Geopsychic - psychogeographies MEMOIRE ABSTRACT

How can the medium of film be used as extension of the body-mind to map out a multiplicity of affects and emotions? Can this same model be used to narrate social and personal histories outside of ones own biography?

Our body is a determined set of relations of movement and rest, and our mind is the idea of our body. Body and mind are two expressions of the same nature, one expressed through the attribute of extension, the other through the attribute of thought. It is hence impossible to consider actions of the body as causing effects in the mind. The same argument prevails when it comes to ideas:

Prologue/ Preface: an undoing   (Carla Lonzi)

Valentine, creating space ‘I walked in an I, but the room gave me the dimensions of she’

Home: At home in voices, an introduction...

Home: To live the orange, an art performance (Do you hear me? Listening to fascia)

Away: Autoaffection and it’s conceptions!

Away: Scripting from the earth Montage and poetry:

Home: Dreammaps (automatic writing/ drawing)

Away: Folktales and Songs

Away: Celluloid dreams (Anthropology)

Home:

 ((((((What is that? a kind of autoaffection outside any subjectivity can exist, an autoaffection is a movement internal to essence. Such an affection is not a feeling, but rather is the opening of a space in Being, of a map, a surface of inscription )))))))))))))))))

My project involves a series of methodologies. The project is about movement and recovery. To visualise in the form of a 'landscape', an itinerary of emotions. But also 'affects', to make the world of 'affects' visible. Grown out of an amorous journey with life, an exterior world (my 'art') should convey an interior landscape. Emotions (which move) materialise as a moving topography. To traverse this land is to visit the ebb and flow of a personal yet social psychogeography.

My project sifts in and out of the places I call 'home' and 'away'

The work proceeds by making tours and detours, turns and re-turns, opening up on different vistas of the production of space. 

My theoretical and haptic explorations include:

- Walking and sounding. The voice in movement or 'drawing with the voice'

A theoretical exploration into the world of affects- neuro plasticity- and the term 'auto affection ' considered to be taken from Spinoza, from the different theoretical viewpoints, Malabou, Derrida, Damascio and Deleuze.

Do you hear me? Movements in fascia and fascial release.

Dream maps, unearthing through drawing, diagrams and text.

Celluloid dreams - the manifestation of narrative/ connection through the medium of the film strip, tracing the exterior worlds and its affects through alternative film production methodologies. To bring this world, or to collect this world on the strip of celluloid film. To explore my surroundings and stories, using experimental film methodologies. To experiment in the medium. 

To do research on location, visual, aural research by means of sketching, note taking, chemigrams on film.

To research folktales/ song lyrics, personal and social histories of the people and the land. Possible ways to narrate or depict certain themes events could be through stop start animation/ puppetry etc. 

Addition: Research into folktales/ song lyrics/ personal and social histories of the places one is going, and the history of the land. Visual manifestation to include animation/ puppets, sets/ cut-outs. (The Sesame technique as a research tool for uncovering drives)

Notes on montage as method:

For Lonzi, arranging texts and images means disorganizing their normal sequence in order to create a fragmented unity and, at the same time, showing the reader the incomplete nature of what they are reading. Montage- a new arrangement of things starting from their differences, an act that renders everything foreign, unusual, as if we saw these things for the first time.

Cinema as site seeing.

It is interesting to note that, rather than constituting itself solely as a descriptive art, mapping, in general, appears to be fleshing out its narrative impulse and new psychogeographic paths.

What Spinoza was not able to see by himself is thus the neural activity of "mapping." Mapping characterizes the way in which events in the body are represented as ideas in the mind. As "representational 'correspondences;" the coincidence between ideas and bodily events draws neural maps that, looking apparently very much like the Deleuzian "planes of immanence," inscribe bodily messages on an internal projective surface

An impulse, after all, is a force that both impels and is impelled by waves of feeling and states of mind.

Cinema is bound to tender mapping on this terrain of intertextuality, which is itself a geography “moving” in history.

Hiroshima mon amour can be read as an actual cinematic remake of the Carte de Tendre. Like Scudéry’s map, it designs intimate space as it enacts a narrative detour of emotional “transport.” Hiroshima mon amour creates a tender map in which a lover’s body stands for a city, while, conversely, the city itself is imagined as a corporeal affair. Let us recall that the city, as the female protagonist tells us, was made to the measure of love, just as her lover was made to the measure of her body. Here, taking us beyond mimesis to the edge of “mimicry,” a body map is lived and even explored as a site as, in turn, a city is tailored to a body—one’s own and that of loved ones. Her city fits (and “fashions”) a body of love. It is an intimate geography, a body-city on a tender map. As in Scudéry’s map, where exterior landscape reads as interior, emotions are architecturally rendered and spatialized along a course. Different topographies merge on this filmic map of love,

-I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data. (Damasio)

If it is true that Nature is everywhere one and the same, that man is not an empire within an empire, and that affects do not proceed from any individual or particular defect, then we have to understand how God himself or Nature, may also be affected to the extent that there cannot be any variability of infinite desire-and there is, of course, no divine conatus.  (Spinoza)

Consciousness itself is an emotional reaction to the intrusion of the outside. Consciousness, at its most elementary, is the awareness of a disturbance of the organism's homeostasis caused by a repeated encounter with an external object. This is why consciousness is inherently emotional. It is an interested reaction to a disturbance. 30 (Damasio)

I am convinced that mental processes are grounded in the brain's mappings of the body, collections of neural patterns that portray responses to events that cause emotions and feelings

Haptic: 

"able to come into contact with" As a function of the skin, then the haptic - the sense of touch - constitutes the reciprocal contact between us and the environment, both housing and extending communicative interface. But the haptic is also related to kinesthesis, the ability of our bodies to sense their own environment in space.

geopsychic space

unpacking the complex construction of a travelling medium by the very means of a practice of travel and a travelling theory. Modern travel is the genealogical descendant of the pilgrimage - a travel story and a spatial practice. The itinerary is often created by hagiographic tales and narrativized, making stories out of spatial trajectories.

