Sher Doruff
Researcher, Head of the Research and Dissemination Programme, Waag Society, Amsterdam (NL)
From Psychogeography to Cybertopology: Situating "Place" in the Disoriented Dérive
Keywords: affective, spectacle, disorientation, control, place, derive, détournement, proprioception, topology
The slow shapeshift from a society of discipline (Foucault) to a society of control (Deleuze) retains certain dimensional qualities of Debord's society of the spectacle . This paper looks at societal paradigms situated in the conflux of contemporary locative media, and multi-player gaming practices. It explores the affective tonalities of psychogeographic and cybertopological encounters. If performing "place" through radical disorientation was evident in the ontology of early Situationist dérives in Paris and Amsterdam in the 50's and 60's, the technological accoutrement for triangulated orientation in many current artistic projects has détourned the dérive in significant ways.
The psychogeographic experience of drifting through an urban landscape without purpose, guided by the shifting rhythms of random and selective attraction was once a 'subversive' aesthetic, primarily due to its playful or ludic character. The urban drift or dérive of the Situationists has subsequently become a common referent in contemporary locative media projects that mix performance strategies with new media technologies. The connotations of an urban dérive were once political, alluding to both the poverty and potential of "everyday life." Contemporary derivations of the dérive in locative media and gaming cultures is evidence of psychogeography re-imagined as a hyperreality spectacle . Emerging aesthetics in a control society play in the urban gamespace with new toys: RFID's, GPS, GIS, WIFI. Art and technology collaborations "exploit" hand-me-down military technologies to perpetuate zones of playfulness. There's no avoiding collusion with the ubiquitous spectacle and precious little wiggle room for diverting anything from the powerful current of capital flow.
Situated performative processes often involve "first life" sensational experience of the "real" world. Multi-player Second Life drifts through virtual geographies are also embedded with unpredictable personal encounters. The political and aesthetic tactics of dynamic situations advanced by Debord are now folded into the confounding ethical complexities of a late capitalism awash in the immanent powerplay of affective intensities fuelled by an economy of the spectacle.
In all this, a sensation of "place" as a relation between forces of orientation and disorientation, as affective, proprioceptive intensity, would seem to mark the topological transition from discipline to control that fluctuates in the relentless appetite of the spectacle. Situating the performance of place through disoriented dérive space is an aim of this paper.
Sher Doruff , Dr. is a researcher and Head of the Research and Dissemination Programme at Waag Society in Amsterdam. She received her PhD from University of the Arts London/Central Saint Martins in 2006. Her thesis "The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram" investigated the role of collaborative interplay and creative processes in networked performance practice. She lectures/mentors in the Dance Unlimited MA program in Amsterdam and in what spare time remains, nurtures a modest artistic practice. Her career has spanned various sectors of the visual and performing arts including conceptual art, music composition, digital design and scenography, interactive installation/performance and software development. She has worked with digital performance technologies in collaboration with interdisciplinary artists and performance-makers since 1986. From 1998-2004 she was a core developer for Waag Society's distributed performance software framework, KeyWorx and curated artist projects in the Sensing Presence department. She has published numerous papers, edited a book on Live Art, and regularly lectures and presents in academic and artistic contexts.