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3. PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: PLACE, PRACTICE, PERFORMANCE

Editorial Design, Extensive Research

"Place, Practice, Performance" is a narrative project rooted in Situationist psychogeography, examining the waning human-social place connection, turning vibrant places into isolated spaces. This notebook-style work documents both collective and personal psychogeographical practices, offering it as a tool to understand and reshape urban life. It leads readers from solitary experiences to societal engagement, bridging the physical and the virtual.

This book breaks the mold with its unique self-rubber binding—a nod to the flexibility of exploration it offers. Each rubber band is symbolic, mapping the journey through the individual chapters, which are as varied in their page sizes and paper textures as the content they contain. Unfolding the book reveals an immediate presentation of the chapter titles to the reader, removing the traditional barrier of a table of contents and inviting a non-linear journey through its pages. Readers are invited to embark on a non-linear exploration, akin to navigating a city's diverse districts, where every intersection opens several potential directions. Start from the beginning or leap into what captures your interest—here, your reading journey is uniquely yours.

I envision crafting a space that mirrors the innovative ideas expressed in my book, an immersive experience where reading is akin to traversing the very landscape of the narrative itself. Inspired by the theory of psychogeography, each chapter is named after a sentiment that comes from my intuition about the content of the chapter.





© 2023 Gwen Geng



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4.1 PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY: PLACE, PRACTICE, PERFORMANCE

Editorial Design, Extensive Research


4.2 SPECTOR BOOKS︎

Related Project


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Place, Practice, Performance is a multi-media narrative that explores psychogeography as a playful way to experience the urban environment. The project investigates psychogeography as a mythology to interpret the urban environment and transform our lives. The book experiments on the theory of psychogeography from individual to society, from physical to virtual. The map stylized book format allows readers to walk through different aspects of psychogeography. The narrative is transmitted using augmented reality to facilitate the expression of psychogeography through print, spatial and digital media.

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The book starts from a sequence of photos taken by the artist Sophie Calle. The arrangement brings the concept that the behavior of walking will influence the way we see the world, and at the same time, the sight can also condition walking behavior.
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The narrative of the book is divided into two dimensions. Chapters focus on the individual psychogeography practice, and chapters focus on social convention. The structured map content can be seen as a navigation guide of the book, which demonstrates that the experience of reading the book is like walking in different spaces of contents created by authors and artists.
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Each chapter is named by a particular emotion and a map symbol reflecting emotional expression. The first chapter, places of anxiety, is about an introduction of psychogeography and three main aspects of the theory: Dérive, Detournement, and Situation. It includes the history of how psychogeography developed from Lettrist and Situationist Internationals.
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The chapter, places of wonder, includes an interview of the writer Iain Sinclair. He thinks map is fundamentally untrustworthy and is a futile compromise between information and knowledge. The map needs a potent dose of fiction to bring them to life, and that’s how the psychogeographer uses the map in a more playful way to experiment on detournement.
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Guy Debord defined psychogeography as the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.
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In Oskar Schlemmer’s theory model “figure in space,” the environment is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The practice of psychogeography goes from individual perspective to social perspective from this chapter.
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In the city model New Babylon designed by Constant Nieuwenhuys, the city itself becomes the wanderer.
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In the chapter Places of Isolation, the psychogeography practice goes to the most significant accessible social space, the Internet. Different web pages of the Internet can be considered as neighborhoods and connected or disconnected with links.
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The invisible neighborhoods of the Internet are connected with physical wire, which can be considered as a map for the virtual society.


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© 2022 Gwen Geng