As we merge into a shared global culture, with ever more unified sources of information to base our choices on, it is more and more difficult to experience something unique, both when traveling, and when closer to home.
Join us this Friday and Saturday, September 24 and 25, to collectively create new ways of looking at the world around you, to allow you, and others, to explore public space differently.
Join us on September 24 and 25, for our two day hybrid workshop, Beat a Situationist. At his own game.
Sign up for “Beat a Situationist…”Born out of the desire to counter capitalist control of public space, the Situationists, after the Second World War, devised ways to agitate against external control of the public sphere, and to bring back the initiative of exploration to a structurally personal approach.
The concept of the dérive, a loosely guided meander, typically based on ambiguously defined tasks, or nudges, was one of the ideas that came out of this counter movement.
After several analogue implementations of the dérive, at the beginning of the previous decade, several digital approaches were constructed, including the mobile app Dérive app, which presents you with a series of tasks, designed to explore your urban environment.
Dérive app went on to win the World Summit Awards in 2012, and has expanded to allow its users to create their own decks of task cards, and to share them with others, through that providing a framework for turning urban exploration into a kind of game.
More recently, a regularly used term to describe these ‘decks’ of task cards, is to refer to them as walking scores.
Blake Morris and Morag Rose, joint café guests earlier this year, and Sonia Overal, also a recent café guest, and responsible for #DistanceDrifts, all deploy walking scores in their work.
This Friday and Saturday, September 24 and 25, together with Dérive app, Cona in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and Pro Arts in Oakland (California), and during both Sound Walk September and Sound Walk City · prelude, walk · listen · create is hosting a two-day hybrid workshop, which you can attend, physically, in Oakland or Ljubljana, or remote, from the comfort of your own home, where you can create your own walking score, and join in the movement to take back control of public space.
During this workshop, you’ll explore your own urban environment, and you will collectively, with the other participants of the workshop, create a deck of task cards, or walking score, designed for exploration and discovery.
The hands-on elements of the workshop, in line with Sound Walk September, will lean on using your senses to explore your surroundings, and will have a focus on listening.
In addition, over the course of the two days, you will listen to six speakers from three continents, who all will discuss different aspects of the use, and abuse, of public space, very much in the spirit of the ideas put forward, half a century ago, by the Situationists.
Check the event page for the full program, and more information, and to get yourself a ticket.
Here are the speakers:
Natalia Ivanova Mount (US) · Chris Byrnes (Spain)
Turning IP law against its intended purpose
John Wild (UK)
Situationist practice in the digital city
Anja Podreka (Slovenia)
To create a space for the river
Cecilia Quiles (Argentina)
The visual language of protest and resistance
Michael Kwet (US)
Safe and smart cities in an age of digital colonialism
All speakers will address immensely relevant subjects in today’s hyper-capitalist world; not only discussing the problems we face, politically and culturally, but also providing frameworks and suggestions for how to deal with them.
The Situationists devised ways to take back control of public space, which now, more than ever, are under control of big business, with the state enforcing ever stronger constraints.
Meanwhile, as individuals, when exploring an unknown, or known, location, we crave for a unique experience that can not be replicated.
Our workshop addresses all of the above, in a collaborative, global, hands-on context, where you’re not only going to learn something, you’re also going to have fun.
Join us on Friday 24 and Saturday 25 September. Sign up now!
Sign up for “Beat a Situationist…”Meanwhile, if you appreciate our work, you can become a supporting member. If you sign up as a ‘gold’ member for one year, before Saturday, we are not only grateful, we also throw in a ticket for this event.
