This made me think of the casting of Yarrow sticks and the I Ching. It's a unique method of Chinese divination. Each toss of the sticks corresponds to one of the 81 verses of the I Ching. Check out Agent Cooper's method of divination on Twin Peaks: https://www.facebook.com/StanAustralia/videos/1353890104668192/ You could do something similar to choose a destination. Also, the way computers generate randomness is artificial, and I sense we're missing a conceptual improvement in that arena. Thank you.
absolutely. i think it will take some experimentation to find the right mix of detail and simplicity for this particular application... i'm somewhat intimidated by the I Ching and its cousins in Western geomancy, because it involves learning a completely different system of references. great for complex divinations about dynamic situations, but maybe overkill for wayfinding on a simple map? not sure.
in any case, i agree completely about using computers to generate randomness: my intuition says that it's either pure randomness—unmoved by any of the spooky quantum effects in the mind/matter interface—or that its spookiness comes from the alien influences of ghosts in the machine, which might not translate well to our world. sub-optimal in either case.
thanks for the helpful suggestions, you can see what i come up with in the next installment.
I don't know what to say about Randonautica except I used to be an Ingress guy and I immediately knew what the location it wanted me to go to on the map was (a person's house behind an elementary school) so it's "what if ingress but there was no game and it's definitely sending you somewhere with a high chance of being uninteresting if you don't live in the city."
with Ingress I was almost guaranteed a cool cemetery or historical marker at the barest minimum.
i'm interested in the whole concept of hyperstition. i've heard of ARGs and RPGs having some spooky real-world effects, and am wondering how those effects can be deliberately invoked. if that's possible—if reality can be altered or augmented with applied metaphysics—it would make the tech-based variety seem a bit thin.
Yes, I played old ones like The Beast and Year Zero as well as the pseudo ARGs Majestic and Black Watchmen. Ingress itself has always had a significant ARG element, with large real world events that used to be important to it before Pokemon.
Ingress was a major driver for getting to know my area better as well as having many Situationist style random experiences, I stopped playing partly because the interpersonal competition aspects of it got way more serious than was warranted and they more or less stopped doing the big time anomaly events.
thanks man! hopefully it will get even more delightful as my recording and editing skills improve, and the number of swamp noises coming from my mouth decreases. fingers crossed.
Apologies if this is based on a misunderstanding. But the derive and psychogeography aren’t exactly the same thing. I would say the field of psychogeography contains many possible techniques, of which randomised walking is just one.
I’ve walked about a lot thinking, and I’ve thought a lot about walking. It’s been huge medicine for me.
But feet are certainly excellent for getting out of the head…!
I think the definition of psychogeography is pretty elusive. I guess I approach it as any (intentional? maybve not always) act designed to rebalance my relationship to place. I use ritual, voice, the power of poetry and metaphor to play with language, the placement of artworks and rearrangement of physical objects, and especially the semi-trance of walking, to make space for myself, on many levels, so that I feel free enough to recognise that the meaning of the place comes through its interaction with my own soul and imagination, and so I have the agency to change that at will.
It might sound rather hubristic and simplistic to say I feel like I’m liberating the place, but I am at the very least making movement towards liberating my portion of the collective consciousness of that place, and through that of all place. And there’s a sense that places generally (though not necessarily always) enjoy being talked with and listened to in this way, that even in the most fucked-up toxic ruins, some gentle and powerful spirit of life still resides, that loves being recognised.
Sometimes this is just a question of paying attention to what I can feel is there on deeper levels, as I walk. In the city or in the deepest Amazon, my sense of place is determined by the usual capitalistic reduction, compression, and flattening of the world, founded on the long history of uprooting and dislocation I have inherited, growing up in suburban no-places. Yet my sense of disconnection and yearning also carries the even more ancient imprint of connection and belonging, and the soul-nourishment of that.
