“Pseudo Random Walks” is an ongoing experiment in psycho-geographic urbanism – maps of “non-places” made while winding through the interstices of the city on foot with aesthetic intention. The work is motivated by a deep longing to connect, “unmediated”, to the built environment, letting the city’s discarded fragments catch my eye under a spell of reverie and micro-wanderlust.
After countless hours of steady contemplation, one of my hopes for this project is to develop an opensource community driven psychogeography and dérive app, combining augmented reality features and open layers. The app will not use data for nefarious capitalist purposes and will anonymize the identities of contributors. Think of it like a dating app for “chance” geographical encounters with experiences, ephemeral debris, spaces, and architecture. It will both welcome and embrace meta-data while shunning its typical use for marketing and advertisements. Instead, it will advertise free raw experiences in exchange, optionally, for ones own.
Initially, I had no intention and let the walks take me without a plan. I found my thoughts scoping out the process, seeking supporting material in literature. I connected to Debord’s essay on dérive, Hakim Bey’s thoughts on temporary autonomous zones and immediatism, while finding comfort in the walks but also through the process of collecting, organizing, mapping the detritus I dragged back. I wondered about the origins of mysterious objects, the histories of old objects, the frequencies of common objects. Materials became a constant meditation.
I have many thoughts about architecture, geography, the flow of the city, my need to collect beautiful garbage for the work – how all of these influences mediate my connection to the urban environment in different ways. Acknowledging that we live in an era of maximal mediation, I hope to find ways to pivot off of that, merging the familiar methods we typically engage, such as through application interfaces, while incorporating grit and methodologies that defy procedural rhetoric (the typical binary resolutions found in gamification).
This is only the beginning. I have been very busy with my studies in computer science lately, but my walks will continue, and I want to systematize their study. Moving forward I would like to begin collecting data on my walks, particularly where the different pieces I collect were obtained. I would like to map the paths I take and study the objects I collect. Ideally building my own app to this end, one that incorporates open layers and allows me to privately maintain a database for studying my works and walks. This would ultimately be used to accompany an exhibit of these collages, with the psychogeography on display adjacent to the urban geography and anarcho-GIS I create.
