Solar Psychogeography – Into the light with a March-Riever, Eric O. Distad

I’ve recently read Eric’s essay ‘Psychogeography: Introducing the Zone and the March-Riever’ (available here – the pdf link is in the first paragraph) and having traded a few emails with Eric earlier this week I thought I’d offer up a brief summary of Eric’s standpoint, its innovations and a slight niggle I have on one aspect of his formulation of a ‘new’ form of psychogeographer, the ‘March-Riever’.

Eric’s essay is well worth a read. It is a very thoughtful, well grounded (both in the literature and embodied experience) exploration of a route towards a psychogeography that is less fixated on excavating a “storied metropolis” (3) (in other words excavating some hidden history), more appreciative of the redemptive qualities of the present (i.e. less nostalgic) and more celebrative of the resurgent power of nature.

Eric helpfully situates the roots of a recreational contemporary psychogeography (one perhaps expressed by many of the contributors to Walking Inside Out) at least in part in Tarkovsky’s Stalker (and even more helpfully situates that film in its own origins, the Strugatsky brothers’ 1972 book, Roadside Picnic). In doing so he adopts ‘The Zone’ as his name for the areas – potentially rural rather than urban or peri-urban – which he is drawn for his hybrid psychogeography/urban exploration.

Eric’s prescription for his ‘new’ type of psychogeographic practice is that it foregrounds subjective experience (with accounts of visits not aspiring to the unearthing of some hidden truth to ‘report back’ to the as yet unenlightened). But the tone to be applied to visits is a reverential one (rather than engaging zonal places wantonly as playgrounds: athletic, destructive or otherwise). Eric gives two main reasons for the reverential approach and I find myself attracted by one, but slightly cynical of the other. Let me explain.

First, Eric figures the Zone (as in Stalker) as a place in which the revenant power of ‘Nature’ can be experienced, and humans reminded of their frailty, temporality etc. This is classic ruin-gazing fare, grounded in 200 years of (variously European and North American) Romantic wilderness-worship. To be honest, I find reassertion of a Human/Nature exclusionary binary a turn off, and feel it risks leaving rural psychogeography indistinguishable from ordinary countryside walking. For me the revelation sought alongside a resurgent ‘nature’ found in ruins, would be a slightly different one, one based on realising that we and ‘nature’ are intertwined and co-dependent (co-constructed even) rather than that we can go to the Zone and humbly face a ‘separate’ (and ‘better’ non-human) realm. In my anti-binary stance, I’m thinking here of OOO writers like Timothy Morton’s (2009) Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.

But Eric’s second reason for an experiential reverence has me hooked. As he puts it: “the march-riever’s approach to psychogeography makes conscious use of solar cues, the time-dependent effects of the sun” (21)

Eric thus appreciates the constantly changing lighting in the Zone as an emphasis of the uniqueness of each moment, and therefore the uniqueness of each experience of place. Eric takes this awareness from photographers (and painters too implicitly – all of whom are hyper-conscious of the place-compositional effects of changing light conditions), noting that “to the photographer, a reliance on solar cues is second nature, whether it is done subconsciously or with active awareness and effort” (24). The zone then, is read (by the artist) and experienced by the explorer, through the dynamic action of environmental illumination. And where there is no solar guide, the explorer must bring their own (puny and fragile by comparison) light source, the torch beams glare highlighting the dark absence around it as much as the features found within its narrow cone of vision.

Eric’s essay is a welcome hybrid in many ways, it is one of few North American commentaries upon contemporary psychogeography, it is an impressive ‘pro-am’ piece of work – a practitioner writing reflexively about their own enthusiastic practice, and by drawing out in its present-focussed and experiential oriented mode, it shows how how the ruin-based orientations of psychogeographers and urban explorers intersect.

Eric’s twitter name is @reluctantgod.

Image credit: http://www.reluctantgodproductions.com/

Advertisement

Urban exploration as deviant leisure

Oooh, this is good! A very thoughtful essay on the ironies of urbex’s ‘double-helix’ relationship with commodified leisure culture. Too many great quotes to pick from, so this one will do: “the performative project of (individualised) identity construction and intense competition for (subcultural) status are now primary motivations driving the practice of urban exploration towards increasingly spectacular manifestations.” Well worth the read…

deviantleisure

By Theo Kindynis (University of Greenwich)

Under London, an urban explorer is dwarfed by the massive Lee Tunnel “super sewer” construction, the deepest and largest tunnel ever built under the city. Photo: Theo Kindynis.

Recreational trespass, or as it has become known in recent years, “urban exploration” (often abbreviated as UrbEx or UE) is the practice of illicitly gaining access to forbidden, forgotten or otherwise off-limits places, ‘simply for the joy of doing so’ and / or in order to document them photographically (Garrett, 2013: 21). Such places typically include: derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals or asylums, abandoned military installations, construction sites and cranes, sewer and storm drain networks, subterranean utility tunnels and rapid transit (metro) systems – the list goes on. In the past two decades, and particularly since the mid-2000s, an emergent global subculture has coalesced around this activity, facilitated by the Internet and online discussion forums such…

View original post 3,593 more words