“ We’ve been lead to believe that we’re either going to work, or going to consume ...”
Raphael Zarka
Public spaces where people can meet freely, have been reduced to the occasional park or bench on the street, and replaced by places of consumption, and we are losing the idea of the greek ‘agora’, a place of meeting and debate, and the basis of democracy.
The visual language of cities has now essentially become aimed towards consumption: Shop fronts, billboards, logos, etc…
and with globalisation, these aesthetics are becoming increasingly homogenised. This means that cities around the world, and the experiences we have of them, are starting to become similar. Everyone seems to do the same things and go to the same places.
Drift is a translation of the French worh ‘Dérive’. It was first used by the Lettrist Internationale in the 1940’s and later by the Situationsist to describe the act of psychogeography: an unplanned journey through urban space, on which the subtle visual language of the city and its architecture subconsciously directs the traveller, enabling hime to engage in an entirely new and authentic experience.
I conducted such experiments in Falmouth which lead me to create a publication composed of three books:
TALK.
LOOK.
PLAY.
Contribution by Richard Fussey, Sally Finnigan, Joe Baker, Jack Bardwell, Timothy Donaldson, Rose Hatcher
