Ntopia: A Google Street View of Psychogeography in Space-Times of Cybergeography

Abstract

This paper translocates situationist concepts of psychogeography and derive into digital “neogeography,” recounting insights occasioned by three digital psychogeographical experiments: an urban walk using the smartphone application Derive: Urban Exploration App, a “hyperlink” walk, and a walk through Google Street View using Derive. As psychogeographical dreams of “endless drifting” have been simulatedby digital media, those media now occasion a reassessment of psychogeographical assumptions about map and territory. Just as Guy Debord and the situationists radicalized concepts of space and place by questioning the division between art and life, so now must cyberpscyhogeographers question the division between physical meatspaces and virtual cyberspaces. Digital media reveal the arbitrariness of urban “physicality” as a mode of data representation, as augmented?reality smart?phone GPS maps merge map and territory, gesturing toward an “n?topia” of instantly mapped desires: a teleportativedatabase logic of “cyberurbanization” simultaneously undoing, unifying, and manifolding conceptions of space and place.