SocialPhysicalFinancialGeographicalSpiritualPoliticalEmotionalCellularGlobalIdealogicalPhilosophicalRelationalIntellectual
We are immobilised but we are still travelling, what a situation...!
I am documenting my myopic journeys through the screen before me. It's a dérive. I can go from one place (situation) to another in a mere click.
Take today:
I began with my email inbox. My starting point. It took me to a call-out from an arts organisation inviting submissions relating to our lock-down. I followed a trail to the group's site who created the call-out and then to their reference page and then to a site with a recording by an artist of words and sounds and then to the site of the artist he collaborated with..... I'm now working on how to render this as a visual recording.... from my living room obviously...
This is the top of the Far Away Tree, but are these worlds whooshing around and coming to the ladder in turn or am I the one that is moving and discovering them? Some are edgy and there is not good magic. But some are so delightful I want to take the whole thing home with me but find I'm settling for bringing back a small souvenir in the form of a jotted note to prompt my memory of it. A postcard or maybe a virtual snow globe from my travels. Then I wonder how curious it is to have this compulsion to preserve the experience of my ephemeral journeys in a material manifestation. But such is the condition (situation) of being a human (situation, site, state, setting, spot, standing, sitch).
" In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there… But the dérive includes both this letting go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities". Knabb, Ken, ed. (1995). Situationist International Anthology. Berkley: Bureau of Public Secrets.
