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From Hill to Sea: Dispatches from the Fife Psychogeographical Collective, 2010 – 2014

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Edinburgh

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Firth of Forth

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Kirkcaldy

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Situationist International

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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

Merlin Coverley
Curated news

The Persistence of Guy DeBord, That Bastard – Shepherd Express

As machines increasingly calculate the “correct” way forward by statistical consensus, our psychic salvation may finally lie in learning how to go the wrong way—deliberately. Source: The Persistence of Guy DeBord, That Bastard – Shepherd Express

Fife: almost an island. Betwixt and between the cities of Edinburgh and Dundee; an ancient Pictish Kingdom, bounded by the Firths of Forth and Tay. Where a Brutalist New Town is built on a 4,000 year old henge and 18 feet menhirs brood on a ladies golf course, under the shadow of Largo Law.

Ideas crackle, tussle and fizz over this land-formed Scottie dogs head. Kirkcaldy’s famous son Adam Smith tossed a large brick into the pool of economic theory with The Wealth of Nations written on a site now housing Greggs the Bakers.

Take a walk with the ghosts through Little Moscow where Lawrence Storione founded the Anarchist Communist League in Cowdenbeath and West Fife elected Willie Gallacher as the first Communist MP in 1935. In Lumphinnans you will find Gagarin Way, a street tagged in honour of the Soviet cosmonaut.

In Methil and East Wemyss, streets and landscapes which inspired painter William Gear, member of CoBrA, the post-war avant-garde movement that fed into the Situationist International. In Rosyth, stumble across industrial relics in unlikely places.

Woven throughout is the presence and wonder of non-human worlds. From archipelagos of imaginary islands to the forms and colours of the wild wood.

From Hill to Sea. Wandering beyond the paths and roads through forest, edgeland, town and city. An expansive psychogeography: the influence of the geographical environment on the human mind in both urban and non-urban contexts. Thin places, worlds within worlds, voids, wild woods and coffin tracks. At the coast, shifting thresholds of sea and sky; land and tidal flows. Walking as being-in-the-world, in the flux and flow of the present moment. Old Heraclitus was right, you never step in the same burn or river twice.

Mapping the interstices of past, present and possible. Assorted rag-pickings collected along the way. Soundtracks, real and imaginary, from Morton Feldman to The Fall.. In Stygian depths, body molecules are rearranged by the shamanic noise rituals of Keiji Haino. On our back, in the dark,in a Paris church, immersed in the Occam Ocean sound world of Éliane Radigue.

Connecting the local to the global and the global to the local: burn, stream, river, estuary, ocean. It’s all just a matter of scale. No landscape is ever neutral.


pedestrian acts

By de Certeau: In “Walking in the City”, de Certeau conceives pedestrianism as a practice that is performed in the public space, whose architecture and behavioural habits substantially determine the way we walk. For de Certeau, the spatial order “organises an ensemble of possibilities (e.g. by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g. by a wall that prevents one from going further)” and the walker “actualises some of these possibilities” by performing within its rules and limitations. “In that way,” says de Certeau, “he makes them exist as well as emerge.” Thus, pedestrians, as they walk conforming to the possibilities that are brought about by the spatial order of the city, constantly repeat and re-produce that spatial order, in a way ensuring its continuity. But, a pedestrian could also invent other possibilities. According to de Certeau, “the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements.” Hence, the pedestrians could, to a certain extent, elude the discipline of the spatial order of the city. Instead of repeating and re-producing the possibilities that are allowed, they can deviate, digress, drift away, depart, contravene, disrupt, subvert, or resist them. These acts, as he calls them, are pedestrian acts.

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