Week 5--- 2/4

• Class visits the "Public Space" photo assignment homework.
• Watch The Situationist International. 

Homework Assigned--Due Week 6:

You will receive a letter grade for each assignment.

• Read Handout #3 (Simmel and Debord) and complete the accompanying worksheet. Print and bring both documents with you to next class meeting (Week6).
• Go downtown, and take a 30 minute Derive as discussed during class. Be prepared with notes on our next class meeting, to discuss where your Derive led you and how it made you feel to purposefully "get lost". 

One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive, a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll. 

In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.

But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science, despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself, provides psychogeography with abundant data.