thanks sir....
the procedures will come framed a bit more than they are here: but basically the idea is to general something like psychogeographies of the ongoing economic/ideological crisis.
here's a link to a bunch of psychogeography resources:
Psy-Geo-Conflux - Links
initially, the situationist idea of psychogeography was pitched toward making intermedia objects as their results---over the past few years, the ideas have resurfaced, mostly taken over by visual/conceptual artist types. some of these folk--like francis alys--do very cool things, but they produce very different types of documentation than i had in mind.
as for examples....for straight-ish writing, there's been alot of this sort of work happening in england for some reason.
the best known version is the work of iain sinclair.
patrick keilor's films robinson in space & london work in the form as well, and are really lovely.
so that's a bit of the background.
as for the type of text, i'm trying to leave it open--most of the stipulations have to do with encouraging cross-genre work (integrating visual, audio and written material)....and with ways to handle the first person in the textual elements. the reason for that stuff has alot to do with the idea that we're tracking an ideological problem, so a collective matter, which means that the terms psychogeography creates problems that seem to me unnecessary--i decided to address them through the procedures rather than by making an argument about them.
the other reason for the constraints to do with the narrator come from the way the procedures try to define ideology, which is routed through spinoza---and the reasons for that center on the claim that there is no outside of this ideological crisis--there are myriad views of it--but we're all one way or another implicated--so i wanted the texts to *not* be made up of snarky observations by an observer who positions him or herself on some plane of Objectivity and watches stupid people turn circles like by going on an expedition and talking to people and looking around they're going to the zoo.
the process itself has to do with setting up a duration and going on an expedition---the duration is important because it marks off the process as particular, and situates you in the mode of drifting, collecting, observing, talking...the emphasis on time follows not only from this, but from the hope that the text-objects produced will not duplicate conventional ways of mapping space, but rather will reorganize it around the central point of the dilation of the observer's attention.
at the same time i'm hoping that folk will not simply write i saw this....i saw this....i did this....
preventing that is another explanation for the constraints concerning the i.
dreamtime is what we are living through. i adapt it from spinoza, and it comes out of the first quote in the procedures, the last line.
if you do not know something about the constraints that shape what you do and are and how you are, you are saying nothing..and in the belief that the situation is otherwise, you are dreaming with your eyes open.
so it is with all of us.
i want to map that.
if you look at sinclair's work, you'll get a good idea of the considerable range of possibilities that follow on playing around with this sort of approach in terms of integrating the experience of someone moving through a geographical space with historical information, conversations with others, memory, etc.
the idea of the project overall would be to collect lots of such accounts, so that taken together they'd be a complex map of the contemporary ideological situation, of the collective dreamtime.
that help?
i'm interested in all of this--what i have to explain, what stands on it's own, whether the project is clear or clear enough that itd be interesting to do some expeditions---personally i think the last response is the one i'm after, and that the doing of the expeditions and writing about them would push you into what the procedures are saying and how they're organized. so i see the project as in significant measure this dynamic of process and constraints...and the outputs--but the core of it is this dynamic.
the vehicle for it will be a webspace. the design is important, and is in process. hopefully it won't take so long to get right that the page will never appear...