You and a small group of collaborators will draw upon course readings, outside research and fieldwork to compose a unique map related to Chicago. Your map can serve as a representation of part of the city, the city as a whole, or it can be devoted to an entirely different way of locating/understanding the Windy City. Look through some of the map links posted on the blog for ideas and inspiration.
In addition to the production of your map (digital or ‘analog’ maps are both acceptable), your group will give a short presentation where you will explain your map and reflect upon both your findings and your experience putting it together. Before working on this assignment, please make sure to give yourself enough time to participate in meetings with your peers and/or group fieldwork.
The main things I'm looking for are as follows:
1) Relate your map to some specific readings & concepts from class. In other words, provide some rationale for how & why you are doing what you are doing. This should be more substantial than a loose analogy, a quick reference, and so on.
2) Have some fun with this. Try your best to do something that is both creative and challenging.
3) Make sure your presentation is coherent and organized...I'm not expecting anything formal, but don't just stand in front of the room and be like "Uh....yeah, so this is....uh.....our map, and stuff." Ok?
One possibility for your paper: Group Dérive
Before you take part in a dérive with your group, you should read the following excerpt as well as some of these articles linked below
"Drifting with the Situationist International" (Excerpt)
"An example of a situation-creating technique is the dérive. The dérive is the first step toward an urban praxis. It is a stroll through the city by several people who are out to understand the "psychogeographical articulation of the modern city." The strollers attempt an interpretive reading of the city, an architectural undcrstanding. They look at the city as a special instance of repressed desires. At the same time, they engage in "playful reconstructive behavior." Together they turn the city around. They see in the city unifying and empowering possibilities in place of the present framentation and pacification. This "turning around" or détournment is a key strategic concept of the Situationists. Détournment is a dialectical tool. It is an "insurrectionalstyle" by which a past form is used to show its own inherent untruth-- an untruth masked by ideology. It can be applied to billboards, to written texts, to films, to cartoons, etc., as well as to city spaces. Marx used it when he "turned Hegel on his head." He used the dialectic in the study of history to expose the ideological nature of Hegel's idealism. The Situationists use détoumement to demonstrate the scandalous poverty of everyday life despite the plenty of commodities. They attempted to demonstrate the contrast between what life presently is and what it could be. They wanted to rupture the spell of the ideology of our commodified consumer society so that our repressed desires of a more authentic nature could come forward. The situation is based on liberated desires rather than alienated ones. What these desires are cannot be stated a priori. They will emerge in the revolutionary process of situation-creation, of détournment . Presumably, communality, unification, and public urban space will emerge as more desirable than commodification, fragmentation, and privatization."
- Report on the Construction of Situations (particularly the last two sections)
- Theory of the Dérive
- Sadie Plant on Psychogeography and the Dérive
- Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles
- Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program
- Thomas F. McDonough, “Situationist Space,” October, Vol. 67, (Winter, 1994), pp. 58-77.
