Unit 10 - a Dérive
Talk about leaving it to the last minute. It's my problem, my lethargy, lack of motivation. So with virtually no time left, I had to get off my arse and set about completing my Unit 10 'artwork'.
I had done a lot of research about the Situationists for my Essay, and this brief had to be an outgrowth of that. This was hard, because I knew from my research that the Situationist idea was to destroy art itself, as part of a programme to transform society. A society without a bourgeoisie could not contain art as we know it now, since art itself is a bourgeois construction.
The obvious choice seemed to be the Dérive - the Situationist technique of semi-conscious wanderings, a pre-revolutionary way of experiencing the urban environment.
The Dérive these days is almost interchangeable with another originally situationist concept, Psychogeography. Plenty of self-proclaimed modern psychogeographers have made the activity an end in itself, free of any radical or revolutionary aspects.
When I looked into it, I found that Guy Debord (a key Situationist figure) had been scornful of the idea of it being too spontaneous - he saw chance as being naturally conservative. So a plan was in order. More research yielded many people using algorithms to conduct their derives. These are a series of repeated changes of direction - for example, 'first left' - 'first right' - 'second left' - 'repeat'. So that would be in mine.
Themes to explore:
Gentrification. It's something that has been a feature of Manchester of many years now, and I have been concious of it ever since my sojourn at Polytechnic in the early 1990s.
The Nuclear issue. Central Manchester has its own atomic bunker from the 1950s (very few people know about this). It ties in with my Unit 25 idea. The Sociology department at the MMU used it as a reference point in their own experiments.
The Hacienda. Anthony H Wilson's former nightclub, now yuppie flats. The name came from a Situationist essay, and Wilson had sought to use Situ ideas as well as accumulate their artworks, being the Bourgeois vampire that he is.
So those were my ingredients. I shot both consciously and unconsciously - shooting from the hip, without knowing how things would come out. There was a lot of repetition. In the end, the Dérive concentrated on the bunker and the surrounding area - Wilson will have to wait for another time.
Now I have to decide what to do with the resulting images.
I had done a lot of research about the Situationists for my Essay, and this brief had to be an outgrowth of that. This was hard, because I knew from my research that the Situationist idea was to destroy art itself, as part of a programme to transform society. A society without a bourgeoisie could not contain art as we know it now, since art itself is a bourgeois construction.
The obvious choice seemed to be the Dérive - the Situationist technique of semi-conscious wanderings, a pre-revolutionary way of experiencing the urban environment.
The Dérive these days is almost interchangeable with another originally situationist concept, Psychogeography. Plenty of self-proclaimed modern psychogeographers have made the activity an end in itself, free of any radical or revolutionary aspects.
When I looked into it, I found that Guy Debord (a key Situationist figure) had been scornful of the idea of it being too spontaneous - he saw chance as being naturally conservative. So a plan was in order. More research yielded many people using algorithms to conduct their derives. These are a series of repeated changes of direction - for example, 'first left' - 'first right' - 'second left' - 'repeat'. So that would be in mine.
Themes to explore:
Gentrification. It's something that has been a feature of Manchester of many years now, and I have been concious of it ever since my sojourn at Polytechnic in the early 1990s.
The Nuclear issue. Central Manchester has its own atomic bunker from the 1950s (very few people know about this). It ties in with my Unit 25 idea. The Sociology department at the MMU used it as a reference point in their own experiments.
The Hacienda. Anthony H Wilson's former nightclub, now yuppie flats. The name came from a Situationist essay, and Wilson had sought to use Situ ideas as well as accumulate their artworks, being the Bourgeois vampire that he is.
So those were my ingredients. I shot both consciously and unconsciously - shooting from the hip, without knowing how things would come out. There was a lot of repetition. In the end, the Dérive concentrated on the bunker and the surrounding area - Wilson will have to wait for another time.
Now I have to decide what to do with the resulting images.
posted by Unknown @ 10:06 pm
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