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Nov 08
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arts, pscychogeography
• planbperformance.net
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
an overview stollen from here and there

Dan Belasco Rogers
the daily practice of map making
If at the end of your life, you could look at the shapes your wanderings over the earth have made, what patterns would you see? What words might be formed that take a human lifetime to write?
Dan's work crosses a number of disciplines: performance, psychogeography, locative media, video and fine art. Since April 2003 he has recorded every journey he has made with a GPS.
Dan is fascinated by the idea that locations (interior or exterior) serve as a mnemonic for the stories that we tell about our lives and often work to reveal these human narratives (my own and other peoples') bound to a place.

Psychogeography, according to its founder Guy Debord, is ââ,¬oethe study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.ââ,¬Âť
Lynch's most famous work, The Image of the City published in 1960, is the result of a five-year study on how users perceive and organize spatial information as they navigate through cities. Using three disparate cities as examples (Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles), Lynch reported that users understood their surroundings in consistent and predictable ways, forming mental maps with five elements:
* paths, the streets, sidewalks, trails, and other channels in which people travel;
* edges, perceived boundaries such as walls, buildings, and shorelines;
* districts, relatively large sections of the city distinguished by some identity or character;
* nodes, focal points, intersections or loci
* landmarks, readily identifiable objects which serve as reference points
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_A._Lynch [en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_A._Lynch]
In the same book Lynch also coined the words "imageability" and "wayfinding". Image of the City has had important and durable influence in the fields of urban planning and environmental psychology.

Map detail: An abstracted linear ââ,¬oemapââ,¬Âť sequencing smells, textures, and sounds from one end to the other of the path investigated.
In fact, it was Guy Debord who introduced the idea â€" together with the
name â€oepsychogeography” â€" to refer to â€oesome provisional terrains of observation, including the
observation of certain processes of chance and predictability in the streets.”2 In his 1955 paper,
â€oeIntroduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Debord argued that, â€oePsychogeography could set for
itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously
organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”