Maybe you know Kirklees pretty well, or hardly at all. Whatever, wouldn’t it be brilliant if you could take that auto-pilot walk to work, that desultory drag round the shops or the routine trip to your Nan’s and turn it into a journey of discovery? What if you encountered new places, people or feelings, just doing what you’ve always done – whether real or imagined? Then you might well be having a psychogeographic experience.

Psychogeography is a way thinking about how environments might affect the emotions and behaviours of individuals in conscious and unconscious ways, but it’s also a practical tool. The practice is psychogeographical walking, also known as the derive/drift, which is a way of departing from the usual mode of walking for work or leisure as a way to creatively and playfully explore different places. Thus derives/drifts are different to a casual walk or a stroll because the aims are to explore what places we are drawn to and discouraged from. There are techniques we can deploy to open up these experiences, and they often involve chance and spontaneity.

By doing psychogeography, by walking across places and spaces in a different way, we may learn three new things: About the places themselves, about ourselves and how we relate to these particular spaces, and about space and place in general with possibility of seeing a glimmer of what’s really going on there.

This is what Huddersfield Psychogeography Network does, through representing our experiences in various written, visual and audible forms and through creating walks and other events.

We are the organisers of the 4th World Congress of Psychogeography in Huddersfield, Dewsbury and Marsden on 6,7 & 8 September 2019.

View my website http://4wcop.org/