Report of the Monkey Magic Walk

Members of the Bored in the City Collective and friends met outside the Palace Theatre, Oxford Road for the Monkey Magic walk. Those involved did not know where the walk would take them, but one person decided to lead the way and walk to the Roman Fort. Before we started moving, a poem was recited:

This is the monkey magic walk
We are monkeys
Monkeys are real situationists
Monkeys are real psychogeographers
Monkeys have fun
Monkey goes where monkey wants
Monkey climbs trees
Monkey finds bananas and a peach
If you find the peach of immortality from the Jade Emperor's Heavenly Garden and if you take one bite, then you will be granted immortality forever.
Let's begin the walk!

So on this note, we began the walk. Fortunately, we were armed with some bananas and a peach - essential food for magic monkeys. One of the members of the collective had recently bought a plastic toy camera (Holga) and they have taken some of the photos included in this blog posting.
What's interesting with photos taken with toy cameras, is that because of the plastic lens and the potential for light leaks into the film, this means that the images which are produced can be unpredictable...sometimes rubbish as a result, but sometimes awesome! Also, photos taken with plastic cameras are not crystal clear, but instead do give much more mood, contrast and also more 'subjective' qualities to images ...

We arrived at the fort, with the Beetham's Tower (known by the bored in the city collective humorously as the 'tower of satan'!). A photograph was taken of the roman fort, with the Beetham's Tower looming over ...

One tower, plus two ...

The remains of a roman wall ...

The watchtower ...

... at the end of the walk, one of the walkers ate the peach from the Emperor Jade's Heavenly Garden and that person was granted immortality forever. Then we walked to the car park for romans ...

A car park for modern day Romans

A location close to the Emperor's Heavenly Garden ...

The seed of the peach is buried in a secret place in the Emperor Jade's heavenly garden and we hope that it will grow to create more magical peaches to grant others immortality ...... Concluding the walk, we ended up in the Arndale Centre and we ate our bannanas

From the Bored in the City Collective

TRIP
Territories Reimagined: International Perspectives
Manchester, 19-22 June 2008.

Call for Papers and Projects

Psychogeography
Neogeography
Deep topography
Urban interventions
Locative media
Collaborative Mapping

Between June 19 and 22, 2008, TRIP brings together artists, academics, movers, shakers, do-ers and dissenters in a unique event combining an interdisciplinary conference with a city-wide series of actions, exhibitions, and screenings. TRIP enables the previously separate worlds of theory and practice to interact, initiating new approaches and energies, and furthering techniques to take on and alter the physical environment.

Beginning as a reaction to the industrial revolution, the re-imagining of the city by romantics, bohemians, and avant-gardists evolved into a diverse range of strategies, practices and arguments, from the psychogeographic drift or derive to the artistic intervention. By the 1990s these were being utilised by artists, writers, activists, and historians, attempting to negotiate urban and rural space in the post-modern world.

But practices developed in the twentieth century encounter a different world in the twenty first - a more observed and policed world on the one hand, a more corporate, globally-connected world on the other. Increasingly the body, social, individual and political, is the site of contradictory demands - the demands to consume versus the demands of control.

TRIP will be based at Manchester Metropolitan University, on the city's main southerly corridor, Oxford Road. But we want events to take place throughout Manchester, in as wide a variety of spaces and venues as possible. Like many northern cities, Manchester is changing fast. Perhaps you want to critique the implications of "regeneration", or perhaps you want to stimulate new ways of engaging with an increasingly consumerised environment. Maybe you're passionate about the possibilities of inventive walking and drifting, or maybe you're a performance artist aiming to change the energy of a public space. Wherever you're coming from, TRIP wants to hear from you with your ideas.

To submit a paper, you should send an abstract outlining your subject and the key points of your presentation.
To submit an idea for an intervention, performance or a walk involving members of the public, please outline in one paragraph the aims and ideal locations for your project.
To submit an idea for a gallery-based project, please outline in one paragraph the thinking behind your installation or work..

Please try to keep your paragraphs to a maximum of 200 words. And don't forget your contact details. Deadline for submissions: October 1st 2007.

Submissions should be emailed to: TRIP@mmu.ac.uk
(and for further information on festival announcements, walks, talks and events, then please access our blog-space, which will be updated regularly at :
http://trip2008.wordpress.com/

The festival proceedings will be fully documented and recorded, and an edited volume of essays, art and photography will be published at a later date.

The Hacienda has already been built, destroyed and rebuilt

**** IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT ****


The Hacienda is now a big car park with a block of yuppie flats




gentrification is dull

VERNAL EQUINOX & a memorial to Jean Baudrillard


The Vernal Equinox (V.E) marks a time of renewed life and birth for many cultures and religions including Wicca and Christianity. The equinox also marks the beginning of the astrological year as the sun enters the sign of Aries. Both day and night will be of equal duration on this date. Also, the Saxon deity Eostre is an important symbol of new life and fertility. Now is the time for play, joy and fun … a time to start new things and for plans to grow. To celebrate this date, we will be doing some of the following:

• Lighting bonfires (to renew life and ensure good crops).
• Ringing bells?!
• Singing songs (for the fun of it, think of some of your own).
• Planting seeds (to ensure good crops for the coming year).
• Cauldron, rope, candles and circular symbolic movement (?)
• And a surprise element in relation to the Sun God and the White Goddess.

Please bring any of these items if you have them! And warm greetings to you all 

Wednesday 21 March 2007 – Meet 6.30 p.m
The Basement, 24 Lever Street.

Brought to you by the Bored in the City Collective
Email: boredinthecity@hotmail.co.uk
Blog: www.boredinthecitycollective.blogspot.com

Greetings all psychogeographers,

The Bored in the city Collective have now set up yet another online space, in which to represent photographs from their derives:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/psychogeographer2023/

There may be upto 2023 psychogeographers in the Bored in the City Collective now!

From 2023 Bored members xx

Don't be a situationist disciple!

Hi - this is a brief blog which will be further discussed over the next few months. The title enscapulates the theme argued here, in that although so far on this blog, there are lot of quotes by the situationists, we do not aim to be situationist disciples! The thing to do is to take inspiration from how they made sense of environments and link this to personal, political, theoretical and practical goals of your own and those of others, such as ...

... Auto-ethnography / Regulation / Photography / Discourse / Affect

What is psychogeography?

What would this fisherman say that psychogeography is?

Geography, for example, deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have of the world. Psychogeography could set for itself the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. The adjective psychogeographical, retaining a rather pleasing vagueness, can thus be applied to the findings arrived at by this type of investigation, to their influence on human feelings, and even more generally to any situation or conduct that seems to reflect the same spirit of discovery (Debord, 1955).

ONE OF THE BASIC situationist practices is the dérive [literally: drifting], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities and all other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is less an important factor in this activity that one might think: from a dérive point of view, cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly encourage and discourage entry into or exit from certain zones (Debord, 1958a).

The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation’ (Chtcheglov, 1953: 1, Capitals in original).

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely limited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient one-self. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive, one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism (Debord, 1958a).

One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross checking these different groups’ impressions makes it impossible to arrive at more objective conclusions (Debord, 1958a).

‘The flâneur stands in a relation: to people; to text; to fact and to tradition’, what they call an ‘urban ethnography’ (Jenks and Neves, 2000: 3)

DETOURNEMENT, the reuse of pre-existing elements in a new ensemble … The two fundamental laws of detournement are the loss of importance of each detourned autonomous element – which may go so far as to completely lose its original sense – and at the same time the organisation of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect (International, 1959).

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea (Debord, 1967: chapter 8).