Psychogeography in the Newstatesman

Remapping High Wycombe gets a mention in Joe Moran's wonderful piece on psychogeography in the Newstatesman. You can read the article here

Scorpion Records - victim of redevelopment

This vid was made in 2005 when Eden was still a drawing on a piece of paper. This legendary record shop - the psychogeographical epicentre of my Wycombe - has been swept away by an extension built onto the front of Sainsbury's supermarket.

In Search of the Western Sector - Eden Shopping Centre reviewed

Returning to Newlands was a peculiar experience. I always thought it would be – maybe that’s why I delayed it so long. I attempted to adopt an air of professional detachment which was only partially successful as the project was always a personal journey – as Cathy had printed on the large scale Significant Sites map ‘This is no project – this is my life’.

Eden they have somehow branded this red brick consumerist behemoth, a moloch that will devour our children. A retail concentration camp, shoppers with bar codes burnt into their retinas, the whole scene directed by George A. Romero or John Carpenter – the no-comedy, spoof-free remake.

The development process that we documented in our project was one of ultra-artful deception from start to finish – a slick PR-savvy campaign by arch corporate colonists, like the alien invaders in the 80’s sci-fi earth invasion ‘V’ who adopt the guise of friendly attractive humans in order to seduce the human race and offer us amazing visions of the future they will bring us – then once we have given ourselves over to them, lowered our defences they remove their masks revealing their reptilian form and their true intention to farm us for food to feed their insatiable appetite. David Icke would probably close the circle and claim that the head honchos at Multiplex and the quisling Council Leaders who sold out the town are in fact lizard-like shape-shifters, a genetic throwback to a master race who aim to enslave us poor innocent homo-sapiens.
I don’t agree with Icke about the lizard thing for the record. I met many of the people responsible for the ‘Horror of Newlands’ and they just looked like perfectly pleasant corporate suits, in much the same way that British colonial viceroys were often urbane, cultured souls. This didn’t prevent the brutality of imperialism – merely meant that it was administered by men who could relate it to the relevant precedent in the classical world. The mark of the colonist was to change the names of local landmarks, towns and villages. And so the Octagon has gone, that dark noxious place full of wonder – a piss-reeking reminder that shopping malls are places to be avoided at all costs. There was no deception with the old Octagon – it spelt it out for you ‘Shopping is Shit’. Where the Octagon still stands now the name reads ‘House of Fraser Eden’. The Octagon is erased from the collective memory – now there is only Eden. Shopping as Soma.


(a recreation of the tour of the site that I did with Cathy in 2004)

And so the Eden Shopping Centre was rationalised in terms of jobs and economic benefits. The havoc it would wreck on the psyche of the town, the scar it would gouge into its flesh was a concept they were unable to engage with. I presented this idea to both the architect of the scheme and the fella at Mulitplex – they simply didn’t have a vocabulary for the experiential qualities of space and place. That a building, especially a large lump of buildings could effect the way you feel, could influence your psychology. They had sophisticated models showing how to drive footfall through the mall, of how to enhance the shopping experience to maximise the consumer spend. But when confronted with the idea that a person might have an emotional response to such a place they were at a loss.

The evidence is there now – the gormless zombies listlessly perambulating from one chain-store to the next. The minimum wage jobs barely paying enough to cover the price of a double-caramel frappucino at BigBucks. The traffic on traction gliding from home to parking-space located conveniently close to the anchor store. The bus delivering you to your retail heaven. This other Eden that looks a lot like Hell to me.

eden shopping centre

Lunchtime Derive Video

This is a video that we shot back in 2004 recording the experience of the Lunchtime Derive. The algorithm that you see in the video (and the idea of algorithmic psychogeography) was developed by Social Fiction.



The aim of the LunchTime Dérive was to study how, by following a simple instruction, a group of workers could re-experience the town during their Lunch Break. The daily hunt for a prawn sandwich or Chicken Tikka Marsala Ready Meal will be replaced with a drift motivated by following a basic algorithm provided Dutch psychogeographers Social Fiction.

