Department of Audiovisual Arts

This paper has been based on the homonymous talk [Greek] I delivered as part of the symposium 'Places of Feminism/Towards a New Cartography' which took place on the State Museum of Contemporary Art of Thessaloniki in Greece. An extended version has been translated in English.

"Throughout the 20th century, urban walking has been regarded as an aesthetic practice and critical tool with great potential. In the ever-changing city, socio-economical transformations indicate various changes in its emotional attitude as well. The emergence of mobility plays an important role in our everyday life with various terminals, platforms and thresholds becoming our new spatio-sensorial vocabulary, as in the case of the Tube. Can such spaces act as urban samples for further emotional consideration? Based on the concepts of flaneur and psychogeography and considering past metaphors of perceiving the urban, this paper investigates the potential of a hybrid artistic walking method in order to set the foundations for an exploration of emotional geography of Tube stations. To achieve this, it sets up a dialogue between metaphors, contemporary practices as well as it highlights the potential of such spaces of transition by reflecting on the spatial features, the sensorial and in-between experience. On the final section, this paper embarks on a speculative approach of hybrid walking in the London Tube, based on an author’s idea, in order to illustrate potential tactics of revealing the emotional geographies of these spaces.

Citation:

Psarras, Bill. (2013) ‘Hybrid Walking as Art: Art Practices and Approaches on Revealing the Emotional Geographies of Tube Stations’, Proceed-ings of 2nd Hybrid City ‘Subtle Revolutions’ Inter-national Conference, 23-25 May 2013, (eds.) Charitos, D., Theona, I., Dragona, D. Rizopoulos, H. and Meimaris, M. The University of Research Institute of Applied Communication, Athens, Greece. pp. 415-422. ISBN 978-960-99791-1-5

"Authors: Bill Psarras, Stacey Pitsillides, Anastasios Maragiannis


""Have you ever sat in front of your computer, looking at the little box with the word search next to it? This seemingly innocent box demanding your attention, demanding to be responsive to your every demand. Have you ever tried to deny it’s pleading emptiness and instead to go on a journey of discovery, charting new and unknown digital territories? During 20th century ‘walking practice’ was used extensively in the avant-garde movement as a critical method to challenge the authoritarian and capitalistic character of the city. Moving through the concept of flâneur who goes on an ethnographic journey (‘botanizing on the asphalt’: Benjamin, 1973), to the distinctly political implications of dérive, arriving at the comparison of ‘resistive walking’ in the physical environment which has a direct correlation to the resistive practices of online non-navigation.
An online psychogeographical dérive could be a form of digital resistance to the various ways information is being dictated to us from contemporary authoritarian rules and search engines. The current information architecture directs the citizen of the online space to find only that, which is highest rated, rather than allowing the tacit discovery of the obscured. The effective search limits the qualities of that which ‘I’ am searching for and in this way pushes our consciousness through a computation landscape discounting the emotional, the affective and the discovery that excites and stimulates our curious being.
This paper seeks to explore whether the psychogeographic technique of dérive can be used to break out of the directed pattern of ‘search to find’ in the online space following from Lev Manovich’s concept of the Poetics of Navigation (The Language of New Media, 2000: 223)."""

This paper focus on the aesthetic and artistic aspects of walking in the city by placing its interest on a relationship between metaphors, senses and actions. It pays attention on the sensorial qualities of metaphors ascribed on the flaneur, the city and the walking. It aims to delineate the potential profile of a contemporary artist-flaneur of the 21st century city, whose attentiveness on the emerging sensescapes and emotional geographies, reveals the potential of walking as sensing framework with poetic implications.

Panel Chair: Professor Thea Dukes (University of Amsterdam)

"Anger can be perceived as a kind of alchemy. The rude and primitive is transformed to something useful and intellectual. The artistic perception acts like a human cell. Elevator pushes this line to the edges of this cell by seeking for a way of connection between the meanings of beauty and disgusting, between the known and the unknown, between the flower and the thorn, between outer an inner – ‘eso’. Why anger then? 'Elevator' is an immersive/interactive audio-visual installation of provoked, expressed and converted human anger to artistic visual output."

(Bill Psarras / Excerpt from Elevator DVD documentary)

Concept-Creation: Bill Psarras
BA Thesis ‘ Elevator ‘, 2008-2009, Ionian University, Greece
Copyright ©  Bill Psarras
Language: Greek
Abstract: English and Greek

Supervisors
Associate prof. Andreas Floros (Programming, Sound)
Prof. Marianna Strapatsakis (Art)