Inspiration of the Week - The Situationists

So today's post is going to be slightly different as I am not looking at a specific project or artist but more looking into a theory and a movement.

The Situationists, or the The Situationist International was a European organisation who stood for social revolution, this group included artists, theorists and other intellectuals.

The reason that I am looking into this group is that they created a theory know as dérive or 'drifting' which is  part of psychogeography. This theory looks at how we explore our environment without much planning or thinking, you rather go where your mind takes you. I think that this could be an interesting aspect to add to my work as I was thinking of going out into places and leaving my 'mark' and I could use this as an inspiration on how to go about it.

In my non-place project I did look into this but didn't really do much with it as it more or less just opened the door into mapping and how people look at the places (or so-called non-places) around them.

These theories have also influenced apps called Dérive and Drift, with the latter also being available card based.

NB - all photographs here have been taken from these sites
https://libcom.org/thought/situationists-an-introduction
http://fog.ccsf.edu/~dcox/EMU/S.I.html
http://showmethewatermelon.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/theory-of-derive.html
http://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/05/situationists-and-occupy-abai.html

I do not own any of the pictures on this post.

That's all for now, next post will be an update so stay tuned!
byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeeee
Róisín -x

Chapter 1 - The Inspiration

So the first part of this process was the inspiration for my final piece. It began when really I didn't now what I was doing, my initial idea was to look at where teenagers hang about with friends ect. What I did was map out what I remembered my school being from memory and labelling the areas that we spent our time in.

This reminded me of an exercise I did in another class last year:

In this class we were given a map of the college and we were to change it however we wanted to. The lesson itself was inspired by the Situationist International organisation and their theory of dérive and psychgeography.

So after this I began looking at different maps and how I could make or draw them.

I also began looking for official maps that I could use or edit in some way. I found one of a non-place that I had looked at in some of my work because I was looking at where teenagers spend their time, and this is a common place in my local area for teenagers to go drinking in.

And so next came the idea - tune in next time to find out what that idea was :P

byyyyyeeeeeeee

Róisín -x

Journey coming soon

Hey so I am aware that I haven't posted in a while and you may be slightly in the dark as to where non-place went. Well fret not, I shall be posting what happened after the blog posts in a series of chapters documenting the process of my final piece. As a quick sneak peack spoiler, I went ahed and made a light box that was slightly different to my maquette, and this time it actually worked! Stay tuned for those and you will find out what my final piece turned out to be :)
I am also planning on starting up a new series of posts called "Inspiration of the Week" where I will talk about a new artist that I have discovered.

So until then
byyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeee
Róisín-x

Non-places

So after our hand in of the pencils brief we were then given our new brief called 'Non-Places' which is a philosophical theory on what defines a place. I'm not going to go into too much detail about that seeing is it is an extremely deep concept which you could argue about for hours, so I'll just let you google it and make up your own mind. :P

So I'm kind of going between a few ideas at the moment, but I think the one I might try and stick to is my idea of looking at where youths go to hang out as normally these would be classed as non-places, like walls and stairwells etc. By them choosing to sit in these areas, they then change the definition of these non-places into places. (This brief is so confusing) I also have considered looking into social media as well, but I'm not sure if this was widen the topic too much. I might also branch out into looking at how as children the places we go are determined by our parents mostly, and as adults we tend to only ever go to "places" like work, home, bars etc.

Anyway now I'm just going to spam you with my sketchbook pages that I have so far. ;)

So that is where I am at with this project hopefully I can get some form of clear direction but I'm planning on talking to some of my lecturers on Monday to help give me some focus,

so until then
byye :)

Róisín - x