User:LEa/blog/2025-10-13

October 13th — Walking and wondering

Today is for making. This morning, I feel a little lost on what to make. Thoughts revolving around food, fermenting and fungi are spooking around in my head. For our (very soon!) upcoming live event at UBIK, I would enjoy making a writing machine that involves something to eat—because food is fun. Sharing tasty experiences brings people together and a full belly might make them stay longer. I am also thinking about including living organisms in the conception of a writing machine. Make the output “more than human”—a phrase that Steve mentioned in or last conversation. I haven’t taken the time to look it up or think about it further…

To help my brain wake up, I stop by the XPUB library to find something to read. The book that catches my interest for now: Walking And Mapping: Artists As Cartographers by Karen O’Rourke. The idea of walking as research appeals to me. Also, it makes me think of a project I saw recently. Ports of Relation investigates the lichen in the ports of Rotterdam and Cape Town. The project explores—both artistically and scientifically—the industrial landscape as an ecosystem. I love looking at lichen and this is not the first time I feel the desire to make something to capture their presence, mapping out where they appear. Lichen are around all year and in very urban environments, which makes them an easy (and fascinating) target.

The first chapter of Walking and Mapping—namely: Psychogeography: the Politics of Apllied Pedestrianism; an extract can be read here—presents the concept of psychogeography. The term was first used by members of Letterist International in the 1950s. It describes the exploration of cities and similar environments with a focus on personal connections to the encountered places and routes taken. This approach is very much based on play and the personal opinions of someone on their surroundings. In the book, Karen O’Rourke recounts an experience from October 2004, when she participated in a “psychogeographic walk”. Writer and squatter Wilfried Hou Je Bek uses “walking algorithms” to drift through urban landscapes. On a note, he writes instructions for the participants such as “first right, first left, third right, repeat”, as well the request to note down anything striking. As it is almost lunchtime, I decide to go for an hour-long walk, accompanied by a little writing machine that I based on Hou Je Berk’s work. Maybe I would get to see some cool lichen. This is the protocol:

[A / The] second turn right 
[In a] first turn left 
[Is walking on] first turn right 
[Wondering about] first turn left repeat

I buy lunch at Jumbo and start my journey. At every turn I take, I note down an object that catches my eye. As I haven’t followed Hou Je Berk’s algorithm—I am taking an even number of left and right turns whereas he is taking an uneven one—I soon notice that I venture farther and farther from school instead of going in a circle. After about 35 minutes, I stop my experiment and head back to school. This is the output of the first go:

A lichen made from metal
In a barrel overflowing with oil
Is walking on balding trees
Wondering about a house of cannibal queens 

Surveillance
In a screaming scull
Is walking on decorative butt plugs
Wondering about a spy 

The headless braid
In a puddle growing larger
Is walking on an animal guard
Wondering about time to go back

Back in the Aquarium, Michael talks to us about questions we are having after the first few weeks of XPUB. He says “indeed” 82 times (Ema counted) and takes many, many detours to explain the grading system in our master’s program. Bart drew a fantastic graph (see below).

After, I continue reading Psychogeography: the Politics of Apllied Pedestrianism. O’Rourke again quotes Wilfried Hou Je Bek, who describes psychographic writing as “the city-space cut-up.” I’m now all ears (or eyes?), as cut-up has been a recurring term in our current Special Issue. And sure enough, in the next sentence O’Rourke makes a connection to William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Just as they rearrange newspaper texts and audio snippets to reveal possible underlying meanings, “so too psychogeographers decode urban space by moving through it in unexpected ways”. It really is all connected, huh?

The route I took following the protocol, starting from Jumbo at Wijnhaven

Bart's flow chart: everything Michael said before coming back to the original question of grading