#chtcheglov

[digitalfountains]

Claudia Sininho by Chtcheglov

[hairtusk]

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.

'Formulary for a New Urbanism', Ivan Chtcheglov

[pasdetrois]

Ivan Chtcheglov, "New Urbanism"

[orbis-tertius]

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.

The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself.

Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage -- slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. -- are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive.

Guy Debord, "Theory of the Dérive" in Internationale Situationniste #2, (1958)

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but…) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration.

Ivan Chtcheglov, "Letter from Afar" in Internationale Situationniste #9 (1964)

[f--e-u-e-r-t-r-u-n-k-e--n]

The End of the World or the End of Capitalism?: Colletion of Notes.

>"Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action". -Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? >[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei.

>"In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci said that in periods of crisis the old is dying and the new is not yet born. While Gramsci drew attention to the morbid symptoms of such a situation (in 1930) our crisis is different, and I want to draw attention to more hopeful symptoms (waiting to be born) of our present crisis of capitalist hegemony. The viability of initiatives trying to avoid competition with the market and escape from the hierarchic state rests on many untested assumptions. The first assumption is that those who do essential day-to-day tasks would continue to do their jobs in a PCC in preference to large corporations and their local affiliates: a multitude of people who now work in private or public sectors, directly or indirectly, establishing PCCs in their local communities producing food, organizing transport, setting up places of learning and transmission of skills, providing healthcare, running power systems, and so on. PCCs already do this all over the world on a small scale but such initiatives struggle within capitalist markets. Community-Supported Agriculture schemes in various parts of the world represent a first step on a long and difficult road to self-sufficiency in this sphere". - Leslie Sklair, The End of the World or the End of Capitalism? >"In 1869, New York neurologist George Beard used the term "neurasthenia" to describe a very broad condition caused by the exhaustion of the nervous system, which was thought to be particularly found in "civilized, intellectual communities." In 1998, Swedish psychiatrists Marie Åsberg and Åke Nygren investigated a surge of depression health insurance claims in Sweden. They found that the symptoms of many cases did not match the typical presentation of depression. Complaints like fatigue and decreased cognitive ability dominated, and many believed their working conditions to be the cause" >"The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation".  -Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. >"Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them. The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action." -Ivan Chtcheglov, Formulary for a New Urbanism

>"To you, this gathering is just one more boring event. The Situationist International, however, considers that while this assemblage of so many art critics as an attraction of the Brussels Fair is laughable, it is also significant.

Inasmuch as modern cultural thought has proved itself completely stagnant for over twenty-five years, and inasmuch as a whole era that has understood nothing and changed nothing is now becoming aware of its failure, its spokesmen are striving to transform their activities into institutions. They thus solicit official recognition from the completely outmoded but still materially dominant society, for which most of them have been loyal watchdogs.

The main shortcoming of modern art criticism is that it has never looked at the culture as a whole nor at the conditions of an experimental movement that is perpetually superseding it. At this point in time the increased domination of nature permits and necessitates the use of superior powers in the construction of life." -The Situationist International, Action in Belgium Against the International Assembly of Art Critics >"Karoshi (Japanese: 過労死, Hepburn: Karōshi), which can be translated into "overwork death", is a Japanese term relating to occupation-related sudden death.

The most common medical causes of karoshi deaths are heart attacks and strokes due to stress and malnourishment or fasting. Mental stress from the workplace can also cause workers to commit suicide in a phenomenon known as karōjisatsu (過労自殺)" >"The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally. This makes capitalism very much like the Thing in John Carpenter's film of the same name: a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact. Capital, Deleuze and Guattari says, is a ‘motley painting of everything that ever was'; a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. In the years since Deleuze and Guattari wrote the two volumes of their Capitalism And Schizophrenia, it has seemed as if the deterritorializing impulses of capitalism have been confined to finance, leaving culture presided over by the forces of reterritorialization.

This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course. We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach' was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history'. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness." -Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

>The Socialist Patients' Collective (German: Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv, and known as the SPK) is a patients' collective founded in Heidelberg, West Germany, in February 1970, by Wolfgang Huber (born 1935). The kernel of the SPK's ideological program is summated in the slogan, "Turn illness into a weapon", which is representative of an ethos that is continually and actively practiced under the new title, Patients' Front/Socialist Patients' Collective, PF/SPK(H). The first collective, SPK, declared its self-dissolution in July 1971 as a strategic withdrawal but in 1973 Huber proclaimed the continuity of SPK as Patients' Front.