In an email to Cathy I sketch out the theoretical background to the exercise and how we might go about organizing it:
According to geographer David Pinder (1996) part of the purpose of the dérive was to allow "participants to drift from their usual activities and to become more aware of their surroundings while simultaneously seeking out ways of changing them."
Our intervention is in part in reference to Chombart de Lauwe's study of the movement's made in a year by a Paris student. Guy Debord referred to the data produced by this study as 'a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions.' By asking the office workers to map their usual lunchtime routines we may find that this precious hour of free time is also similarly limited.
Debord describes the dérive as a period when one or more persons "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." We will be asking people to drop their usual lunch-time routine of the trip to M&S for a sarnie or surfing the net a their desk and to follow an algorithm wherever it may take them and experience the town as they find it.
We will employ an algorithm to jolt people from their routines and drive the drift most likely taking them into areas they wouldn't normally consider going to at lunch-time. Debord suggests that the dérivers may discover new 'psychogeographical attractions' to which they may be drawn back, in this way our intervention may have deeply subversive consequences in changing the lunch-time habits of a group of office workers, the hunt for grub between 12 and 2 being one of the town's primary motors. By mapping this dynamic then by interfering with it we can start to truly understand and interact with the 'psychogeographical articulations' of the town.

Process:
1. Organize an initial meeting with the workers 1 week or so before the derive. Ask them to map their usual lunchtime movements.
2. On the day of the derive meet the volunteers outside their workplace. Issue them with: notepad, disposable camera, piece of paper containing the algorithm.
3. Make sure that everybody understands the instructions and send the groups of 2-3 people off in different directions.
4. We will accompany the groups to record the event but not intervene. The groups record their route, observations etc. on the notepads.
5. The derive finishes after 30 minutes and we reassemble for lunch and debrief.
6. We collect in notepads and cameras and process the results creating maps of the routes followed.
(we could give them a small amount of money to collect food along the way for the lunch at the end)

Rules for a Dérive
1. One or more persons may dérive
2. The most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several groups of two or three people.
3. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another.
4. Drop your usual motives for movement and action, relations, work and leisure activities.
5. The average duration of a dérive is a day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep.
6. The times of beginning and ending have no necessary relation to the solar day.
7. The last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
8. A dérive seldom occurs in its pure form.
9. The spatial field of the dérive may be precisely delimited or vague.
10. The spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure.
11. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs.
12. The minimum area can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance (the extreme case being the static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
Extrapolated from Guy Debord’s 1958 Theory of the Dérive

Drift #1 Video

This is the video we shot on our first tour of the site that is now the Eden Shopping Complex back in 2004. Much of what you see in the video has now been demolished - before you celebrate that fact consider what has been lost in terms of collective memory replaced by a bland homogenised closely control corporate consumer monolith.
You can read the report of the Drift here

Inside Deep Library

Here's a video I made featuring Desborough Hundred Psychogeographical Society member Nick Papadimitriou talking about his practice of 'Deep Topography'

Reframing Maidstone - a kino derive

We've developed the work we did with Significant Sites to produce an event in Maidstone for Architecture Week - 'Reframing Maidstone'.

It's an event where archive film clips of the town are transfered to people's mobile phones, they then hunt down the locations of the clips using clues we give them, shoot their own response to the footage and the location, then bring their own clips back the installation at Maidstone Town Hall where they are loaded onto a video map displayed on large plasma screens.

We did it last Saturday and it worked really well, and it will run again tomorrow. If you'd like to participate but can't make it along you can send us a clip of whereever you are and we'll send you a clip of Maidstone in return. (email: reframingmaidstone@googlemail.com)

I've written an outline of the idea of the Kino Derive:

Self-authorship of the landscape: from the Phantom Ride to the Mobile Phone

"The modern avenue served as laboratory for the flâneur, while the contemporary street finds the neo- flâneur manipulating the mediating filters of technology in pursuit of new connections to the landscape." Glenn Bach. Atlas Peripatetic (MFA Project Report).

<1> Film-maker Patrick Keiller has identified that a common feature of the early city films of late 19th and early 20th Century was that they tended to be "one to three minutes long, and consisted of one or very few unedited takes". This format is again becoming popular with the using of online video-sharing, self-broadcasting websites such as YouTube and Google Video. The development of portable devices such as mobile phones presents new opportunities for topographical film-makers as short clips can be shot on the move and sent directly from the location to a website, or another device, where they can be simultaneously viewed and commented upon.

<2> This also has implications for the time-space compression (David Harvey) as people can broadcast to a potentially large audience images of the landscape as they pass through it in real-time and experience moving image bulletins from the past in-situ. Like the early city films these clips or bulletins will necessarily be short and unedited.

<3> Our visions of the landscape can now be filtered through a digital interface. Collectively these visions form a snapshot of the townscape and the personal topographies of the auteurs. The exchange that takes place on a kino dérive between author and instigator/ provocateur transforms the personal into the shared experience of space and place, spanning past and present.
A video map is created, logging the journeys undertaken. This then enables us to explore the changes and tensions, highlight historic symmetries and developments.

