Contemporary psychogeography
CONFLUX 2006 - “the annual NYC festival for contemporary psychogeography where international artists, technologists, urban adventurers and the public put investigations of everyday city life into practice on the streets” - starts tomorrow in Brooklyn, NY and runs until Sunday. The project line-up looks great, but here are a couple that sound interesting, and can be reproduced in your own neck of the woods.
On Friday you can join Caitlin Berrigan and Michael McBean in mapping the smells of Brooklyn–and if you’re not in Brooklyn, why not form your own neighbourhood Smelling Committee?
“Inspired by the olfactory bravado of the original Smelling Committee, we will lead an historical simulacrum of the 1891 adventure that will invite reflection upon the ephemeral, odiferous fabric of Brooklyn neighborhoods. We use our eyes to navigate geographies, but it is our sense of smell that ties us most tautly to our emotional memories. Histories of New York are ripe with scents and stinks—the trek of the Smelling Committee will attempt to chart a small portion of this heritage as a collective endeavor…”
Also on Friday, you can join Ryan Griffis and the Temporary Travel Office’s continuing explorations of parking lots and utopias:
“Parking Public is an investigation into the realities of utopian thought as materialized in the mundane and pragmatic spaces of parking lots. Parking lots, one of the most visible, yet overlooked, artifacts of American mobility reveal the concrete space required to store the supposed tools of utopian ideals . . . For Conflux 2006, The TTO will offer a guided tour of parking in the Brooklyn area that will also serve as a participatory mapping of personal utopias upon the topography of property development.”
See also: A Brief History of Parking: The Life and After-life of Paving the Planet By Jane Holtz Kay
If you’re not in Brooklyn you can still document your own parking lot images and location online by uploading photos and describing your personal visions of utopian destinations.
And of course, if you are in Brooklyn, don’t miss the many site-specific projects, including Mark Shepard’s Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit project, Alison Sant’s TRACE project, and tours of The City Reliquary and its awesome community collections!