So I feel that just by the act of paying attention, to the dynamic flow of sensation, thought, emotion, internally and externally, I reclaim ownership of this place, and begin to restore something of the mythic depth it always had. And there is also something quite erotic about this… just as the delicate, loving quality of attention one pays, as one moves one’s gaze and touch across the body of a lover, can ignite a reciprocal desire for closer connection, so the way we move across the surface of the earth - whether it’s clothed in tarmac or mud - can bring a much closer and very magical relationship. The intention to walk with that quality of attention almost without fail brings a heightened sense of awareness of synchronicity and being in conversation with place. I think there is also a sense of being willing to take responsibility for seeing the pain that is caused, to earth and humanity, by the disconnection, and my participation in it. And in heavily built places, the imagination of what wants to grow up through the cracks - or how much more beautiful it could be if designed on a more human scale, and with more plants and trees - feels like a powerful balm for a sensitive nervous system that isn’t really designed for that kind of environment.
My walks have been anything from a couple of hours to a week. The shorter they are, the more random they tend to be. But it can be great to have specific goals, even if based on stupid puns. The longer ones normally, though not always, have definite aims (eg connecting all the places in Somerset with dragon stories attached, or walking to reinstate energy flows where I perceive they’ve been cut or blocked), and I think of much more in the way of pilgrimage, which is definitely a type of psychogeography.
I think the very urban, literary slant to psychogeography - mostly from London, where I lived most of my life, and Paris, where I lived for 2 years - tends to have ignored these older, more classically spiritual and nature-oriented traditions of walking and relationship to place, which are an incredibly rich deep seam of inspiration and guidance, that can and perhaps needs to be brought back into the city. Nick Papadimitriou (who calls himself a conscious walker and deep topographer), who loves the outer suburbs, is the most mystical of the urban walkers I’ve read. Aboriginal songlines… the Wirrarixa sacred mountain pilgrimages… etc etc (I have a feeling I might have already mentioned Manchan Magan, the Irish writer who’s amazing on the subject of place and language, on a comment on one of your articles before - he has a great anecdote about a Native N American tradition, I think here https://shows.acast.com/blindboy/episodes/manchanmagan )
Really enjoyed your ‘broadcast’. Looking forward to your next one. You mentioned seeing with ‘fresh eyes’ … brings Marcel Proust to mind:
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust
dig it. absolutely. thanks for listening and commenting! should be a fresh broadcast coming along in the next few days, stay tuned.
This made me think of the casting of Yarrow sticks and the I Ching. It's a unique method of Chinese divination. Each toss of the sticks corresponds to one of the 81 verses of the I Ching. Check out Agent Cooper's method of divination on Twin Peaks: https://www.facebook.com/StanAustralia/videos/1353890104668192/ You could do something similar to choose a destination. Also, the way computers generate randomness is artificial, and I sense we're missing a conceptual improvement in that arena. Thank you.
absolutely. i think it will take some experimentation to find the right mix of detail and simplicity for this particular application... i'm somewhat intimidated by the I Ching and its cousins in Western geomancy, because it involves learning a completely different system of references. great for complex divinations about dynamic situations, but maybe overkill for wayfinding on a simple map? not sure.
in any case, i agree completely about using computers to generate randomness: my intuition says that it's either pure randomness—unmoved by any of the spooky quantum effects in the mind/matter interface—or that its spookiness comes from the alien influences of ghosts in the machine, which might not translate well to our world. sub-optimal in either case.
thanks for the helpful suggestions, you can see what i come up with in the next installment.
I don't know what to say about Randonautica except I used to be an Ingress guy and I immediately knew what the location it wanted me to go to on the map was (a person's house behind an elementary school) so it's "what if ingress but there was no game and it's definitely sending you somewhere with a high chance of being uninteresting if you don't live in the city."
with Ingress I was almost guaranteed a cool cemetery or historical marker at the barest minimum.
nice, i hadn't heard of Ingress before.
i'm interested in the whole concept of hyperstition. i've heard of ARGs and RPGs having some spooky real-world effects, and am wondering how those effects can be deliberately invoked. if that's possible—if reality can be altered or augmented with applied metaphysics—it would make the tech-based variety seem a bit thin.
have you played many ARGs?
Yes, I played old ones like The Beast and Year Zero as well as the pseudo ARGs Majestic and Black Watchmen. Ingress itself has always had a significant ARG element, with large real world events that used to be important to it before Pokemon.
