Dérive in Amsterdam

‘Dérive: A mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of transient passage through varied ambiances.’ Guy Debord & The Situationist International (1967) 

​‘In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities and all other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn to the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.’ (Bridger, 2015, p 230)

Last Thursday and Friday (16 & 17 June) I attended the Visualizing the Street Conference, hosted in Amsterdam by the ASCA Cities Project. Alongside my colleague Jeremy Knox, I presented a methodology for investigating the city that drew on multimodality and mobilities (including Kress & Parcher (2007)), combined with the growing scholarly interest in urban walking (including Richardson (2016)). Our methodology involved undertaking an unrehearsed dérive through the city where we set out to gather aural and visual data that would provide opportunities for thinking about our relationship with the city. This methodology involved arriving early in Amsterdam ahead of the conference in order to undertake our walk around the city, before reflecting on the data and then pulling it together into something coherent ahead of our presentation the next day. Perhaps the most interesting part of our approach was that, for the most part, our route through the city was guided by the sights and sounds that grabbed our attention, reflected in the video below. 

As we reflected on our experience in the hours following the dérive, one of the ideas to emerge was that while we might see ourselves as freely exploring the city, our path was also shaped by weather, building work, hunger and also self-preservation as we attempted to negotiate a safe route between bikes, trams, mopeds and canals. We became part of the city's network, subject to its flows and varying rhythms: with more time for reflection we would like to have explored how sociomateriality and posthumanism might differently theorise our approach.

Another idea to emerge in conversation was the importance of paying attention to the aural character of our environment. As the acoustician Trevor Cox has recognised (2014), for a long time we have heavily privileged what we see over what we hear, meaning that the aural character of our environment is under-theorised and under-considered. In our approach we attempted to turn up the volume on the city, as we simultaneously gathered sounds and images on our phones. When we later came to review this data it became clear that focusing on a single mode sometimes provided an incomplete or at times misleading representation of the city. At the same time, by looking beyond the visual we gained a more complete appreciation of our surroundings in the moment that we gathered our data, or as I put it during our conference presentation:

Sights and sounds come together in concert and collision, talking to us about the complexity and fluid nature of the city with its different rhythms. By bringing image and sound together our gaze extends beyond the edge of what is shown in our viewfinder: we are able to hear the invisible and see the silent. 

Here are the slides from our presentation, although unfortunately without the accompanying field recordings that we played to accompany our discussion.

References:

• Bridger, A.J. (2015). Psychogeography, Antipsychologies and the Question of Social Change. In T. Richardson (Ed) Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. pp.227-240
• Cox, T. (2014). Sonic Wonderland: A scientific odyssey of sound. London: Vintage Books.
• ​Kress, G. & Pachler, N. (Eds.) (2007). ‘Mobile Learning: Towards a Research Agenda’. WLE Centre, Occasional Papers in Work-based Learning 1. Available at: http://eprints.ioe.ac.uk/5402/1/mobilelearning_pachler_2007.pdf.
• Richardson, T. (2015). Conclusion: The New Psychogeography. In  In T. Richardson (Ed) Walking Inside Out: Contemporary British Psychogeography. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. pp.241-254

See also:
Listening to the street
EC1 Sights and Sounds
​Everyday Edinburgh: a multimodal mapping exercise
​The Sights and Sounds of Portsmouth & Southsea