Psychogeography Project

Psychogeography is the idea about finding out how the environment we live in shapes our behaviour. "The Study of specific affects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals" (Guy Debord, 1958). Pychogeography shows how humans shape the environment they live in and also how the environment shapes them. Whilst travelling, we see many things which we would either class as every day things we see or there are things that we would never notice. Considering these things can gives us a sense of feeling of the area or place we are in. The derive which means 'drifting' in French is a term which means going to places unplanned. When we take a different route to our normal ones it allows us to explore the area around us and discover new places. If you pay more attention while on your everyday routes, you will notice more things about the place where you are. These could be small things like a sign or a poster or larger things like a person that travels at exactly the sae time as you everyday. There are many different Psychogeography techniques that can be explored, however I didn't really understand how it all worked until we did our own.

At first we didnt know how to start our journey, but then we came up with the idea of covering more than one route as we realised that in Leicester all routes to town ended up at the Clocktower. We chose to focus on the four main routes that led to the clocktower. As we walked the routes we decided that we would take pictures or make sketches of interesting things that we hadn't noticed on our journey before. We also decided to take pictures of iconic buildings that would help people recognise where they are in town.

We presented our route to the class in the form of a map on a board where we highlighted our chosen routes. We then stuck our images around the board and used pins to locate their exact point on the map. We also produced a video of one of the routes that was taken. Below is an image of our map.

We also put the pictures we took into a slideshow for each route. Below are all four of them.

Route 1


Route 2


Route 3


Route 4