Kevin Newark

Kevin Newark

I first came across this photographer in a lecture. When i first saw these images I thought that they were galaxies or stars or maybe jelly fish. It was amazed when I found out that they were plastic bags. I like these images as they show something so simple and lonely as a plastic bag can look like something as complex as a whole galaxy if you do not know what it is.



"My practice resonates around the themes of space, time, anxiety and displacement. In photographing discarded plastic carrier bags found in the canals of East London, I looked to find some solace for the exiled soul of the plastic bag. After short, useful lives, discarded plastic bags enter into a perpetual state of retirement, their spent utility a metaphor for our own mortal anxiety, whereas the demise of plastic is a distant, uncertain prospect. The moment of disclosure (cognition) is delayed to induce a sense of disorientation allowing the viewer to disassociate themselves from the dogma of optical faith.

Their boundaries of scale can be breached in our allegorical thoughts allowing these photographs to be equally expandable or retractable; the electromagnetic imaging of micro-science and the radio imagery of space are seemingly alike; the Petri dish and the cosmos. Weightlessness engenders a separation of lightly form that permits a new relationship with dimensions in space. Dissociation from the atmosphere allows these tormented, utilitarian forms the serenity of an embalmed, opaque nirvana where they feign organic structures yet remain veiled with a radiant toxicity.

Kevin newark has been commissioned by Pavilion to produce a new body of work for exhibition as part of the Pavilion Commissions Programme 2008. "-    http://www.pavilion.org.uk/gallery.php?gid=15

Sergey Larenkov

Photographer Sergey Larenkov uses computational rephotography (as shown above and explained here by Wired) to overlay extant WWII-era photographs on their corresponding modern settings. The results are both spooky and stunning:http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/ghosts_now_officially_exist_thanks_to_sergey_larenkovs_computational_rephotography_17049.asp

 I thought these images stunning and are a very loving reminder of the people and things that used to be there. These images I feel are very emotional to look at as you are looking at people and things that no longer are with us, surrounded by the new life going about their day as if nothing ever happened. I feel these images bring back the memory of the life lost to bring the life that we have and live today.

Brassai

Brassi

Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (9 September 1899 – 8 July 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to international fame in France in the 20th century. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars. In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940-1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career.- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassa%C3%AF

I like the way that Brassai uses light and shadows through black and white photography to give an impression of the city. The impression that you get from these images is of a place that looks unsafe, the sort of place you wold not go to.

Richard Wentworth

Richard Wentworth

"Wentworth's work is an ongoing conversation with his native habitat, fuelled by daily walks down the Caledonian Road and expeditions into the hinterlands of King's Cross. In photographs, objects and lectures he charts the contours of the inner city, the ebb and flow of urban life, the things that change and the things that never do."-http://www.artangel.org.uk//projects/2002/an_area_of_outstanding_unnatural_beauty/about_the_project/an_area_of_outstanding_unnatural_beauty

I like these images as I like the idea of 'found sculptures' within our everyday environment. These little sculptures that you could quite easily pass on the street and not notice shows a new way of looking at the city or any envorment that you live in.

shirley baker

shirley Baker

Shirley Baker was born in Salford and produced documentary photographs depicting the lives of people in the local area throughout the 1960s and 70s. They showed Salford as how it was, being a very happy go lucky place despite the run down buildings and the lack of money within Salford when she was taking these images.And the social changes within the middle class.

I love this below image as it show as child wearing adults shoes pushing a pram which you also expect to see an adult with. The image demonstrates the child playing in Salford/Manchester, I found this image shows a typical child playing at being an adult.

