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Introduction.
In this dissertation I aim to look at the story behind my piece of work. A summary of what fanzine culture is about, which ties in with the aspects I have utilised and why this was a perfect vehicle to give the information back, to my chosen audience. The Site/Fanzine then becoming global, through the postal service. I will run through events in the order they happened – leading to the idea, planning and creating of a fanzine as my project, with a specific audience unravelling out of the journey itself, then receiving my project in the final chapter.
The story unfolds – like a journey or ‘Derive’[i] This I intend to weave into my critical analysis of my work. At the beginning of my journey, it did not occur to me as
Psychogeography [ii] mapping. There is a correlation between what I did and the following story. My markers at each stage being clues to working out a man’s life, from its end backwards using the clues he has left behind. A crucial part to the process was outside interventions. In order to find my information, I needed to utilise the quickest resources relevant to the questions I had. The Internet was invaluable. Prior to this mystery, which I will explain in the following chapters, I had not had a vast amount of experience using computers and their technologies. These technologies being added to our lives in quick succession to each other also plays a role in this story. We as society quickly drop the old to get to grips with the new. I intend to examine how this has affected what is now counted as worthless to one person, can be another persons gold. The Journey I took physically, as well as mentally, turned into an enormous learning curve that has taught me a lot about myself and other people’s attitudes. The audience unravelling itself, in the course of this project as well as the piece I produced. The following chapters represent a walk through the process/journey, as if a third person were there. I hope to convey it as a mystery/story unfolding in the way it happened to me. My work has involved hundreds of phone calls and e-mails, not to mention countless individual meetings with people. To include everything would be impossible. To aid you in the events that occurred, I have included a time line diagram at the beginning of this writing.
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Then, looking back over, come to the conclusion why I undertook it. With the Fanzine being my art piece and how its creation will or will not affect the audience, as well as me.
[i] La Dérive, a French concept meaning an aimless walk, probably through city streets, that follows the whim of the moment. French philosopher and Situationist Guy Debord used this idea to try and convince readers to revisit the way they looked at urban spaces. Rather than being prisoners to their daily route and routine, living in a complex city but treading the same path every day, he urged people to follow their emotions and to look at urban situations in a radical new way. This led to the notion that most of our cities were so thoroughly unpleasant because they were designed in a way that either ignored their emotional impact on people, or indeed tried to control people through their very design.
Above extract from; Dérive http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9rive
[ii] Psychogeography is "The study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals", according to the article Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in Situationniste Internationale No. 1 (1958) History
Psychogeography was developed by the Lettrist International, as part of their system of unitary urbanism. The term has since been used by many others.
Disagreements have led to many variations in the practice which have included the following forms: Debordian; Literary; Generative or Algorithmic; and Quantum. Various factions claim to be or accuse each other of being: academic; occultist; avant-garde; proletarian; or revolutionary.
During the 1980s and 90s while situationist theory became popular in avant-garde, neoist and revolutionary spheres, many psychogeographical groups emerged, developing the praxis in various ways. Psychogeography has since also become a device used in performance art and English literature.
In May, 2003, psychogeographers gathered in New York for the first Psy-Geo-Conflux, an annual event dedicated to current artistic investigations in psychogeography. This was timed to coincide with a Talk:Cartographic Congress in Limehouse, London. The event was held again in New York in May 2004; and as PsyGeo-ProvFlux in Providence RI in June 2005.
In 2004 Joseph Hart wrote that "psychogeography" was "a slightly stuffy term that's been applied to a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities. Psychogeography includes just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."[1] extract taken from; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychogeographical.