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Back in January I was honoured to be invited by Poets for the Planet to run two workshops at their launch event at the Society Of Authors in London. “Poets for the Planet is a community of kindred poets, performers, artists and creative activists raising their voices to engage with climate and ecological emergency through … Continue reading Verse Aid : Poems for the Earth →
--------------------------The video embedded above is the recorded presentation I gave at the 20 Years of Seeing with GPS symposium, hosted online by the Department of Digital Humanities at Kings College London on 12th June 2020. This event marked the ...
For the past seven months or so, I’ve been developing a location-based game as part of my PhD research. Building on early experimentation in the first year of my PhD, as well as The Timekeeper’s Return, the mixed-reality game I created for Canterb...
Following on from the previous post: Saigon Canal Walk - Planning, 22 January 2020.On the morning of Sunday 23rd February, I once more travelled to District 1 of Saigon accompanied by Nina, Yiu Lai Lei to mark the occasion of the Terminalia F...
My new chapbook, Sward {skin of the earth}, published by Sampson Low Ltd, is available for purchase here Sward + post and packing UK £3.50 GBP EU £4.50 GBP Rest of the world £5.00 GBP Sward represents my walks up and down the central reservation of the A240, Kingston Road, from the Tolworth Roundabout to … Continue reading Sward {skin of the earth} →
On 24th November 2019 Dr. Blake Morris initiated his latest marathon walking project entitled '52 Scores'. The envisioned plan is for a walk to take place each week throughout the coming year, spanning 2019/20. Once again this project allowed for other...
a tidal log book: salt, moon, sun, wind ≈ I – Kirkcaldy Harbour To think of the journeys that have started and ended here. Safe harbour: a place of refuge or shelter. Arrivals and departures, crossing borders. Time measured in tidal flows. A … Continue reading →
___________________________________One year ago this autumn, I reached the culmination of an overwhelming three months of creative work and collaboration when I designed, wrote and directed The Timekeeper’s Return, a story-based immersive treasure hunt...
The 4th World Congress of Psychogeography was held on the first weekend in September 2019 at the following venues in West Yorkshire: Huddersfield on Friday 6th, Dewsbury on Saturday 7th and Marsden on Sunday 8th.I have never classed myself as a true ps...
Meaning “sod, turf” developed from the notion of the “skin” of the earth (compare Old Norse grassvörðr, Danish grønsvær “greensward”). Walking the central reservation of the A240 Kingston Road, from Tolworth Roundabout to the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames boundary with the Borough of Epsom and Ewell. The project is called ‘Sward’ after reading … Continue reading Sward →
At the wooden bridge, beside the washing-willow, under frayed dare-devil rope-swing, we small-fry gather; splash-paddle in the sun-filled slipstream, our expectant jam jars perched ready on banks for contents of day-glo nets on bamboo poles, skim-dunked, dipped into laughing sparkle, we seek out elusive piscine lurkers, shoal-darters, minnow-school pretty-carpers, spike-backed silver-bellied sticklebacks, shimmer and shift … Continue reading Hogsmill Tiddlers →
I don’t recall where I learned about David Pinder’s essay “Arts of Urban Exploration”—perhaps in Tina Richardson’s anthology on contemporary British psychogeography, or maybe in Phil Smith’s book Walking’s New Movements. Sometimes a long time elapses between reading about (and printing) an article and actually getting down to reading it. Without knowing the context that […]
I often feel nostalgic, sometimes for a past I’ve never experienced. I am nostalgic for a world where the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere is less than 405 parts per million, for instance. I’m nostalgic for a world when southern Saskatchewan was still grassland, a time before settlers arrived (which would mean that, as […]
In Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, architect Francesco Careri constructs a genealogy of walking that is somewhat different from Phil Smith’s in Walking’s New Movements. It moves from the Dadaists, Surrealists and Situationists, as does Smith, but it ends up with Minimalism and Land Art, rather than performance. My sense that walking as an […]
Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure or the Art of Wandering is one of the central texts in occult and literary psychogeography. It’s also a very strange book. Its digressive narrative is characterized by endless deferral; the narrator (I’m not sure whether this book is a novel, an autobiography, or a pseudo-autobiography) tells one story after […]
This is an important book. Phil Smith makes an argument in favour of a specific kind of walking that is both politically and aesthetically radical, drawing on psychogeography as a resource but subjecting it to a thorough critique. I can’t say that I understand all the nuances of Smith’s argument—that’s what this summary is for, […]
While thinking and writing about Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital this week, I realized that I needed a firmer sense of exactly what psychogeography is. Good thing Merlin Coverley’s little book on the subject was on my shelf. It’s a brief but informative look at a variety of writers–Coverley is primarily concerned with literary manifestations of psychogeography, […]
It is the Urban Tree Festival this weekend – celebrating London’s amazing Urban Forest. While we celebrate our wonderful leafy friends this weekend, I am also commemorating the significant number of trees that are being destroyed at an unprecedented rate at the moment in the Royal Borough of Kingston Upon Thames. This is not something … Continue reading Dead Trees #1 →
This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation, powered by Office.------------------------------ Below is the written version of the paper I presented in the 'Innovative Research Methods' session at the RGS-IBG Postgraduate Forum Midterm Conference ...
osmosis: A gradual, often unconscious process of assimilation or absorption; the spontaneous passage or diffusion of water or other solvents through a semipermeable membrane. ≈ The walker on the city street stops to gaze at the ocean. Tracing a … Continue reading →
