engleski

The Alternative Urbanism of Psychogeography in the Mediated City

Adopting the perspective of ‘non-media-centric media studies’ as my method, which argues that media only gain meanings in actual material and embodied contexts, in this paper I explore the constitution of the experiential space of daily walking through a focus on a particular media- city development, the increasing presence of various screens in public spaces (information panels, outdoor advertising, media façades). I ponder the unanticipated relevance of psychogeography as a way of understanding how people negotiate ordinariness in spaces that seem to be changing at different rates and scales, from the more contained and repetitive alterations like blinking screens to broader waves of regeneration involving transformations of entire landscapes. I delve into records made by three anonymous passersby of their walking through the Old Street Roundabout in London, an informal gateway to an area of the East End, which has recently been rediscovered by international capital. Extending my project on ‘everyday encounters with public screens’ , I particularly examine my participants’ (non)interactions with a large advertising and news screen that faces a pedestrian path. Participants’ mobile records of that mediated environment demonstrated that, first, even though mediated cities make evident an unprecedented pressure of globalised, service- based capitalism on people’s lifeworlds (increasing amounts of virtual spaces require daily integration into or exclusion from embodied and material spaces), daily uses of city spaces remain as differential as ever. This was particularly evident in the fact that my participants skilfully turned to and from the screen in question to deal with immediate street situation—s like moving through the crowded, lonely or unfamiliar environment, rather than to read its messages fully and attentively. Second, it is not only media sceneries but also people’s experiential horizons that are spatially constituted and thus require spatial analysis. Spatial design (organisation of the roundabout), representations (screen imagery) and practices (moving and looking around) together produce ‘multiplicity’ for which, I argue, psychogeography has considerable and unappreciated relevance. Drawing inspiration from Marx’s definition of radical practice as the will ‘to grasp matters by the root’ , and from the fact that invisible aspects of everyday life (the routine of living), are only available for discussion in displaced form, I submit that the integration of psychogeography into conventional urban and media analysis, may be the most radical method of all for understanding, and changing the city.

space ; power ; situationism ; media ; city

nije evidentirano