<4> By viewing archive film images in situ what historical tensions emerge? When standing in Fremlin Walk looking at Sonny Hanson’s film showing Fremlins Brewery in 1938 it’s difficult not to become aware of the economic and cultural transformation that has occurred as we have moved from distinctive local industries to a homogenised shopping mall culture.

<5> Can this simple act of authoring our own representation of our environment somehow give us a link to collective sense of place beyond that defined by urban planning, the privatisation of public space and received notions of localness and belonging? Somehow enable access to what Nick Papadimitriou calls a kind of "regional memory" locked in the landscape. A route to a sense and spirit of place which is inclusive.

<6> With the traditional psychogeographical dérive or drift we seek to strip the city or town bare, to reveal its secrets, its mechanisms and motors. The motivations for engaging in such an activity vary as much as the outcomes. For the Situationists it was a reconnaisance mission for the revolution of everyday life that they sought to bring about. The fact that they moved on from drinking absinthe in Montmatre to being at the heart of the revolt of May ’68 that brought the French government to the brink of collapse suggests some use came from these "journeys outside the timetable."

<7> With a kino dérive we don’t anticipate a revolution in the traditional sense to occur, although it would be nice. It is an experiencing of place through a simultaneous active engagement with moving image and the landscape.

Book Review on Bodmin Moor Explorer

The excellent Bodmin Moor Explorer has given our book 'Remapping High Wycombe: journeys beyond the western sector' a nice little review on their blog - read it here.
I strongly recommend spending a while reading Bodmin's blog, it really personifies the English 'Earth Mysteries' Psychogeographical School (or that should be College in the druidic sense).

The book is also now available to buy from Crockatt & Powell's Booksellers on Lower Marsh, London SE1.

We'll hopefully get some copies into Wycombe bookshops at some point.

Wycombe Wanderers vs Kingstonian 1958

footage courtesey of the Wycombe Film Society

Beyond Psychogeography with Nick Papadimitriou

Nick describes his methodolgy for tapping into "storage vats of regional memory" on a hike following a water course across North West London.

More development in Wycombe

This week the Bucks Free Press announces the Council’s plan for further development throughout the district. As I observed on my Wye Walk a year ago, the development is floating down the stream from the Eden scheme just like the effluent from the open sewers when Newlands was a slum.

"Areas highlighted in the WDF for redevelopment include the Molins Factory in Saunderton for low-key employment, part of Stockwells Timber Yard in Stokenchurch for a care home, the former Bartletts site in Desborough for housing and business, the gas work in Lily's Walk for housing, shops and possibly a hotel, and the Compair site in Hughenden will house a sports centre and could become the new home for Amersham and Wycombe College."

The new wave of de/re-generation is again being driven by economic concerns and Government targets that ignore the things that really make a place, what it means to the people who live there, how we experience it, and how it is woven into our personal and collective narratives.

