l’intérieur.
On y forme des suites de mots, des phrases, on établit des repères. Les villes, « pelotes d’histoires », nous exposent à un buissonnement permanent de traces et d’indices enchevêtrés. Chaque ville parle son propre argot secret dont le flâneur reconstitue la trame, le tissu, avec ses moirés et ses accrocs, à la fois achevé et à tisser encore. Cette inextricable complexité de la ville est rendue lisible par l’ascension de l’observateur, qui peut dès lors déchiffrer le texte écrit par ses habitants-marcheurs (Wandersmänner)¹, sans qu’eux mêmes puissent le lire.

Le texte ci-dessus est en partie inspiré/condensé de trois essais de Jean Christophe Bailly publiés dans La Ville à l’œuvre, paru aux Editions de l’Imprimeur en 2001 :
La grammaire générative des jambes, p.21 – 34
Le propre des villes, p.81 – 84
La Clairière, p.73 – 79

¹ Michel de Certeau, L’invention du Quotidien, Tome 1, p.139

“Old traps vanish, new ones take their place; the old safe places become impassable, and the route can either be plain and easy, or impossibly confusing.”

Andreï Tarkovski, Stalker

As illustrated by Tarkovski’s Zone, the conception of place seems to be constantly evolving, ever-adapting to the circumstances of one-self.
Bergson sees place as “space in which the process of remembrance continues to activate the past as something which is lived and acted, rather than represented”.
Indeed, the notion of place couldn’t exist without memory – or perhaps even outside memory: when we leave a place, we take with us our own constructed and fantasised version of it: for instance, “home is absolutely an imagined or fictiously remembered place that people want to exist, but it exists almost entirely in memory” (Simon Schama). The tension between memory and present experience is epitomized by the feeling of Nostalgia (from the Greek word nostos meaning returning home, and algos meaning pain), which was once recognised as a clinical condition known to have once rendered Russian soldiers incapable of fighting.

In his street-walking itinerancies, Bojan Sarcevic has seeked to highlight the relationships going on between different forms of experience of a place, from tourist to inhabitant: from alienation, to strangeness, to familiarity. The remote and exotic place offers something ‘other’ to those who go there; but the tourists are themselves also ‘other’ to the city’s inhabitant…
On tourism, the sociologist John Urry wrote: “Like the pilgrim the tourist moves from a familiar place to a far place and then returns to the familiar place. At the far place both the pilgrim and the tourist engage in ‘worship’ of shrines, which are sacred, albeit in different ways, and as a result gain some kind of uplifting experience.”
For Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage is defined by a movement from the ‘profane periphery’ to the ‘sacred centre’”.

Place (Tacita Dean & Jeremy Millar) is released in the Artworks collection, Thames & Hudson.

While we may think of geographic maps as amongst the more objective graphics, Stephen Boyd David reminds us of the subjective nature of mapping in this essay published in Emotional Cartography (Ed. Christian Nold). There is always some degree of subjectivity in an image. The way we see the world is channelled by language (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and linguistics have taught us that maps, like pictures and words, do not represent things, but shared ideas of things.

In contrast with the perspective, which needs a viewpoint, the map doesn’t need an onlooker – it is the first panopticon.
However maps do distort and select – because they are made for a purpose: they carry place-names, or indicate a hierarchy of importance. Whereas aerial photography shows the “raw stuff”, a well-made and usable map must be clear and legible, serving its purpose precisely through its selectivity. But some profound distortions go unnoticed because they are embedded in a shared cultural perspective: as the terrestrial globe is unwrapped on a flat surface, Europe is conveniently located in the middle of most Mercator projections. Yet even a globe, considered to be the most direct model of the Earth, has its northern hemisphere “up”, still dominating the under-developed world.
The first level of subjectivity arises from who we are and what we are trying to represent; on top of this is always overlaid our belonging to a wider cultural group: “dominant groups often assume that the shape of their world is the shape of the world.”

Oskar Karlin, Elephant & Castle-centred tube map.

Where you start a journey is sometimes as important as where you are: Time and space has already been compressed by ever faster mechanised travel, and increased ease of access makes the territory a different shape and size, experienced differently in different places. This is evidenced by Oskar Karlin’s time travel map, showing travel times from Elephant & Castle station, distorting Beck’s original underground map which is itself a heavily deformed representation of the topography giving much greater importance to the central area at the expense of the periphery. The emphasis on connections (or absence of them), the relative proximity of places is reminiscent of space syntax diagrams showing the connections between adjacent rooms in a building, rather than their relative layout as shown in a plan view.

Perspective is another way of prioritising and organising importance: The introduction of perspective in the BBC broadcast weather maps attracted much criticism, not least because it was thought to breach the corporation’s duty of impartiality. The same effect was exaggeratingly used by Saul Steinberg’s 1976 New Yorker’s view of the world to a humorous end.

