Digital Storytelling and Psychogeography

Post-COVID-19 environments have challenged our embodied identities with these challenges coming from a variety of domains, that is, microbiological, semiotic, and digital. We are embedded in a new complex set of relations, with other species, with cultural signs, and with technology and venturing further into an era that pushes back on our anthropocentrism to create a post-human dystopia. This does not imply that we are less human or forfeit ethics in this state of flux, but can lead to considering new ways of being alive and humanists. The aim of this project was to explore walking through our associated psychogeographies as captured in photographs and text from individual walks, as the means by which to characterize responses to the distress of the pandemic and to assess resistance to non-being. The psychogeographies were the starting points for our dialogic enquiry between authors who each represent living theory, representing their own emergent knowledge, inseparable from person...

This paper considers Michel de Certeau’s account of “everyday practices” as a means of escaping the totalising forces of social governance and ideological apparatuses, which he believes are deficient of the necessary spatial orientation to daily activity, and thus unable to comprehend the full complexity of lived experience, particularly in regards to the life of a city. The extent to which resistance is possible will be evaluated in light of the totalising threat of computerised surveilliance and digital architecture, where they are considered to overdetermine and stratify public space. As such, a “rhetorical of walking” will be assessed for its potential in revealing the everyday stories and spaces that are unseen from ‘above’. Particular reference is made to the potential impact and uses of nascent digital cartographic tools in shaping encounters at street level in the contemporary city.

In an age where displacement and dislocation are a common place, McKenzie Wark sets out to make the best of it. In Dispositions, he creates a way of writing that can create a sense of belonging while remaining outside of the markers of a reliable identity, whether in terms of nation, profession, gender or genre. Walking a fine line between the essay, the memoir, fiction and the prose poem, Dispositions creates a nomadic geography that can find its way across the space of both the city and the space of the text. Wark reimagines Australian writing as a 'minor literature', traversing the world in its own way. As Mark Amerika says: "Dispositions reads like a philosophictional codework that samples vocabularies, manipulates meanings, and mixes discourses. Wark's tele-nomadic GPS blog style is an anti-memoir you won't forget."

An investigation into the socio-spatial relationship between subject and place;
with specific reference to the artistic practice of Layla Curtis, Doung Jahangeer,
Richard Long and Jeremy Wood.
The paper is motivated by an interest in walking and mapping as art forms. it investigates the relationship between art and psychogeography.

Please see:- https://chrisdooks.bandcamp.com/album/lessons-learned-in-the-k-nigsforst-pdf-2015 for related piece, inc free audio download.

This text is a transcript of a spoken word piece of the same name from The Environmental Arts Festival Scotland 2015 - with the addition of an interview between the author and composer/visual artist Wolfgang Voigt.

Walking is a practice that has gone beyond the mechanics of bodily movement. It is endowed in meaning, critical and aesthetic, environmental and personal. Since the Romantic movement, the hypnotic rhythm of walking has been used as a source of literary inspiration (Poe, 1840; Wordsworth, 1979; Sinclair, 2003; Solnit, 2006; Papadimitriou, 2012; Self, 2015), political movement (Benjamin, 1939; Chtcheglov, 1953; Debord, 1967; Sadler, 1999; Solnit, 2006; Garrett, 2013) and corporeal transcendence (Breton 1960; Aragon, 1999; Basset, 2007). From the romantic poet to the psychogeographer and the urban explorer, the exploration of landscapes has been a window into an occult mysticism and enchanting perambulation (Coverley, 2010). Walking allowed the wanderer to immerse him or herself in a landscape and dwell in its intoxicating past (Benjamin, 1939), so finding their route to spirituality in a disenchanted world (Solnit, 2006; Self, 2015).

The PC gaming platform, Steam, has seen a sudden appropriation of the term “walking simulator”. Games that have been tagged as such by its users include: Year Walk (Simogo, 2013), Gone Home (Fullbright, 2013), Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012), The Vanishing of Ethan Carter (The Astronauts, 2014), The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe, 2011), Myst (Cyan, 1993) and Life is Strange (Dontnod, 2015). This project is a literary analysis into the patterns of the first three of these games, arguing that they are a continuation of the Romantic tradition of walking as an aesthetic practice.

Though the paper acknowledges the controversies behind the term “walking simulator” (Goodwin 2014; Gaynor, 2015), debating the terminology goes beyond the scope of this essay. For lack of a better term, this paper will stick to “walking simulator” due to its proliferation on Steam. It will define walking simulators as games with an immersive use of exploration as a core mechanic utilised for environmental storytelling purposes.