Henri Lefebvre - spatial architectonics

film and architecture are practices of representation written on and by the body map.

film/ body/ architecture -----a haptic dynamics, a phantasmatic structure of lived space and lived narrative, a narrativized space that is intersubjective, a complex of socio sexual mobilities.

My project involves a series of methodologies. The project is about movement and recovery. To visualise in the form of a 'landscape', an itinerary of emotions. But also 'affects', to make the world of 'affects' visible. Grown out of an amourous journey of life, an exterior world (my 'art') should convey an interior landscape. Emotions (which move) materialise as a moving topography. To traverse this land is to visit the ebb and flow of a personal yet social psychogeography.

My project sifts in and out of the places I call 'home' and 'away'

My theoretical and haptic explorations include:

- Walking and sounding. The voice in movement or 'drawing with the voice'

A theoretical exploration into the world of affects- neuro plasticity- and the term 'autoaffection' considered to be taken from Spinoza from different theoretical viewpoints, Malabou, Derrida, Damascio and Deleuze.

Dream maps, unearthing through drawing, diagrams and text. -

Celluloid dreams - the manifestation of narrative/ connection through the medium of the film strip, tracing the exterior words and its affects through alternative film production methodologies.

Addition: Research into folktales/ song lyrics/ personal and social histories of the places one is going, and the history of the land. Visual manifestation to include animation/ puppets, sets/ cut-outs. (The Sesame technique as a research tool for uncovering drives)

SECOND DRAFT

1.        TITLE – What is your question/investigation/theme?

 

Subtitle – is the focus your process, context, materials, 

methodology?

 

2.         1st draft of your ABSTRACT

This should be around 250–300 words. This is a SUMMARY

 

Imagine someone doesn’t have the chance to read your whole memoire. This is the short text that can give them a flavour of what it contains.

 

It should include the WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY AND HOW of your memoire

 

You can’t include every philosopher or artist in this. But you could say if it is phenomenological or embodied or authoethnographic

You can’t mention every influence. But you could say it’s a lot to do with the uncanny or inspired by fairy tales or space etc.

 

3.        BIBLIOGRAPHY

Include all the texts, films, conversations, documentaries, exhibitions etc.

 

4.        Thoughts on Overall design and concept

Chapter headings

Layout/design/font

Use of images

Intros/abstracts

Materials

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIES

The Body, the Film strip and the Ethnographic.

Methodologies of art making and experiencing.

This projects seeks to use different methodologies of artistic research and production to  investigate alternative ways of depicting subjectivities - both human and non human - in the ethnographic field. 

Beginning through an autoethnographic lense, moving outwards through automatic/ haptic findings and practice as research, I will use  assemblage as a way of connecting and producing knowledge.  Through various mediums of collection such as somatic dance/ movement, drawing, writing, voice recording and image making, I intend to use experimental and ecological film processes and the film strip itself as the material on which I inscribe my findings. 

From a personal perspective, the project is about movement and recovery, to touch on the lived space of the subjects (myself and others) our emotions (which move) materialise as a moving topography. To visualise in the form of a 'landscape', an itinerary of emotions. But also 'affects', to make the world of 'affects' visible.

 To traverse this land is to visit the ebb and flow of a personal yet social psychogeography.

The recovery I am grappling with crosses subjectivities. My responsibility as an artist going into 'the field' is to let the actors play themselves, taking on a feminist ethnographic approach my aim is to be attentive to diversity and focus on topics of inquiry that are relevant to my subjects, especially those who occupy a different subject position than myself.

Bibliography

Reference list

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André Breton (2019). Nadja. Paris: Gallimard.

Arnd Schneider and Pasqualino, C. (2014). Experimental film and anthropology. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Bruno, G. (2018). Atlas of emotion : journeys in art, architecture, and film. New York: Verso.

Burkhalter, S. and Schmidlin, L. (2017). Spacescapes : dance and drawing since 1962 : [Symposium in Geneva, University, 31 may - 1st juni 2012]. Dijon: Presses Du Réel ; Zurich.

Cavarero, A. and Kottman, P.A. (2005). For more than one voice : toward a philosophy of vocal expression. Stanford, Calif. Stanford Univ. Press.

DavisD.-A. and Craven, C. (2023). Feminist ethnography : thinking through methodologies, challenges, and possibilities. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham (N.C.) ; London: Duke University Press.

Hogg, J. and Roberts, A. (2019). Chantal Akerman retrospective handbook. London: A Nos Amours.

Ingold, T. (2018). Anthropology : why it matters. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Johnston, A. and Malabou, C. (2013). Self and emotional life : merging philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press.

Kane, S. and Greig, D. (2001). Sarah kane complete plays: (bl (Methuen Contemporary Dramatists). London, Uk: Methuen.

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Loy, M. and Conover, R.L. (1999). The lost lunar Baedeker : poems of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Luce Irigaray (2010). Speculum of the other woman. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, [Ca.

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Pizarnik, A. and Siegert, Y. (2016). Extracting the stone of madness - poems 1962 - 1972. New Directions Publishing Corp.

Ramzi Rouighi (2022). INVENTING THE BERBERS : history and ideology in the maghrib. S.L.: Univ Of Pennsylvania Pr.

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