Psycho Geography

In our first session with Leah Gordon, and the day after our first briefing on the maps and journeys project, we were asked to read an article written by Leah on a psycho geographical journey she took while in Stockholm. In it, she wrote in detail about writing the name 'Bill' on a street map and walk it, taking pictures as she went. The name 'Bill' was chosen as it was the inspiration of the psycho geographical artist Bill Drummond. In his work, and many other works of psycho geographers, there is an element of chance to the work as you are not setting out to take a particular photograph or see a particular thing. I can see the links this has with our brief, the artists here are taking a literal journey to a place or a group of places, and involve physical mapping. This is one way of exploring the brief literally to produce a creative outcome. Leah had us research some of the artists she had shown us in the morning a bit further to see what we could discover about their work that had psycho geographical elements; I was given Thai artist Rirkrit Tirivanija.

As I found out, Tirivanija mainly produces works which involve audience participation, however he has produced a few psycho geographical works as well. You can see the presentation I made on his work here.

As we all presented our findings, I was particularly interested in the work of 'Janet Cardiff'. Her psycho geography walks either included photographs, or video, and then a separate audio to listen to. They were intended to accompany you as you walk around a specific place, and it reminded me of audio tours you can rent in museums to give you more insight into the things you are viewing. This, I feel, gives you a unique insight into the experience someone else had when they visited this place, and is something which we can't otherwise experience fully. You can view some of her works here.

At the end of the session, we were given the task of doing our own psycho geography exercise by writing our own names, creating a shape etc. into a map of the surrounding area and producing a creative outcome from this. I want to try and experiment with the idea of chance that is involved in a lot of psycho geography, and also try to produce something similar to the works of Janet Cardiff since I was so intrigued by the experience she could give to an audience through her work.