Psychogeography

Prior to the campaign mentioned in the previous post, one of our earlier tasks this year was to create a psychogeography project. This was one of my favourite tasks this year.
Psychogeography is the study of the emotional and psychological effects of our environment. This involves going out on a dérive (French for "to drift") which is to explore an environment you may be unfamilar with, with no pre-determined destination, with only chance and coincidence as a guide. The concept itself was introduced in 1955 by Guy Debord who defined it as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals".
For this project we were to get into groups. Again, I worked with Kate, Kelly and Dale. We then looked into different methods and ideas in order to come up with our own particular dérive. As none of us were from Leicester, apart from Dale, Leicester was relatively unknown and unexplored to us. Eventually we came up with the idea to roll a die to determine our destination. The way we did this was to catch a bus, after purchasing a day ticket, and then roll the die. Whatever number the die came up with was the number of stops we would wait before getting off the bus and catching the next one we could find.
Our first bus was from the city centre. Upon catching it we rolled the die and funnily enough it only came up with '1'. This meant we only moved a short way before we had to depart from the bus. The next available bus stop was at the train station, where we caught the 54. We rolled the die again, which this time gave us the number '6'. This brought us into a completely unknown area to myself and we waited a very, very long time for the next available bus. The next available bus happened to be the 54 again which we caught and got off after 3 or 4 stops, which brought us to an area between Thurnby Lodge and Evington. The next bus was the 38A. After five stops we coincidentally ended up in the neighbourhood Dale grew up in. This was completely by chance and very surprising. Armed with our video camera, which we had been using to record the journey, Dale entered his mum's house, where he used to live, while Kate, Kelly and I waited at the bus stop for the next available bus.
The final bus, the 38, took us back into town and thus completed our dérive. Our next task was to edit together the footage into a video, using Windows Movie Maker, to present to the class the next week. We chose to speed up the footage where we were on the bus, using a video effect that can only be described as "sketchy" - this was to convey the fact that we only had a relatively sketchy idea of Leicester itself and the bus trip in which we were taking. The song we used was 'King of the Road' as buses in Leicester seem to dominate the traffic.
We were happy with our video and confidently presented it to the class the next week.