This paper will concentrate on Year Walk, Gone Home and Dear Esther as examples of walking simulators. Year Walk has been chosen for its critical acclaim (Unity, 2013; BAFTA, 2014) as well as its strong references to transcendental walking practices grounded in history (Kent, 2014). Gone Home has been chosen for my own extended experience with the game as well as its direct inspiration from urban exploration (Gaynor, 2012). Dear Esther was chosen for its heavy use of idyllic Romantic British landscapes and its use of walking as the single form of interaction. By going on a psychogeographic walk through these virtual landscapes this paper aims to place them within a literary and aesthetic cultural context. Extensive reading followed by the use of a gameplay log will identify the literary knowledge tied directly to the landscape of the games. It thus interprets games as an artistic and aesthetic expression in line with the Romantic’s emphasis on authentic emotion, speculating that these games could be seen as a romantic revolution in which ludic experiences are understood as subjective expressions of players and designers.

This project is written in conjunction with a short game that aims to show the practical applications of the observations made in this paper. The ludic sketch was developed over the course of two months to observe how the construction of a walking simulator might evolve through an understanding of its corporeal origins.

The paper, published in Interartive journal's 100th edition devoted to walking art and aesthetics, explores and analyzes the various ways in which the fundamental principles of Situationism have been applied in specific cases of digital media art creation. Furthermore, the study investigates and comments on the alternative possibilities that are provided to artists, as well to non-artists, through the use of new technologies, in order to experience the surrounding space, express themselves and share their concerns.

Bill Lane describes his recent body of work, 'The Older Industrial Parks Near Newport, Victoria', as “an extended dialogue with the late Lewis Baltz”. Qualifying the nature of that dialogue is a gateway to understanding how Lane’s work both participates in the New Topographic tradition that Baltz and others initiated in the 1970s and reconciles aspects of photographic history that are commonly thought to be antithetical.

"Extreme Geography." 1997. California Geographer. 37:10-31. http://scholarworks.csun.edu/handle/10211.2/2690 URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10211.2/2690

A recent editorial in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers (Dixon and Jones, 1996) presented an entertaining deconstructive reading of scientific geography. This innovative essay, titled "For a Supercalifragilistkexpialidodous Scientific Geography" demonstrates how a popular deconstructive method adapted from the humanities might be deployed to facilitate the "self-redemption" of scientific geography from its constraining positivist closure, perhaps paving the way for its alignment with the open-ended and pluralistic world-view of an emerging critical poststructuralism.

Stylistic and methodological attributes of a postmodern attitude permeate the editorial: its postmodern style is a refreshing departure from the usual flat, denotative prose of scientific reporting; the blatant refusal of the authors to marshal validity and reference authority in support of their arguments is a portent of bold, new directions for the discipline's flagship journal; finally, the topic is thought-provoking and timely, motivated in part by the authors' concern about "the absence of a considered debate over the challenges and relative merits of poststructuralism" (Dixon and Jones, 1996,767). The timing of this debate cannot be separated from events and conditions that characterize the postmodern-as-epoch (Dear and Wassmansdorf, 1993). Perhaps that time has already passed: at least one observer suggests that the impact of information technology and time-space convergence on human communication seems to render Dixon and Jones' "considered debate" less relevant in the postmodern epoch (Nemeth, 1997).

Postmodern skepticism thrives on information surfeits. Ambiguous truths are bred wholesale by the speed in the span of cyberspace. This new flexibility in the accumulation of information now feeds a frenzy of popular skepticism about absolute truths that is much deeper and darker than the methodological skepticism in positivist science that continues to invest heavily in their credibilities.

Keyword: quantum thinking;
California Geographer ~ URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10211.2/2690

Tim Wright's 2004 creative memory project, In Search of Oldton, is concerned with a need to reconcile a personal and collective cultural understanding of a recent predigital past with the present. Its complicated and fragmented landscape is produced by the remediation of repurposed pre-digital artefacts, and traversal of its space engages with the manner in which technology is increasingly mediating interaction between the urban landscapes and their inhabitants. This paper seeks to examine the manner in which Oldton's ludic-constructive play with memory engages with the psychogeographic understanding of the production of space and place through the user's interaction with the work, and its consequent commentary on the expansion of social interactions within a contemporary social apparatus so as to include the technology that makes these interactions possible.

