The Situationist International (this is a punk rock introduction from 1984, published in Maximum Rock 'n' Roll), a group of artists, writers and filmmakers from Europe, were active as a group from 1957-1968. Their influence extended beyond those confines, though, as Greil Marcus outlined in
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Ken Knabb has released online his indispensable
Situationist International Anthology, and has collected many other crucial texts, including many about
San Francisco Situationist groups, at
The Bureau of Public Secrets. A more recent appropriation of Situationist rhetoric and strategies can be found in
Ulysses Speaks (previous MeFi link
here), the organ of the DC punk rock band
Nation of Ulysses. More information and Situationist repositories
here and (including a detailed timeline)
here.
posted by OmieWise
on Jul 19, 2005 -
27 comments
The
Situationists famously had their own ideas about cities, and about how to city them; in particular, they held forth the derive, or aimless drift, as the ideal way to encounter and make sense of urban place. It's easy to caricature the derive as an essentially passive mode of experience, but it was intended to be
anything but: a playful, lively, engaged, and above all social act.
Now that cities are where most of us live, for better or
worse, and we have the ability to document our travels through these conurbations and
share them over the Web, might it be safe to say that Situationist psychogeography has gone mainstream? That the moblogged drift, in fact, takes things to an entirely new level, by making the city and its flows not merely more
legible to ourselves, but
visible to a potentially global audience?
posted by adamgreenfield
on Sep 23, 2004 -
39 comments