 

Psychogeograpy info

"Psychogeography is a term coinedf by a bunch of avant-garde European upstarts known as the situationists in the 1950's and 60's to refer to the impact that one's surroundings has upin one's emotions and pscyhe. the situationists were rebelling against the way urban planning had dumbed-down individuals' connection to their surroundings by locking residents into prescribed patterns of movment. through setting off on derives, literally walking "drifts" about the urban landscape, the Situationists sought to reconnect individual with enviroment"

Who and what are the Situationists International?
The Situationist International formed as an underground group out of a meeting of three small artistic groups (the Letterist International, Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association) in a bar in Cosio d'Arroscia, Italy, in 1957. It was there that Guy Debord emerged as the dominant personality of the group, with the suggestion that it should be named ‘Situationist International.’

From 1957 to 1962, the group formulated a number of significant concepts (unitary urbanism, dérive, détournement, and décomposition). It attracted many prominent artists and theorists into its ranks, even though, as former members T.J. Clark and Donald Nicholson-Smith observe, the Situationist International “never ‘recruited’ members”. [1] According to many accounts, the membership of the group never exceeded more than twenty. Nevertheless, the group managed during this period to attract members from Algeria, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Sweden, and the US, [2] thus attaining international status. It is possible to attribute its ‘rotating’ membership to the group’s “policy of aiming for constant agreement on key matters,” [3] which often resulted in ad hominem attacks among the members and consequent expulsions from the group. Nevertheless, during this period the situationists were active in theoretical as well as artistic work, often capturing public attention with modes of action aiming to scandalize and provoke the public, as well as the orthodox Left.

From 1962 to 1966 the life of the group was characterized by splits and more internal disagreements. In 1962, a rival Second Situationist International was established. As Peter Wollen argues, the breakup “can be characterized as a split between ‘artists’ and ‘political theorists’ (or ‘revolutionaries’)”, based around Debord’s insistence “that art could not be recognized as a separate activity, with its own legitimate specificity, but must be dissolved into a unitary revolutionary practice.” [4] The split effectively put an end to the earlier artistic endeavors of the group.

It is not until 1967, however, that the group regained a public presence. That year two major texts outlining Situationist theory were published: Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. Furthermore, various creative actions committed by members of the group won the Situationist International media attention. Perhaps the greatest year for the group was 1968 when the uprisings that shook Paris were characterized by forms of creative resistance which “were far more in tune with the SI than with ‘Vietnam Committees’ and calls for university reform.” [5] As Peter Wollen notes, “their contribution to the revolutionary uprising was remembered mainly through the diffusion and spontaneous expression of situationist ideas and slogans, in graffiti and in posters… as well as in serried assaults on the routines of everyday life” [6]. The situationists were active participants in the events, acting as ‘mentors’ of revolution who promoted workers’ councils without attempting to gain any power in them. In 1969, the group published the last issue of its journal L’Internationale Situationniste and held its last conference in 1970 in Wolsfield and Trier, East Germany. More internal disagreements, expulsions and splits followed, with the group dissolving in 1972. Its total membership never rose above 70. - http://affinityproject.org/groups/situationist.html

Who is Guy Debord and what role did he play in psychogeography:
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
Guy Debord emerged as the most important figure: he had been involved in the Lettrist International, and had made several films, including _Hurlements en faveur de Sade_ (1952). Inspired by the libertarian journal _Socialisme on Barbarie_, the Situationists rediscovered the history of the anarchist movement, particularly during the period of the First International, and drew inspiration from Spain, Kronstadt, and the Makhnovists-http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Obituary/debord.html
who is Iain Sinclair and what makes him a Pschogeographer?
Iain Sinclair made a documentary and a book called Orbital, where he and friends walk around a motorway that rings London called the M25. Like Ballard, he is interested in no-man's land (like you get around motorways) and how humans and nature actually fill that space that isn't meant to be filled with anything.