The SPK assumes that illness exists as an undeniable fact and believe that it is caused by the capitalist system. The SPK promotes illness as the protest against capitalism and considers illness as the foundation on which to create the human species. The SPK is opposed to doctors, considering them to be the ruling class of capitalism and responsible for poisoning the human species. The most widely recognized text of the PF/SPK(H) is the communique, SPK – Turn illness into a weapon, which has prefaces by both the founder of the SPK, Wolfgang Huber, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Rejecting the roles and ideology associated with the notion of the revolutionary as scientific explainer, they stated in Turn Illness into a Weapon that whoever claims they want to "observe the bare facts dispassionately" is either an "idiot" or a "dangerous criminal."

[ladybugmeat]

3.

The first of the preceding images is a collage of the Franco Manca floor-plan and a Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe style plotting of my movements within the span of a week. The plotting displays a whirring triangular circuit between front desk, bar, and kitchen porter. I have taken aesthetic properties from Wyndham Lewis’ BLAST: War Number in order to convey the narrow and mechanical quality of my traversing. With no deviations, only iterations, my activity stands in stark contrast to the whimsical premise of the Dérive. The hand of the Vorticist opposes sentimentality. The serrated edges of the woodcut are designed with sheer violence. Lewis desires to convey an exact quiddity of the modern world. The Vorticist does not pursue simulacra, only aggressive substantiality.

To some degree, the restaurant emulates battle. The serving hatch defines two separate spheres: Front of house and Back of house. The two parties are kept in a state of near conflict. When carrying the collage to photograph at an upstairs window, the pieces reconfigured to form alternative compositions. The two latter images depict the collage’s resultant organisations. Without manipulating the shapes myself, the collage reverted to a vortex.

20:07

PROVOCATION PIZZA : BIN BAG BANALITY

FORMULARY IN THE SPIRIT OF IVAN CHTCHEGLOV

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of the First NYC Art Parade, Part I: The Social Mirror, 1983, garbage collection truck.

I tie the bags, carry them out into the rain, and drop them at the curb. ‘Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.’ Whilst maintenance is a fundamental fixture of Capitalism, it is a facet carefully concealed. This heaped street-side installation only appears at night - only at closed-doors.

One Autumn night when the collection truck didn’t show and foxes chewed through the bin bags, the morning’s passersby were enraged. They stopped at the curb, looked down into the spilled contents of chewed crusts and beer bottles, and went online to write their martyred diatribes. Faced with the messy by-product of consumerism, the people responded with pointed fingers. They recognised their reflection in Franco Manca’s glass front but not in the littered gutter.

If a new pizzeria were to be formulated, one might forefront and hijack the establishment’s hidden maintenance and service work. In Chtcheglov’s sardonic tone, I might announce the appointment of a new management team. Staff would no longer serve under the elusive figure of Franco but instead the transparent moniker Frankie - Manky Frankie. Inside the restaurant, entropy would reign supreme. Fungi would grow in thick shelves from the walls but also the tables, stairs, and utensils. Bouts of watercress, spinach, and peas would grow in deep-set, water-logged motes running along each wall.

The menu would solely list produce cultivated and foraged within the restaurant. Neighbourhood rodents must be caught and carved if a customer has a preference for meat. A single septic tank and a simple hydroponic system would keep all nature in balance. The menu would move with the seasons. In winter, the interior’s crop might entirely perish. This would reintroduce the acumen of the hunter-gatherer, a ‘forgotten desire’. Everybody pitches in, society thrives. Customers would no longer sit down to their private dinnertime spectacles but would engage in a situation of invigorating, albeit nauseous, uncertainty.  

Artist Zeger Reyers engages in a near identical form of Situationism. With a desire to humanise the domestic sphere, Rayers planted mycelium within everyday objects. The mushrooms were then prepared and served during the exhibition finissage. Through consuming from the furniture, the objects were reestablished as secondary - as tools and accessories. The furniture became wood, glue, and damp again - No longer confined to the trappings of a feminine realm.

[zenbruiser]

“All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past.”

from Formulary for a New Urbanism

by Ivan Chtcheglov

Being Wild Art @beingwildart invite us to break out of and into our everyday urbanism during their week long artistic residency in Loughborough Marketplace. Forging interventions with found waste materials, the street, buildings, people, pigeons and dogs.