Ingress was a major driver for getting to know my area better as well as having many Situationist style random experiences, I stopped playing partly because the interpersonal competition aspects of it got way more serious than was warranted and they more or less stopped doing the big time anomaly events.
It’s delightful to have your voice with me in my office today.
thanks man! hopefully it will get even more delightful as my recording and editing skills improve, and the number of swamp noises coming from my mouth decreases. fingers crossed.
Apologies if this is based on a misunderstanding. But the derive and psychogeography aren’t exactly the same thing. I would say the field of psychogeography contains many possible techniques, of which randomised walking is just one.
I’ve walked about a lot thinking, and I’ve thought a lot about walking. It’s been huge medicine for me.
But feet are certainly excellent for getting out of the head…!
I think the definition of psychogeography is pretty elusive. I guess I approach it as any (intentional? maybve not always) act designed to rebalance my relationship to place. I use ritual, voice, the power of poetry and metaphor to play with language, the placement of artworks and rearrangement of physical objects, and especially the semi-trance of walking, to make space for myself, on many levels, so that I feel free enough to recognise that the meaning of the place comes through its interaction with my own soul and imagination, and so I have the agency to change that at will.
It might sound rather hubristic and simplistic to say I feel like I’m liberating the place, but I am at the very least making movement towards liberating my portion of the collective consciousness of that place, and through that of all place. And there’s a sense that places generally (though not necessarily always) enjoy being talked with and listened to in this way, that even in the most fucked-up toxic ruins, some gentle and powerful spirit of life still resides, that loves being recognised.
Sometimes this is just a question of paying attention to what I can feel is there on deeper levels, as I walk. In the city or in the deepest Amazon, my sense of place is determined by the usual capitalistic reduction, compression, and flattening of the world, founded on the long history of uprooting and dislocation I have inherited, growing up in suburban no-places. Yet my sense of disconnection and yearning also carries the even more ancient imprint of connection and belonging, and the soul-nourishment of that.
So I feel that just by the act of paying attention, to the dynamic flow of sensation, thought, emotion, internally and externally, I reclaim ownership of this place, and begin to restore something of the mythic depth it always had. And there is also something quite erotic about this… just as the delicate, loving quality of attention one pays, as one moves one’s gaze and touch across the body of a lover, can ignite a reciprocal desire for closer connection, so the way we move across the surface of the earth - whether it’s clothed in tarmac or mud - can bring a much closer and very magical relationship. The intention to walk with that quality of attention almost without fail brings a heightened sense of awareness of synchronicity and being in conversation with place. I think there is also a sense of being willing to take responsibility for seeing the pain that is caused, to earth and humanity, by the disconnection, and my participation in it. And in heavily built places, the imagination of what wants to grow up through the cracks - or how much more beautiful it could be if designed on a more human scale, and with more plants and trees - feels like a powerful balm for a sensitive nervous system that isn’t really designed for that kind of environment.
My walks have been anything from a couple of hours to a week. The shorter they are, the more random they tend to be. But it can be great to have specific goals, even if based on stupid puns. The longer ones normally, though not always, have definite aims (eg connecting all the places in Somerset with dragon stories attached, or walking to reinstate energy flows where I perceive they’ve been cut or blocked), and I think of much more in the way of pilgrimage, which is definitely a type of psychogeography.
I think the very urban, literary slant to psychogeography - mostly from London, where I lived most of my life, and Paris, where I lived for 2 years - tends to have ignored these older, more classically spiritual and nature-oriented traditions of walking and relationship to place, which are an incredibly rich deep seam of inspiration and guidance, that can and perhaps needs to be brought back into the city. Nick Papadimitriou (who calls himself a conscious walker and deep topographer), who loves the outer suburbs, is the most mystical of the urban walkers I’ve read. Aboriginal songlines… the Wirrarixa sacred mountain pilgrimages… etc etc (I have a feeling I might have already mentioned Manchan Magan, the Irish writer who’s amazing on the subject of place and language, on a comment on one of your articles before - he has a great anecdote about a Native N American tradition, I think here https://shows.acast.com/blindboy/episodes/manchanmagan )
Totally agree about escapism not working any more... Pretty sure the derivé is a Situationist idea. Guy Debord