By Nato Thompson, from “Experimental Geography”

Experimental geography is about asking questions rather than providing answers: a new field that broadens the frame through which we see our culture.

Artists at the CLUI serve as facilitators:

“each artist simply points to the phenomena that condition our lives.”

Guy Debord:  father of psychogeography.

How does our physical environment, not just our perception of it, shape our behavior?

“Cartography as a medium through which not only to reflect existing conditions of power, but also to produce new urban relationships, became an aesthetic and geographic endeavor.”

Maps have a bias, data is valued or devalued by the cartographer.

These individual perceptions and biases were valued by the Situationists; they advocated wandering without a destination, allowing yourself to be drawn to sites and encounters.

[Critique of psychogeography is that it values the experience of the individual over the collective.]

“…acts in space can be interpreted via the various forces that produce that space – whether it is walking, bus riding, interventions, or mapping, that is, an analysis of how culture is produced in space and, in turn, how those spaces produce culture.”

Importance of understanding infrastructure; the complexitiy of the systems that support the most mundane aspects of daily life.

Stratman’s Park: physical experiments in behavior modification through architectural means.  Political and social undercurrent in physical constructs.

Reciprocal relationship between cultural production and spatial production: gentrification.