Psychogeographic Audio Tour

In the Audio Tour, there is nothing to tell you when and where to listen to any particular entry, except your own moods, inclination, and place.

The Audio Tour is a form of psychogeography, a type of conscious wandering developed by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Psychogeography attempts to reveal the 'real city' underneath what Debord called The Spectacle, which can be generally described as the flashy and seductive commodification of ideas. The real city represents your own emotional experience of something, before it has been sold back to you (which in today's Spectacle, can happen even before you experience it).

Specifically, the Audio Tour draws on the concepts of the dérive and détournement. The dérive, or, "to drift," involves walking around and trying to follow the emotional and psychological trajectories of an urban environment, rather than the ones planned out for you (the main highway, the shortest commute from home to work, etc.) To pursue a dérive was ". . . to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed," explained Sadie Plant in 1992. It is the perfect approach to Burning Man, and what many of us do there already.

The Audio Tour and Peggy Nelson's other work