"Listeners of Radio 4's Today programme recently voted London's M25 the worst of the "seven horrors of Britain" in a poll. One imagines that this refers to their experience of it as drivers; but perhaps if they'd done what the novelist, poet and "psychogeographer" Iain Sinclair did and walked around the M25, they'd have thought differently. For this was his unique project - to walk anti-clockwise around the motorway and the areas that it enclosed from Waltham Abbey, exploring the huge tranches of unknown territory that lay bounded by the M25 outside of the city centre. And in doing so, comprehending the scale of the invasion of commerce in these zones and witnessing, as it were, an invisible landscape disappear.
Sinclair describes the journey - taken in the millennial year - in his new book London Orbital. Most people would of course regard the idea of circumnavigating the M25 as a mad one, but was it really that dispiriting? "Not at all. The experience of doing it was incredibly exhilarating," says Sinclair. "You didn't know what you were going to find. Getting up really early in this weird landscape. You might as well have been in some totally remote country."- i bleev that this hliglted section is what makes Iain Sinclaire a psychogeographer, as he went out to creat work in the urban envorment not knwing what he was going to find or photograph.

J G Ballard and his book 'Miracles of Life'
'Miracles of Life' opens and closes in Shanghai, the city where J.G.Ballard was born, and where he spent the most of the Second World War interned with his family in a Japanese concentration camp. In the intervening chapters Ballard creates a memoir that is both an enthralling narrative and a detailed examination of the events which would profoundly influence his work. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He explores his subsequent involvement in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, and the adjustments to life following the premature death of his wife. In prose displaying his characteristic precision and eye for detail, Ballard recounts the experiences which would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing an striking social analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. 'Miracles of Life' is an utterly captivating account of an extraordinary writer's extraordinary life.

Who is Will self?

Will Self: On ‘Psychogeography’ and the Places That Choose You

Travel Interviews: The novelist and journalist talks to Frank Bures about his new book, long-distance walking and our search for the places that embrace us

12.17.07 | 4:41 PM ET

Photo by Michael Wildsmith.