Tom Carden’s Travel Time Tube Map expands on Karlin’s work by allowing any user to dynamically reorganise the map in order to represent travel times from any station:

Tom Carden, Travel Time Tube Map

A new generation of web-enabled interactive devices has enabled dynamic and on-demand maps to be produced, customised by users to fit their interests, altering the role of map-maker and opening up a map to new expressions, re-introducing objectivity into an object that has become more universal. Portable GPS technologies have further changed the stakes by adding the here and now, making maps inherently personal and embedded in the present.

Download the book (Ed. Christian Nold) from Emotional Cartography.

In his classic book Memory, first published in 1957 by Penguin Books, Ian M. L. Hunter made some interesting attempts at characterising the processes at work in memory and remembering. He defined and analysed them in those terms:

recalling: reproducing in the present some event from the past. While a person is recalling, they are essentially engaged in selectively constructing the salient characteristics of the original event. This highlights the constructive and selective nature of learning as an active process of registration, in which coordinating relationships are elaborated between old and new. These relationships play a role in subsequent recall.

recognizing: identifying some present event as being familiar from the past.

We sometimes become aware of our attempts at characterising and constructing a framework for remembering past events, using devices like associations of sounds, rhythm, or the context of encounter. By constructing a historical context for the event, we can also localise it in our personal past.

Recollecting constitutes a particularly rich form of recalling, when the warm intimacy of past personal experience is suddenly brought to the surface of the present – see Proust’s madeleine and the idea of involontary memory.

Imaging: experiencing sensory qualities in the absence of appropriate sensory stimulation. Much of our remembering takes the form of imaging, i.e. re-living past complex experiences in vivid sensory terms. We recall the past by reconstructing its sensory characteristics, thus giving us the illusion of going back in time.

The cumulative effects of past experience

The Bartlett experiments¹ have highlighted the gradual and ongoing process of filtering / transformation / degradation occuring with memorised events. The retained effects of past experience form an organised system, progressively elaborated into inter-related systems and sub-systems, where events are selected / re-ordered according to their mutual relevance, which in turn informs the way present circumstances are perceived. A person’s memory is a permanently self-modifying system, their cumulative past constantly enriched and updated by the present.

¹ Frederic Bartlett was a british psychologist famous for his experiments related to the formation of memory. He conducted a series of studies where subjects were told a story, then asked to recall it after various intervals of time.

A new book exploring the political, social and cultural implications of visualising intimate biometric data and emotional experiences using technology.

“The Bio Mapping tool is therefore a unique device linking the personal and intimate with the outer space of satellites orbiting around the earth.”

A collection of essays by Raqs Media Collective, Marcel van der Drift, Dr Stephen Boyd Davis, Rob van Kranenburg, Sophie Hope and Dr Tom Stafford brought together and edited by Christian Nold.

Book launch, with talks by the editor Christian Nold as well as Dr Tom Stafford and Sophie Hope, Friday 24th April 2009 6.30 -9pm at SPACE, Hackney.

SPACE, 129-131 Mare St, London E8 3RH

From Rhizome News:

Creative Time curator Nato Thompson will lead a discussion of Experimental Geography with Lize Mogel and Damon Rich, two artists who participated in his exhibition (for Independent Curators International) and book (Melville House) of the same name.

Saturday, March 21st, at 3pm
$8 General/ $6 Members
the New Museum, New York, NY

Finisterre is a collaborative film project, part-documentary / part-music promo, between film-makers Paul Kelly, Kieran Evans and the electro-pop band Saint-Etienne, produced by CC-Lab and supported by Onedotzero.

I watched this film for the first time shortly after it came out in 2003, and remained fascinated by it ever since; after watching it again recently I was inhabited by the same irresistible feelings of nostalgia and tenderness. Beyond the innovative format of the film, which seeks to explore the possibilities of a 60-minute music-promo at the scale of an entire album, the combination of Saint-Etienne’s melancholic or energetic tunes and Kelly/Evans thoughtful shots successfully captures the alternating moods that London has to offer to the unsuspecting visitor.

The film starts and finishes with a train journey in and out of the city, dusk to dawn, unknown to familiar, and transports the spectator on a journey of discoveries and insights into the ‘London Nobody Knows’, through a succession of interviews of local artists and residents connected to the story of Saint Etienne, blended with powerful musical passages accompanied by imagery ranging from architectural patterns to urban scenes and walking crowds, always meticulously shot as stills documenting the city area by area, punctuated by an overwhelming voice-over narrative that features the observations and reminiscences of Lawrence. Finisterre sheds some light on London as a source of influence, inspiration and curiosity for many, offering a trip through the city that is largely reminiscent of a line of psycho-geographic films such as ‘London’, ‘Robinson In Space’ (Patrick Keiller), and ‘Orbital’ (Chris Petit).

The result is a touching tribute to London, marvelously conveying the essence of the place while forming a visual record and musical impression of the city today.