Interview in the Bucks Free Press

Author mourns Wycombe's loss of identity

ONCE known as a potential safe haven for Londoners during times of catastrophe, High Wycombe is today facing a catastrophe of its own as the town's identity gradually erodes away, says author John Rogers.
John, who was born in High Wycombe and raised in Wooburn Green, has just published his book, Remapping High Wycombe: Journeys Beyond The Western Sector, which questions the impact of redevelopment on the town itself. The book, and an accompanying DVD, formed part of an 18-month public art project developed by John's sister, Cathy, and was financially supported with grants from Arts Council England.
The impetus for the project, says John, was the announcement of redevelopment plans in the town centre, a mixed-use retail-driven scheme that was initially called Project Phoenix, but which later changed its name to Project Eden and is expected to finish in 2008.
The 35-year-old, who now lives in East London with his wife, Heidi, and two young sons, is keen to point out that both project names suggest "revival", but he believes the opposite is in fact true.
John says: "High Wycombe once had a distinctive identity. It was called "Chairopolis" because it was the centre of the chair-making industry. But its industrial heritage is now slipping away and High Wycombe is like anywhere else.
"People say High Wycombe survived the Luftwaffe, but not the urban planners of the 1960s.
"Cathy and I looked back at the headlines from the 1960s and saw the doom and gloom newspapers spell for so-called "development".
"But those headlines are little different from the ones we see today. We've learnt absolutely nothing. And why? Because the drive behind the development is always the same - money."
John tells me he feared the town would undergo such radical change that in only a few years, his birthplace would become "unrecognisable".
With the help of his sister, he decided to capture High Wycombe, in words and film, before its transformation is complete, as well as rediscover the town's "forgotten history".
John says he also became increasingly interested in psychogeography, or how a place affects people's emotions and behaviour.
"The basic idea we came up with was to look at the way people connect to an area and how this can be disrupted," says John. "In recent months, High Wycombe has been described as "a leading M40 corridor town", because of the new developments in place.
"How is this something we should be aspiring to and how does that affect the people who live there?
"High Wycombe was once known for better things, such as producing two Prime Ministers, the Earl of Shelburne and Disraeli. How many other towns can lay claim to that?"
John adds in his book that he found many other reasons why the people of Wycombe should be proud of their area.
He writes: "Apparently there is a saying that the river Wye gave the town its mills, the mills produced the market and the market gave birth to the town.
"It's where the early translators of the Bible found support, where Engish Civil War took root, where the Quakers plotted their flight to America, the US Air Force based their Cold War communications; and where RAF Strike Command still rests in the hills."
With these thoughts in mind, John tells me he set out to "rediscover" the historical High Wycombe for himself.
He discarded his maps and instead embarked upon a series of walks or "drives", purposeful drifts around the streets of the town that he believed would help him see the town with fresh eyes.
"It was all about seeing past the surface level," says John. "I've travelled a lot in the past, around India and Australia, and I think it's really helped to heighten my senses.
"I can wander around places with innocent eyes and even the most mundane things are fascinating to me."
With his trusty camera by his side, John took pictures of crumbling engravings, vandalised bus shelters, picnic tables scrawled with graffiti, sharp razor-wire fences and ancient stone bridges.
Each has come from a different time and has a different purpose, but, explains John, they all make up the High Wycombe of today, and as such, deserve to be recorded in his book.
"My investigation threw up all kinds of fascinating things I never knew before. I discovered an ancient footpath in Green Street, which stretches back to before the Romans, possibly 5,000 years, maybe earlier.
"There's so many little footpaths everywhere, and who knows where they lead?
"Some seem like they don't go anywhere, but the important thing is that they once did."
John says he is proud of his book, if only because it offers a "snapshot" of the town, preserving it before it changes for good. He now plans to return to High Wycombe in future years and document the town's changes again.
"The main thing is that we found another Wycombe. We found our own town. We ignored the maps and we discovered a town that still has a very strong spirit of place. That can't be taken away, whatever lies ahead."
Remapping High Wycombe: Journeys Beyond The Western Sector is currently available exclusively at www.lulu.com/cryptotopography. For more information, log onto http://remappinghighwycombe.blogspot.com.
1:13pm Friday 8th December 2006
By Francine Wolfisz


Here's an earlier piece in the BFP

Regime Change in High Wycombe

A film recording the ancient ceremony of the Weighing-In of the Mayor, unique to Wycombe. Filmed on Super 8 in 2003 when we were first developing ideas for a film about Wycombe.

Observersations on a journey to H.W.

I'm going to an open evening/talk/discussion about the public art commission in wycombe - 'Living Wycombe'. It's a journey I make alone this time, John has to work.

Starting point: Marleybone
Entry point into the portal: between Gerrards Cross and High Wycombe

I know this place, its familiar but alien; my body remembers it but my mind is uncertain - a parallel life.

It's like time travel - a tube transporting me back in time - my mind tells me I've done this trip many times, the moving landscape is known but it feels like this is a new experience.

Its a wierd thing - time travel.

I've landed. I step off the train, it's 1985 - wait, no it isn't, there's Spanish Deli on Crendon Street, open at 5.45pm. I am hungrey so I head into town - good old Costa's open as there isn't much else. Ummm. Stand under the Little Market House with the smell of wee and try to feel the buzz of something I know. It's old so the walls must contain the energy of all the yesterdays, a feeling of familarity.

There's a number of pink and yellow Amnestys staked out on all axis of the high street.

Making my way to the university now for the meeting, I scan the pub forecourts cautious of familiar faces - but thinking about it, they're probably all dead or banged up by now. Under the tunnel through to the university. Gold stars in the skip.

The corridors smell like the hospital I can see out of the window - windows big enough to sit in and write this.

Meetings over and I'm waiting outside for my lift. It's dark. A re-enactment society is in the car park, I thought it was a gang duelling for real.

Observing some men coming through the front doors, in blazers, ties and grey hair. It's all quite proper round here. I rememer that feeling from School. Committees after school meets old men in battle uniform.

My lift arrives - my mum - as she whizzes me away from the town I'm transported back to another era.

I need to get home.

Journeys Beyond the Western Sector - book

We've finally published a book that brings together the project. It features full reports of all the derives and some other research we gathered along the way. There is a Dvd to accompany the book which we'll send out upon request. It's free to download or you can purchase a bound copy on lovely creamy paper from Lulu.