"A few years ago, acclaimed British novelist and journalist Will Self started walking. Not just wandering around, but really walking. He began after he quit using drugs, after he was famously kicked off British Prime Minister John Major’s plane in 1997 for allegedly snorting heroin in the bathroom. After that, Self began walking 10 and 20 and even 100 miles at a stretch. As a student of psychogeography, he found a kind of fulfillment in these adventures that he could not find traveling in planes, trains or automobiles. It had something to do with the way the physical world and the mind intersect to create experience, and it’s the subject of his new book, Psychogeography, a collection of his essays about his walks around the world.
In it, Self writes that people today are “decoupled from physically geography.” He observes that walking “blows back the years, especially in urban contexts. The solitary walker is, himself, an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveler.” He told the New York Times on his 26-mile walk from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Manhattan that, “People don’t know where they are anymore. In the post-industrial age, this is the only form of real exploration left. Anyone can go and see the Ituri pygmy, but how many people have walked all the way from the airport to the city?”
The book is one of the most original travel tomes in years. Its essays, which originally appeared in the Independent, are illustrated by none other than Ralph Steadman. It hits bookstores at a time when many people seem to be craving a more immediate experience of the world and are ready to explore experimental travel. Frank Bures asked Self all about it.
World Hum: For the uninitiated, what exactly is psychogeography?
Will Self: The term derives from the French Situationists, a post-Marxian groupuscule in 1950s Paris. Their leader, Guy Debord, coined it. For him, what he fervently hoped was that “late capitalist” society was a kind of illusion, or spectacle, in which city dwellers were thrust hither and thither by commercial imperatives—work, consume, die—and so unable to experience the reality of their environment. His solution was the derive, or drift, really a resurrection of the time-honoured tradition of the Parisian flaneur, in which the solitary walker ambles through the metropolis, experiencing its richness and diversity when freed from the need to use it. Since the Situationists—whose main derive was to pick up a few bottles of cheap red wine, get drunk on them, totter through Paris to the Ile de la Citee in the Seine and then sleep it off—psychogeography has mutated in many ways, but most of us who practice it—and it is a practice, not a field per se—take the view that by walking you can decouple yourself from the human geography that so defines contemporary urbanity.
How did you get interested in it?
My epiphany came in 1988, when one day I found myself standing in Central London with a day to kill. I realised—from out of the blue—that I had never seen the mouth of the Thames River that flows through London, even though I had been born in the city and lived there all my life. Not only that, I had never even seen a representation of it. It struck me, that if you were to encounter a peasant 30 miles from the mouth of the Amazon, and ask him what it was like at the river mouth, and he was to say that he had never seen it, you would think him a very benighted peasant. Yet that peasant was me. I immediately got in my car and drove to the mouth of the Thames. Needless to say it was nothing like I imagined. But as an indication of how strongly this human-defined geography still holds sway, I recently asked a large London audience at one of my readings how many of them had seen the Thames’s mouth, and only a handful raised their hands.
What got you started as a long distance walker?
My father was a big walker. My way of being with him was to walk. We did long walks—hikes, really—when I was a child. The impulse to walk went underground for a long while—walking doesn’t really mix well with drug addiction, unless you’re going to score—but then re-surfaced eight years ago when I cleaned up. Since then it’s been burgeoning and burgeoning.
You write that tourism is a search for a place that will embrace you. Is that partly what you’re doing with your walks?
No, not really. I’m an unrepentant Londoner, and the places that have chosen me (because I think it’s that way round: places choose you, rather than vice versa), have already done so. I think you only have room for two or three serious affairs of place in a lifetime, just as you only have emotional space for two or three serious love affairs.
Apart from your walk from JFK to New York, what have been your most memorable walks?
One that springs to mind is at the mouth of the Thames. On the north bank of the river there is a large, 10,000-acre island called Foulness, which has been a British army firing range since the First World War. It’s off limits except to those going on shore from boats. You can then walk across this eerie land that time has passed by and out on to the Thames estuarial mud, this on a Medieval causeway called the Broomway, because it’s made up of bundles of broom buried in the mud. I walked with a handful of companions over the mud for about six miles upriver, before tending back to the shore—an utterly bizarre, dislocatory and quite beautiful experience.
What separates a psychogeographic act from a stunt, or a gimmick? Is it a difference in intent, or in outcome?
I’m too old for gimmicks or stunts. The kind of psychogeography I practice really works—for me. It inspires my prose, it soothes my soul. It makes it possible for me to deal with the hideousness of the globalized man-machine matrix.
In such a hypermediated world, what room is there for an idea like psychogeography?
Like writing—which is low start-up, all you need is a pen and a piece of paper—psychogeography is bare-bones. You just get out there and experience. It doesn’t require the hypermediated world, it is more akin to a meditational practice.
Photo of Will Self by Michael Wildsmith."
http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-interviews/will_self_on_psychogeography_and_the_places_that_choose_you_20071217/

What is Flaneur
"The term flâneur comes from the French masculine noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", "loafer"—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means "to stroll". Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning of flâneur—that of "a person who walks the city in order to experience it". Because of the term's usage and theorization by Baudelaire and numerous thinkers in economic, cultural, literary and historical fields, the idea of the flâneur has accumulated significant meaning as a referent for understanding urban phenomena and modernity. In French Canada flâner is rarely used to describe strolling and often has a negative connotation as the term's most common usage refers to loitering.
Flâneur is not limited to someone committing the physical act of peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a "complete philosophical way of living and thinking", and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb's essay on "why I walk" in the second edition of The Black Swan (2010).^[1] Louis Menand in seeking to describe T.S. Eliot's relationship to English literary society and his role in the formation of modernism describes Eliot as a flaneur (The New Yorker,September 19, 2011, pp. 81–89?)"
"
The flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography. The street photographer is seen as one modern extension of the urban observer described by nineteenth century journalist Victor Fournel before the advent of the hand-held camera:

This man is a roving and impassioned daguerreotype that preserves the least traces, and on which are reproduced, with their changing reflections, the course of things, the movement of the city, the multiple physiognomy of the public spirit, the confessions, antipathies, and admirations of the crowd. ("Ce qu'on voit dans les rues de Paris", What one sees on the streets of Paris)

