01 · THE VOICE
Narrator
The narrator offers fragments from architecture, plaques, weather, memory, and nearby histories. The trace, annotated.
AI PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC DRIFT INSTRUMENT
DÉRIVE
You know every shortcut. You know nothing about your city.
NO DESTINATION · NO ARRIVAL TIME · ON PURPOSE
Walk without a route. Capture fragments on your phone; later, print the private trace as a counter-map, poster or foldable zine from the local archive.
PHONE FIELD TRACE
SOURCE MATERIAL
Fragments stay local until you decide what leaves the archive.
PRINT PROOF
A4 foldzine, A3 work proof, A2 poster map.
FIVE INKS · LOCAL TRACE · NO ROUTESCROLL TO BEGIN
01THE PROBLEM/ §1
You live inside a navigation app.
It tells you where you are. It tells you where to go. It has, very quietly, told you that the only good walk is the shortest one.
·Routing engines optimise for arrival. A dérive refuses the shortest line and follows attention. One is a tool; the other is a posture. The city you live in is the same city; the relationship is different.
A line of least resistance. The city, refused.
A line of attention. Fragments along the way.
02THE THEORY/ §2
In a dérive, one drops the usual motives.
·The word comes from Paris, 1956. Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Ivan Chtcheglov: the Internationale Situationniste. They were the first to argue that the city was being rebuilt to refuse attention, and that the cure was a deliberate, undirected walk.
·To dérive is to drop the usual motives, work, leisure, errand, and let the terrain pull you. Streets become arguments. A staircase becomes a question. The cinema you walk past every morning becomes a place that asks where you have been.
“In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”
Guy Debord · Théorie de la dérive · Internationale Situationniste N°2, 1958
03THE INSTRUMENT/ §3 · four ways of noticing
Four faculties, one trace.
The walk is a single line. Four ways of reading it.
02 · THE MAP
Counter-map
Your emotions, not streets, are the cartographic unit. Wonder, calm, melancholy, defiance: twelve named affects drawn into the territory. The trace, as counter-cartography.
03 · THE CAPTURE
Fragments
Photos, field recordings, handwritten notes, kept with the private walk, close to where they were felt. The trace, with fragments.
04 · THE SOUND
Soundscape
Field recordings become a quiet score: not a soundtrack pasted on top, but the walk heard back through pace, pause, and texture. The trace, as a listening surface.
04THE ARTEFACT/ §4 · what you carry back
A walk you can hold.
Four things a drift may leave behind. Not a score; a residue.
01 · COUNTER-MAP
Your emotions, as cartography.
Twelve hues, twelve named affects. The cartographer is the body. Not a route; a relationship.
02 · FRAGMENTS
Photos, audio, notes on coordinates.
A photo, a short recording, a sentence you typed. Kept with the private walk unless you choose to publish. You can return.
03 · SOUNDSCAPE
The city, time-stretched into score.
An opted-in local recording, granulated and time-stretched in the engine, composed against the rhythm of the walk. The mic gate is visible; the file stays local until you share. The walk you made; the song the walk made.
04 · RISO ZINE
A foldable printed object.
Designed as an A2 single-sheet, two-pass risograph, hand-folded in a small edition. Each drift can become one printed object.
05LINEAGE & METHOD/ §5 · whose company we keep
A long line of people who refused the optimised route.
Lineage · our forebears
Guy DebordPARIS · 1955Janet CardiffCANADA · 1991—Blast TheoryUK · 1991—Christian NoldUK · BIO-MAPPING · 2004Duncan SpeakmanUK · SUBTLEMOBS · 2010CircumstanceUK · WALK WITH ME · 2012Craig ModJAPAN · TŌKAIDŌ · 2019
Method · consented corpus
The research corpus is being assembled. Published figures, the methodology DOI, and the open dataset link will appear here only after consented, aggregate release.
06BEFORE YOU BEGIN/ §6 · five rules
The ritual.
A walk that wants nothing from you, except your attention. Five rules. None of them are clever.
- Step outside with no destination.
- Take the next turn that surprises you.
- Stop when you want. Stay as long as you want.
- The phone goes in your pocket after the first minute.
- The walk ends when you decide.
“The dérive entails playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects.”
Guy Debord · 1958
07BEGIN/ §7 · the threshold returns
Your city has been waiting for you to pay attention.Every walk can become a printed thing.
The phone is the instrument; you are the walker.The larger screen is the press table.