Drawing / Notation

A drawing of a city as a series of Situations (Situationists)

I created a Situationists’ map of Sydney using a printed out aerial view of the city. I then used a scalpel to cut out sections of the city which featured iconic landmarks and buildings as well as public spaces where city-dwellers can socialise. These pieces of the city were assembled onto the page in no particular order and reconnected using bold, red arrows of different sizes and weights.

Guy Debord states that “the goal of the Situationists is immediate participation in a passionate abundance of life by means of deliberately arranged variations of ephemeral moments.” (Guy Debord, “Theses on Cultural Revolution”, 1958). This depicts that a situationist city is more of a different approach to urban living than a preplanned lifestyle. So that cities that are once dedicated to work and capital accumulation become areas of playful experimentation based on involvement of urban inhabitants in shaping their environments. Art and technology are used in combination to create these places that more fully coincide with human needs.

The Situationists created a series of concepts where they aimed at the perspective of societal change, through methods like psychogeography. This is an ambulatory exploration of the ways different environments influence human feelings and actions. They use the term “derive” which means ‘drifting, or walking without a set course through landscapes primarily in cities’ and the situation where “a ‘revolutionary’ moment arranged to inspire people to examine and improve their daily lives through creative exploration”. This notion of psychogeography draws attention to the importance of maintaining a link with the cities’ historical past and entices many to explore the city with an altered perspective

Guy Debord’s ‘THE NAKED CITY’ effectively uses these techniques in a visual way in the form of a map. This is where the plan of Paris is cut up and divided into 19 sections that are placed back together. The weight and direction of the arrows represent the intense experiences felt within those regions. Similarly, I have rearranged the map of Sydney (below) and have tried to use similar techniques to effectively connect and represent the intense experience of a person in the city of Sydney.

References:

- https://paulwalshphotographyblog.wordpress.com/2013/07/08/the-naked-city/

- http://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/05/situationists-and-occupy-abai.html