The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur

 Richard Wentworth

 The Guardian, Thursday 19 September 2002 18.27 BST

Article history

Office workers are on the roof garden of their block thinking they are above the city, but they don't know that I'm watching them through a periscope that is mounted on the roof of a plumbing supplies centre round the side of King's Cross rail station. Swivel the periscope and you see Victorian rooftops in the afternoon sun, a Union flag flying. This view is framed in such a way that you don't see cars, or McDonald's, or any of the detritus of today's King's Cross - it might be London on the day Mafeking was relieved. Turn the periscope to the right and you are even more dislocated in time, as the Dracula's castle of St Pancras blots out the sky.
It sometimes seems that Artangel, the site-specific art-enabling outfit behind this installation, is mustering an army of artists to explore London's exotic corners: Whiteread's Bow, Sinclair's Spitalfields. Richard Wentworth's mapping of the King's Cross area is another excavation of the capital's psychogeography. So you come to this plumbing supplies warehouse not bored exactly, but with a slightly comfortable expectation of metropolitan magic realism.
But King's Cross resists cosiness. Wentworth insists it is "an area of outstanding unnatural beauty". It's got something, all right. That wooden tower like a maimed windmill makes you think for a second that you are in Montmartre. The space in front of the station has a seaside feel.
Wentworth offers tentative ways of knowing this place. There are ping-pong tables printed with fragments of the A-Z street map, video monitors showing The Ladykillers, and maps from different eras - frozen moments of London, recognisable yet alien configurations of the city. In the 18th century it was all fields around here. A Victorian map minutely discriminates between the unrespectable, semi-respectable and respectable, house by house.
Wentworth's project is in a tradition of modern art as urban exploration. It successfully distils what it is like to walk around London. The inconclusive arrangement of tables, TV monitors and periscope platform creates a pleasurable disorientation. When you look through the periscope, the rooftops, railways and canals don't resolve themselves into a pattern; London seems thrown together carelessly.
Among the maps is a comparison of the street plans of London, Paris and New York. Next to Haussmann's boulevards and Manhattan's grid, London looks like noodles spilled on the pavement. Which is just the sort of thing you are likely to tread in if you get too dreamy around King's Cross.
· Until November 17. Talks and walks start September 25. Details: 020-7713 1400.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/sep/19/artsfeatures1

Psychogeography

Psychogeography

"Increasingly this term is used to illustrate a bewildering

array of ideas from ley lines and the occult, to urban walking and political

radicalism. But where does it come from and what exactly does it mean?

Psychogeography is the point where psychology and geography meet in

assessing the emotional and behavioural impact of urban space. The relationship

between a city and its inhabitants is measured in two ways - firstly through an

imaginative and literary response, secondly on foot through walking the city. PG

creates a tradition of the writer as walker and has both a literary and a political

component."-http://www.pocketessentials.co.uk/ai_pdf/1904048617.pdf


I liked this symbol deffonishion which i found

psychogeography

The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals-http://semaphore.blogs.com/semaphore/2008/02/history-of-unit.html

i found this aritcal below to be very helpful in my undestanding in phsychogeography.

http://semaphore.blogs.com/semaphore/2008/02/history-of-unit.html

lecture notes for a conference in Riga Art+Communication Festival, May 2003

The topic of our panel discussion this afternoon is about " local media, maps and psychogeography". I think it's necessarry to come back first to a brief history of psychogeography, Unitary Urbanism and the Situationnist International at the turn of the sixties. The end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties were a period of acceleration in urbanism of European and world cities. In Paris, this period is the explosion of what politicians and urban planners called " new cities ". Paris was exploding outside its " ring road" and cities such as Sarcelles were created with totally new urban models. There was a strong feeling in that time that the cities were losing their human dimensions. I will first try to show how this acceleration of modernisation of urban society had an influence on the tactics of the SI as an avant-garde concerned with the uniformisation of society through urbanism, mass media, and the dichotomy of work and leisure. I will especially focus on Unitary Urbanism and 4 years of intense activities (58-61) that finally culminate by totally abandonning these theories. We will then discuss actual initiatives that use tactical medias in the streets and how this is link to the new rise of psychogeography and the necessity of reclaiming the streets.

