Psycho Geography? on the trail of the monster Frankenstein is full of walking, stalking and tracking: through Alpine landscapes, the backstreets of Ingoldstadt and the bourgeois neighbourhoods of Geneva. This performance lecture combines psychogeographical theory, walking as document and literary context to follow in the footsteps of Frankenstein. Look through the lens of Shelley’s novel to find the creature and his creator lurking around a corner near you….

How can form be used to represent or respond to place? This walkshop and soundshot brings together individual, interpretive experience with a performance-based, participatory approach to written text. This exercise has been developed by the author from ice-breaker workshops with writers who have no previous experience of sharing their creative work. The article provides a theoretical framework for the exercise, with an account of its use at A Forum on the Art of Participation, University of Kent, May 2016.

The mobile phone has become part of our everyday lives with astonishing speed. Over four billion people now have access to mobile phones, and this number keeps increasing. Mobile media technologies shape how we communicate with each other, and relate to the world. This raises questions about their influence on identity. Medium-specific properties and user-practices challenge the idea that we understand ourselves through stories. It is proposed that the notion of play sheds new light on how technologies shape identities. The (...) mobile phone mediates identities on four play levels: we play on the mobile, with the mobile, through the mobile, and at the same time we are played by the mobile. Mobile media bring new freedom of movement. Yet at the same time they constrict us. In this dialectic we become moving circles. (shrink)

By observing the mediating role of Pomarańczowa Alternatywa [Orange Alternative], the Polish artistic-activist formation of the 80s and 90s, this paper aims to determine the properties, values and ideals that make a piece of art a public act that can engage people from different social groups in play, and can allow them to reveal their self-determining agency in light of social change. Within the system of varying degrees of social permission, art should allow for the transition from the realm of (...) the “unofficial” to the realm of the “forbidden,” and should facilitate a transformation from the realm of thought to the realm of action. Art introduces an element of play into the sphere of collective behavior, and is a bridge over dichotomous social and political forces. (shrink)

In this paper we emphasize the need for a multidisciplinary approach to support the urban and territorial research; it can contribute to the knowledge of the area and city with the aim of direct transformations and future development. Therefore, we need to acquire sophisticated tools and talk simpler language and insightful in order to respond to the social demand for local knowledge. We have to study a new paradigm to understand social phenomena; the old perspectives of urban sociology, but also (...) planning and analysis of territorial systems, is today replaced by an integrated view in which we do not evaluate and not only analyze the more specific objects of the individual disciplines but a number of variables and components in synergy. (shrink)

In response to calls to forget and unthink photography this article considers the computational environment and its consequences for the image making. What is there to know about images that are networked and generated with data processing techniques rather than with light and chemistry? How to analyse images and read what they are and what they represent, beyond what is visible in the picture? The article argues that glitches while aesthetically capturing errors in the machine point to broader conditions of (...) image making revealing systemic errors and not only its momentary technical failures. To explore digital images as affective phenomena to be sensed, the article looks at how glitch and its operations have been used by artists to generate digital images, and most importantly how they reveal computational systems as technical objects and affective infrastructures where discrimination is not an error but part of the system. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

By their nature, heritage sites often require constraints and controls on pedestrian access. Yet the freedoms of walking – and the attendant pleasures of pausing, ruminating, peering, questioning, imagining and narrating – are vital to the public experience of these sites. In this paper I will discuss how psychogeographical approaches, particularly those embraced by practitioners of counter tourism, can be used to ameliorate issues of access and develop imaginative responses to physical and less tangible heritage. Since 2015 I have been (...) developing the use of creative and attentive walking practices at heritage sites from the perspective of a psychogeographer and curious visitor, rather than a member of the archaeological community. This includes work with English Heritage at sites in East Kent, an HLF-funded project ‘Walking Heritage’, and ‘O what we ben! And what we come to!’, an interactive walking project mapping post-apocalyptic literary landscapes onto medieval and Roman sites in Canterbury. Drawing on these case studies, I will discuss how walking with psychogeographical attitude can be encouraged, creating playful experiences and an enriched engagement with heritage places and spaces. (shrink)

A parallel reading of ten powerful works of conceptual and analytical originality yields a novel epistemological method based on the possibility of automated experimentation in engineering and architecture. An initial protocol for Parametric Epistemic Things, a particular kind of assemblage (as postulated by DeLanda following Deleuze & Guattari) that builds on Rheinberger’s ideas of Epistemic Things, is outlined and conceptualised to allow for the possibility of such automation. Following the interpretations of fragments from the texts, a discussion examines future potentials (...) and identifies some of the conceptual and pragmatic thresholds to overcome in order to leverage the proposal and situate it within a general theory of science and research, while attempting to answer the question at the heart of this essay: what is the role of parametric epistemic things in contemporary evolutionary architecture? (shrink)

Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game. Guy Debord In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.Mary Poppins1This article, formerly known to us as “Citi...