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

“What would happen if street corners could talk? Some people believe that bricks and mortar can record sound vibration – that if you could unlock this you would be able to hear the history of the area played back to you.”

Daniel Belasco Rogers spent months recording stories told by local residents of the Greenwich area. In August 2006, the “Peninsula Voices” project will find out what stories are written through the pavements, using handheld computers connected by GPS, making it possible to walk round the area and hear the voices of those who lived there.

www.planbperformance.net/dan

“The social practice of travel is driven by romantic desire for a transformative symbolic experience in an other place from which one could return renewed. Tourism converted secular pilgrimage into a commodity marketed in two-dimensional images.” ¹

Michael Naimark’s work involves projects of “real-space imaging”, surrogate travel and “moviemaps” based on series of photographic images of an existing landscape taken methodically on a dolly-mounted camera: an interface and a screen allowing one to “browse” backward and forward on a grid of predetermined paths and see, for instance, Aspen by car (Architecture Machine Group, MIT 1978-1980), San Francisco by air (SF Exploratorium 1987) and Karlsruhe by tram (ZKM 1990-1991). In See Banff ! (1994), he used a stereoscopic camera and the latest computer-driven video disk technologies to present the work through the peep-hole of an old kinetoscope. Interestingly, by texture-mapping bi-dimensional pictures onto a 3D immersive mode of representation, he melts photographic space and cyberspace.

¹ Margaret Morse, Nature Morte: Landscape and Narrative in Virtual Environments, p.202-203 in Immersed in Technology, Art and Virtual Environments, edited by Mary Ann Moser. Cambridge, Massachusetts : MIT Press, 1996.

Following the release of the eponymous book ¹, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) ran A Mis-Guide to Anywhere in April 2006: four walking tours within the environs of the gallery, which unlike ordinary guided tours, are disrupted by the practice of “mytho-geography”, which places the fictional, fanciful, fragile and personal on equal terms with ‘factual’, municipal history. E.g. “Out of place” took people out for a walk of coincidences, derived from overlaying a map of Paris onto London.

¹ Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti, Phil Smith and Cathy Turner (2006) A Mis-Guide to Anywhere. London: Wrights & Sites