New weird America

2009-06-17T13:25:00.000-07:00

The idea of psychogeography is really all about learning to play the immediate environment like a musical instrument. I mean, everything is a musical instrument, so it doesn't necessarily have to be music. But it's all about embodying something that was previously separate from yourself (i.e. an 'instrument'). One example is learning to speak; wadding your communicative being into the being-wad inhabited by all the other speakers. In these terms, words and the cadences of sentences are mega-developed and specialized forms of 'music'. Before people knew words, we connected through mutual resonance / pure-stomach-feel vibration (abbreviated henceforth as ‘vibes’). Think dogs barking a lot in your neighborhood and them probably not saying anything specific.

To reiterate, psychogeography is all about being a geographic 'musician'. Geography is comprised of all types of components - social/cultural, ecological, geological, spiritual, psychological, political, economic, etc. - none of which are ever wholly separate (i.e. world). These are like different types of instruments; you might have a certain knack or interest in one over the others; you might want to observe how certain geographies interact, combine, and compliment one-another...

Cities and their enveloping ecologies are totally-new-always; games of events; new rules all the time... and also NO rules, maaaan. The goal is to learn from previous experiments and to better understand how situations make us FEEL/DO (passively/actively creating situations) --- making NEW TIMES or dancing to the cosmic disco. For now, this translates into walks/vision quests (see sidebar), collectively compiling a sort of haunted Portland database (this blog?), special-spot performance night(s), and otherwise engaging and experiencing the forests, herbs, venomous spiders, sidewalks, humans, and rivers of the valley jumping in spacetime.

Portland Psychogeography Society

New weird America