The Situationnist International emerged in 1957 from the Lettrist International, the Imaginary Bauhaus and the London Psychogeographical Comittee, with new fields of interests and a revolutionnary program that was focusing on the " suppresion and realisation of art in life " and what they called the "construction of situations ". The preliminary idea for many of their members, as many avant-gardes tried to, was to make creativity appear again in the social sphere.

Constructed Situation, Psychogeography and Unitary Urbanism were the key concepts at the foundation of the Situationist International. In 1958, the first issue of the Situationist International bulletin directed by Debord gives these definitions :

• constructed situation

A moment of life concretely and deliberately constructed by the collective organization of a unitary ambiance and a game of events.

• psychogeography

The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.

• unitary urbanism

The theory of the combined use of arts and techniques as means contributing to the construction of a unified milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior.

These key concepts were developed for few years by founding members such as Jorn or Debord and relayed in Potlatch, the bulletin of the French section of the Lettrist International. I read you a quote of Asger Jorn's text " Form and Image " published in 1954 in Potlatch 15.

"Architecture is always the ultimate realisation of a mental and artistic evolution; it is the materialisation of an economic level/status. Architecture is the pinnacle of realisation for all artistic production because architecture signifies the construction of an atmosphere and fixes a way of living."

Another founding text was The Formulary for a New Urbanism, by Gilles Ivain alias Ivan Chtcheglov, written in 1953 and published in 1958, in the first issue of the Situationist International bulletin.
" The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action. "

" We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space.... "

Most of the persons who took part in the foundation of the SI were already excluded when the first central bulletin was published. Olmo, Verrone and Simondo were expelled over a row around a text on Experimental Music which Debord had accused of 'right-wing thought'. Rumney who created the Psychogeographic Comittee of London at the launch of the SI was expelled a bit later for failing to complete his psychogeographical report of Venice on time. Ironically he had mailed his essay off two days before being notified of his expulsion from Paris.

In december 1958, Constant and Debord wrote the Amsterdam Declaration to prepare the third conference of the SI and published it in the second issue. This issue also contain the famous " theory of the dérive ". I read you few extracts of the manifesto concerning Unitary Urbanism.

"4. The SI's minimum programme is the development of complete decors, which must extend to a unitary urbanism, and research into new modes of behavior in relation to these decors.
6. The solution to problems of housing, traffic, and recreation can only be envisaged in relation to social, psychological and artistic perspectives that are combined in one synthetic hypothesis at the level of daily life.
9. All means are usuable, on condition that they serve in a unitary action. The coordination of artistic and scientific means must lead to their total fusion."

The German group Spur, which Jorn met in 1958, joined the SI and became its German section. Together with ex-COBRA Constant, the group developed the concepts of play and pleasure, central to the SI program.
Under Constant and mainly with the participation of the Dutch section, the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism was created and based in Amsterdam. It was composed of a team of artists, architects and sociologists, and carried out studies towards the construction of unitary ambiances.

The situationists' idea of psychogeography (and this was also related to Constant's experiments since 1953) was that in the city one could create new situations by, for example, linking up parts of the city, neighborhoods that were separated spatially. It was done first in Amsterdam, using walkie-talkies. There was one group that went to one part of the city and could communicate with people in another area.
In the third issue of the bulletin published in december 1959, the text " Unitary Urbanism at the end of the fifties " confirmed that Unitary Urbanism was one of the central concerns of the SI and that Unitary Urbanism was not a doctrine of urbanism but a critique of urbanism.