Walking has been a long standing source of literary and artistic inspiration for writers (Poe 1840; Wordsworth 1979; Sinclair 2003) political activists (Chtcheglov 1953; Garrett 2013) and artists (Breton 1960; Aragon 1999). The videogames landscape has seen a surge in walking inspired games controversially tagged as ‘walking simulators’. This paper is a literary reading into three such tagged games: Year Walk, Gone Home and Dear Esther. It frames these games as continuations of the Romantic tradition of walking as an aesthetic practice thus embracing walking simulators as an art, the like of Romantic paintings and literature. Using the psychogeographic dérive, it interprets these ludic experiences as an artistic and aesthetic expression with an emphasis on authentic emotion, subjective in play and design. Through the walk, the landscape of the games become tied to the practice of literary psychogeography following a lineage including Charles Dickets (2010), G. K. Chesterton (1905), ...

Transmedia storytelling is defined as a process where integral elements of fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels to create a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. This process and its narrative models have had an increasing influence on the academic world in addressing both theoretical and practical dimensions of transmedia storytelling. The Handbook of Research on Transmedia Storytelling and Narrative Strategies is a critical scholarly resource that explores the connections between consumers of media content and information parts that come from multimedia platforms, as well as the concepts of narration and narrative styles. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as augmented reality, digital society, and marketing strategies, this book explores narration as a method of relating to consumers. This book is ideal for advertising professionals, creative directors, academicians, scriptwriters, researchers, and upper-level graduate students seeking current research on narrative marketing strategies.

An interrogation of a monumental urban structure – a road bridge – considering its kinaesthetic affect on the in situ observer, or viewer of ‘Sound : Bridge’, a short film which reconstructs the site.  The paper outlines Antonio Damasio’s neurobiological model of affect, and links it to C.G. Jung’s model of archetypal symbolism, to consider the ways in which the acoustic and visual qualia experienced at the substructure of the site may induce altered emotional states and a sense of the numinous.  Archaeoacoustic and Neuroarchaeological findings relating to Neolithic consciousness, sacred caves, standing stones, and shamanic practices are considered in terms of how we may perceive the road bridge at a neurologically hardwired, and universal collective unconscious level. The paper also explores Psychogeographic and Depth Psychology perspectives and strategies for creatively re-engaging with the mundane built environment.

If the city has become the decisive art form of our present, with its structures deciding physical movement through positionality, by what methods might these seemingly fixed spatiotemporal terms be rewritten? This photo-essay highlights how, through the material conventions of both painting and photography fissures may be cast in the forms, discourses and increasingly unidirectional relationship imposed by the global city. Decidedly intertextual, drawing from the esoteric writing of Pierre Klossowski, a disputed 18th Century painting and the magic realism of Césare Aira in which the specters of an unbuilt Buenos Aires have a tangible effect on the lives of its inhabitants.

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Between November 5-14th (2010), the city of Istanbul hosted the fourth international Amber Art and Technology Festival. The festival explores and questions the impact of technologies on social, cultural, and political domains via artistic practices. This year’s theme was: DATACITY. The Mobile City’s guest blogger Tina Bastajian looks back on a workshop she conducted at the conference together with Seda Manavoğlu. The approach of this workshop built upon experiences with their interactive and locative documentary, Coffee Deposits:::Topologies of Chance that they previously had carried out in Istanbul.

"Authors: Bill Psarras, Stacey Pitsillides, Anastasios Maragiannis


""Have you ever sat in front of your computer, looking at the little box with the word search next to it? This seemingly innocent box demanding your attention, demanding to be responsive to your every demand. Have you ever tried to deny it’s pleading emptiness and instead to go on a journey of discovery, charting new and unknown digital territories? During 20th century ‘walking practice’ was used extensively in the avant-garde movement as a critical method to challenge the authoritarian and capitalistic character of the city. Moving through the concept of flâneur who goes on an ethnographic journey (‘botanizing on the asphalt’: Benjamin, 1973), to the distinctly political implications of dérive, arriving at the comparison of ‘resistive walking’ in the physical environment which has a direct correlation to the resistive practices of online non-navigation.
An online psychogeographical dérive could be a form of digital resistance to the various ways information is being dictated to us from contemporary authoritarian rules and search engines. The current information architecture directs the citizen of the online space to find only that, which is highest rated, rather than allowing the tacit discovery of the obscured. The effective search limits the qualities of that which ‘I’ am searching for and in this way pushes our consciousness through a computation landscape discounting the emotional, the affective and the discovery that excites and stimulates our curious being.
This paper seeks to explore whether the psychogeographic technique of dérive can be used to break out of the directed pattern of ‘search to find’ in the online space following from Lev Manovich’s concept of the Poetics of Navigation (The Language of New Media, 2000: 223)."""