In this week’s workshop we were told about the concept of psychogeography, were the journey was more important than the destination. We had to travel by putting a conscious effort into our journey and about how we got from our starting point more than where we were actually going to end up. I thought this would be quite hard to do as I was fairly new to Leicester and had only stuck to routes that I knew, but I did like the idea of the unknown as I wanted to discover more places.
I have to say I was very excited by this and mine and Valerie’s first ideas were quite ambitious, even speaking about going to London and travelling based on Harry Potter locations and characters. After we settled down our first idea was to approach strangers in Leicester and get them to draw on tracing paper and we would then match these lines up with a map of Leicester and walk, this was based on a YouTube video we had seen. Due to time constraints and being unable to meet up on various occasions we started thinking of new ideas and after some research I found out about Luke Rhinehart a man who had used a dice to decide what he does on a daily basis. We liked this and decided to follow Rhinehart’s method of using dice to decide our journey. We decided to do our journey in Highcross shopping centre using 3 rolls to determine what shop we would end up in; first roll decided the floor odds bottom, even top; second roll decided the side odds left, even right and the third roll the number dictated how many shops we would walk to. I liked the project but I am also disappointed that we didn’t really travel to places we hadn’t been before.
After we had finished I was thinking about how we did our journey and I did like the approach we took and thought it was good but also nerve wrecking to take the thinking out of it and leave everything to something as simple as the roll of a dice, because of this uneasiness I am glad we went to familiar surroundings.
Overall I really enjoyed this project and I feel that sometimes as people we just follow the same routine without even thinking about it so it was nice to do something like this to be out of my comfort zone. However I think it would have been better if we had been in completely new surroundings but doing it for a few hours in familiar setting was more than enough and I do not understand how Rhinehart managed to do it for over 40 years and let it decided the fate of practically everything he did and he still continues to.
References
Weiner, M. (2011). Rolling with the Dice Man. Available: http://www.sabotagetimes.com/people/the-dice-man/. Last Accessed 1st Jan 2012