" Unitary Urbanism is opposed to the temporal fixation of cities. It leads instead to the advocacy of a permanent transformation, an accelerated movement of the abandonment and reconstruction of the city in temporal and at times spatial terms. " Unitary Urbanism is opposed to the fixation of people at certain points of a city as well. "

The Issue also report the 3rd Conference of the SI that took place in Munich. Some divergence emerged between Debord and Constant over Unitary Urbanism. Debord insisted on Unitary Urbanism as being a mere instrument, and envisaged a revolutionary creativity separated from existing culture. Constant insisted on the central role of Unitary Urbanism as an alternative means of a liberated creation and did not see the pre-conditions for a social revolution. Constant went even further in the text " another town for another life " describing utopian cities and architecture. A point that would create separation in the SI objectives.

One year after the third conference, the problem on Unitary Urbanism was not resolved. Constant resigned and the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism moved to Brussels under the direction of Attila Kotányi. In the texts " Gangland and philosophy " published in 1960 in issue 4, Attila Konatyi critiques some aspects of Unitary Urbanism and definitions of Debord as well in his text Construction of Situations He quotes Debord contradiction "Integral art, which has been talked about so much, can be realized only at the level of urbanism" In his opinion, that was exactly where the limit lay in the SI at that time.

"Gangland," in Chicago gangster slang, means the domain of crime, of rackets.

Kotanyi suggests to reexamine common language and propaganda :

" We should develop a little glossary of detourned words. I propose that "neighborhood" should often be read gangland. Similarly, social organization = protection. Society = racket. Culture = conditioning. Leisure activity = protected crime. Education = premeditation.

The systematic falsification of basic information (by the idealist conception of space, for example, of which the most glaring expression is conventional cartography) is one of the basic reinforcements of the big lie that the racketeering interests impose on the whole gangland of social space.

If we were allowed to monitor, by means of an exhaustive survey, the entire social life of some specific urban sector during a short period of time, we could obtain a precise cross-sectional representation of the daily bombardment of news and information that is dropped on present-day urban populations. "

After 1960 there was the great movement in urbanization. The Situationists abandoned the theory of Unitary Urbanism, since Unitary Urbanism only had a precise meaning for historic cities, like Amsterdam. But from the moment that the historic city exploded into peripheries, suburbs -- like what happened in Paris, and in all sorts of places, Los Angeles, Chicago, wild extensions of the city -- the theory of Unitary Urbanism lost any meaning. Guy Debord said that urbanism was becoming an ideology and that people were becoming too much fascinated by it. Between the idea of elaborating an urbanism and the thesis that all urbanism is an ideology is a profound modification. Even the derive, the derive experiments were little by little abandoned around then, too.


The progressive radicalisation of the French section was gradually dividing the group. The situation seemed to have got even worse with Jorn's resignation . He resigned on April 1961, his position in the group having become more and more embarrassing following his huge success in the commercial art world.


In issue 6, the theoretical problem on urbanism became more and more important, even though Spur magazine was publishing a special issue on Unitary Urbanism at the same time. Raoul Vaneigem who had recently entered the SI, was part of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism with Konatyi. They signed a " basic program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism " proclaiming the nullity of Urbanism and the nullity of the Spectacle. The development of the urban milieu was the capitalist domestication of space.
" Modern capitalism, which organizes the reduction of all social life to a spectacle, is incapable of presenting any spectacle other than that of our own alienation. Its urbanistic dream is its masterpiece. "

Vaneigem played two tactical roles - I would say to finish off Unitary Urbanism - one inside the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism and one with the danish Martin for the shift away from the Unitary Urbanist art practice.
He writes in the same issue of the bulletin " comments against urbanism " arguing for example that :

" Urbanism and information are linked in capitalist and anti-capitalist societies, they organise the silence. "

At the opening of the 5th Conference held in Goteborg (Sweden) at the end of August 1961, Vaneigem made this declaration: "there is no such thing as situationism or a situationist work of art...such a prospective doesn't mean anything if not directly linked to revolutionary practice, to the will to change the use of life. [...] Our position is that of combatants between two worlds -one that we don't acknowledge, the other that does not yet exist."

