How do environments, landscapes human and natural, influence and structure the behavior, emotions, and thoughts of human beings? In 1953, the French iconoclastic cultural critic Guy Debord turned his attention to this very question. The question and its range of answers has everything to do with Paris’s city-organized festival “Nuit Blanche,” or “Sleepless Night,” which took place last night.
In the early 1950s Debord set about exploring this theme as well as other forms of structure and play in the increasingly globalized consumer society. Psychogeography, he wrote in 1955, is a term that combines what he saw as common considerations mobilizing the fields of geography and psychology. For him, geography was about the natural environment’s determination of economic structures and consequently its possible effects on the way societies might thus imagine the world. Psychology for him, though he doesn’t say it directly, is about the laws by which the mind works, structures of thought processes, emotions, memory, and consciousness.
Psychogeography would then be a study “of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” It was a sort of everyday experimental practice by members of his cultural avant-garde, drifting (dérive) through the various urban landscapes of Paris to reflect later on how they felt, why, and, in some cases, how such environments might be transformed (detourné) into something more playful or liberating instead of being the exclusive domains of buying, selling, and the facilitation thereof. The situationists even went so radically far as to call for cathedrals like Notre Dame to be transformed into playgrounds and zoos.
Fast forward roughly fifty years. The City of Paris holds its fifth “nuit blanche” event October 7, 2006. The event is part art expo, part carnival of eating, drinking, and extended leisure time. Its official aims will sound familiar to the last living situationists.
From 7 at night until 7 the next morning, various establishments across town stay open: museums, cafés, and movie theaters as well as churches, libraries, and swimming pools. And there will be art and lighting displays at landmarks like the Hôtel de Ville. Streets, buildings, monuments, and so forth are re-imagined by artists and transformed into spaces and encounters that aim to deviate from, even revivify, the everyday.
Article comments
1 - Rohan Venkat
So in the true sense, it's not possible to 'celebrate' psychogeography through actually creating art and adjusting it to the environment, but creating art which is a result of the impressions of the environment?
2 - jayson
What is "actually creating art" will be debateable to different people. The focus here is on the goals of production toward reception (such as when production and reception might become one) and how their dynamic is structured.
3 - diana hartman
I am pleased to tell you this article is being featured in the Culture Focus today, October 10th.
Diana Hartman
Culture Editor