Psychogeographies is an interdisciplinary night of programming exploring performative embodiment and the production of social space. Updating the Situationist’s eponymous concept, Psychogeographies asks its artists to consider how space—urban and virtual—ought to be reimagined against a backdrop of market driven surveillance technologies.

With the advent of algorithmic feedback loops and corporate touted Smartness, the divide between digital and material is increasingly tenuous. Urban space—synchronized, mundane, and extractive—has become another method of capture. Caught in the interplay of communicative surfaces, we move and labor within a captive landscape. Dissociation has never been more boring.

 Increasingly, we’ve come to wonder if this topology will extend to the realm of dreams and hallucinations?

Psychogeography affords a conception of embodied space that moves towards a disassembling of the social.

Space is performed-- it does not pre-exist. .

One creates a psychogeographic map by abstracting the given, subverting its currents, eroding fixed points and hierarchical vortexes. A practitioner doesn’t just proliferate dead zones:  they reintroduce new points of entry.

During Psychogeographies, our artists will  interrogate current conceptions of social space—reminding us that place has no protocol.

Featuring live readings and performances by Jess Gaston, Kevin Rogan, Tom Hack, Micah Schippa, Liza, Doug Rosman, Yarrow Woods, Wanbli Gamache, Eliza Chen, Phaedra Beauchamp, Sonia Cheng, Lori-May Orillo, Cherrie Yu, Alex Bliziotis, and Alex Karsavin; as well as the commissioned video work of Talah Anderson, and screenings of films by Basma Alsharif, and eteam*.

This project is made possible by the generosity of the Graduate Dean’s Office at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Video Data Bank.

Organized and curated by Alex Bliziotis and Alex Karsavin
Graphic Design by Eliza Chen 

*Basma Alsharif’s O, Persecuted and eteam’s Waypoint, Follow, Orbit, Focus, Track, Pan have been provided through the Video Data Bank.