Psychogeodata

Psychogeodata, 2011, Python code.

Psychogeography is a set of techniques for defamiliarizing the landscape, particularly the urban landscape. It is a way of resisting and critiquing the historically, culturally and politically imposed reality of the built environment.

The town and tube maps used by previous psychogeographers have been replaced in modern experiences of the landscape by Geodata, a mesh of points joined by the lines of streets and accompanied by tagged information describing them for human and machine use. Combining Psychogeography and Geodata gives us Psychogeodata.

Geodata is tied to the logic of Googlization, of making the world rational and tractable for machines within the economy. Its positioning between commerce and consumer makes it ideal raw material for Situationist-inspired ironization.

Taking the inhuman logic of Geodata as the basis for Psychogeography allows us to use Graph Theory to examine the landscape mathematically. The randomness, unfamiliarity and conceptual slippage that this provides us with can intensify historical strategies of Dérive.

You can find out more in these blog posts:

Psychogeodata (1/3)

Psychogeodata (2/3)

Psychogeodata (3/3)

And you can get the code here.