Never underestimate the power of cardboard.

[seikatsumusic]

no one's perfect - without you

https://youtu.be/QW_MFYuaq_g

Photo by Chtcheglov

[finitevariety]

Critique of Separation, Guy DeBord

[novediscursos]

ivan chtcheglov

[digitalfountains]

Claudia Sininho by Chtcheglov

[richardjlockleyhobson]

→ the freedom to wander represents for most only a possibility → a bourgeois notion → a fantasy → aimlessness is offensive → it quickly draws attention to itself and to stray from a well-trodden-path → toward unfamiliar terrain → is problematic → 

[spaceintruderdetector]

Theory of the Dérive

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their 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 a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.

The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.

‘‘In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us” - Ivan Chtcheglov, excerpt from a 1963 letter to Michèle Bernstein and Guy Debord

GUY DEBORD 1958

[georgina-hnd]

Psychogeography

What is the movement? Psychogeography describes the effect of a geographical location on the emotions and behaviour of an individual.

When did the term originate? The term Psychogeography was originally developed by the avant-garde movement Lettrist International. In June, 1954, the Lettrist International contributed an article about psychogeography and the dérive to the journal La Carte d’Apres Nature, which was published by the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte.

What are the key features/ideas of the movement? After the disbanding of the Lettrist International and the subsequent takeover of Psychogeography’s development by Guy Debord and the Situationist International, they largely focused on the ‘banalisation’ of everyday life within the city. They suggested that the city “creates and isolates the individual through the commodification and ritualisation of (their) images of space and time”. Within his book ‘Society of The Spectacle’ (1967), Debord states “everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”. Disillusioned with capitalistic urban space, the Situationist International sought to create new visions of the city through mapping and geographical investigations. They reimagined the city repurposed, prioritising playful exploration over rigid functionality.

What are some key figures within the movement?

Ivan Chtcheglov, a French political theorist, activist and poet,who wrote  ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ in 1953, at age nineteen. This proved to be an inspiration to both the Lettrist International and Situationist International. 

Guy Debord, a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, member of Letterist International, and founding member of the Situationist International. Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Debord.

Asger Jorn, a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. A founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA, and the Situationist International. He and Debord collaborated on the Psychogeographic Guide of Paris in 1957 and later The Naked City. They cut apart a typical map of Paris and repositioned the pieces of the map that corresponded with ‘stimulating’ parts of the city that were worthy of study.

Who/what inspired the movement? Formulary for a New Urbanism written by Ivan Chtcheglov served as inspiration to Debord and the Situationists. Psychogeography within art is tied to both Dada and Surrealism, one for its political undertones and often nonsensical results, and the other for attempting to channel the subconscious to create concepts of liveable spaces. The dérive was inspired by the french term flâneur (a man who saunters around observing society), and was a critical tool for understanding and developing the theory of Psychogeography.

Who became inspired by the movement? Psychogeography gained popularity yet again in the 1990s, with artists, writers and filmmakers such as Iain Sinclair and Patrick Keiller using the idea to create works based on exploring locations by walking. Richard Long created his artwork by continually walking, with the new concept that art could be the journey as well as the final result.

How could the ideas of the movement relate to your work?Psychogeography relates very strongly to the feelings produced by a specific place, in the case of my own research, the psychological response to the safety and relief provided by sanctuary.

[unusualyoung]

[photosyntax-derive]

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Earth Screaming by Esther Iverem

EcoArts on the Palouse (Inspired the idea for this project)

expedition to the chimacloud by Saya Woolfalk

Formulary for a New Urbanism by Ivan Chtcheglov

How To Draw Mushrooms On An Oscilloscope with Sound by Jerobeam Fenderson

How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene by Natasha Myers

How to Make a Spore Print by Caine Barlow

Mushroom Bloom Timelapse Set to Trippy Music by subwaysurfer

Notes Towards a Manifesto of the Biotariat by Stephen Collis

Questionnaire on the Psychogeography of Les Halles (Some field exercises inspired from here)

Starter Kit by Phil Smith

Theory of the Dérive (Inspired the idea for this project)

Walking by Linda Hogan

Watering Plants – ASMR by Claudia Paul

All photographs included as part of this project are my own, as are the uncredited poems.