The position of the German 'Spur' group (supported by most of the Scandinavians) on revolution and art were quite different from Vaneigem & friends. As it had already emerged from the previous Conference, the group didn't believe the workers were dissatisfied enough to hold any revolutionary potential. It also had different opinions on the realisation and suppression of art envisaged by Debord. The Conference adopted a resolution by Kotányi proposing to call all the artistic creations by members of the SI as anti-situationist, but ended without any of these controversies being resolved. Six months later the whole 'Spur' group was expelled by the Central Commitee. In March 1962, the Scandinavian section broke away from the SI and announced the formation of a 2nd Situationist International around Nash (Jorn's younger brother).

This is in a way the end of Unitary Urbanism and Psychogeography in the SI. With the attack of Vaneigem and Martin against the " nashists " and the rupture with the founding theories on urbanism and psychogeography.

The theory of situations was itself abandoned, little by little. And the journal itself became a political organ. They also began to insult everyone. Jorn was the only ex-situationist who was not attacked or denigrated by Debord.

In 1963 in a show in Denmark, Martin presented a piece called " destruction of the RSG 6 ", in parallel to a protest against an A-bomb shelter in UK. In the exhibition, Martin showed thermonuclear maps depicting Europe 4 and a half hours after the beginning of thermonuclear war. This makes me think of Bureau D'Etudes' tactics. A few months after this, Kotanyi was excluded for asking for a fondamental reorientation of the theory. This reorientation was rejected with accusations of mysticism.

So, to sum things up, this is the time to give my opinion. I think the breaking point in the SI in 1961 and the radicalisation of the French group was around the perception that the first aims of psychogeography were shifting from a tool for social movements to a series of psychogeographical " games ". And this is also quite clearly present in the contemporary technological use of GPS, cell phones, wireless networks that are a bit limited to " games " instead of using these technologies for social actions.  
I found this artical useful but long, and I highlighted words and points I found of particular interest.

Photography Research Eugene Atget

Eugene Atget

Eugene Atget was a French photographer who was noticed for his work documenting and recording Paris's landscape before it was changed, with many of his images including not just the city itself but shop fronts. I chose to look at this photographer relating to my new project as he looks at the city which encapsulates French culture and architecture of the time when she was taking these images.

"Atget assigned himself an alluring and provoking subject, the city of Paris, the dream city of thousands of struggling, aspiring, gifted and would-be poets, painters, composers. Paris, the city of art and bridges over the Seine, of boulevards and cafes, of narrow, crooked streets and gray plane trees in the beautiful Luxembourg gardens.

To Atget, Paris was not a dream but an actuality a fact of hard material expressions, of strange contrasts and contradictions. It was weathered, eroded facades of mansion and humble dwelling; ornate construction of wrought iron grilles and balconies; fantasy of shop signs and carousels; visible magic of rich grapes, cherries, cauliflower’s, lobsters, heaped in luxuriance in Les Halles; formal elegance of Versailles and the Trianon; rustic primitiveness of a plow lying in furrows outside the fortifications; outmoded forms of carriage and horse-drawn cabriolet; excitement of an eclipse seen by crowds in the Place de l’Opera; a thousand and yet another thousand images of the miracle of daily reality.

In recreating Paris for us and for all time, Atget gave it permanent reality by utilizing photography in its own right. He did not veer toward excessive concern with technique nor toward the imitation of painting but steered a straight course, making the medium speak for itself in a superb rendering of materials, textures, surfaces, details. Within the limits of his equipment, he recorded all phases of the life about him: people, street activity, the city proper."
http://www.photo-seminars.com/Fame/eugene.htm