Psychogeography Project

Dérive is to explore the urban environment in new ways, with fresh eyes, in order to experience it in a non-quotidian manner and “to cultivate an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is presently conditioned and controlled” (Plant, 1992).

I took an opportunity to record me walking with my friends to a night club in the streets of Leicester.  I took a path where I had not walked through before and took an advantage of this to observe the way in which areas have the most interesting building and graffiti on the walls.  I think taking a chance at walking though the market at a night time was very random and made me notice that the environment looks better in the day lights since there’s more life to the scenery.

Before the night, I searched an alternative route to get to the night club with a shorter route suggestion and then planned to take that route.  I think I did a bit of  Derive because it had some randomness it did still require a certain amount of forethought.  For example, whether it was save to walk through the market at that certain time. Even when using the ideas of the Derive to walk randomly I still needed some sort of focus to record and some reason to begin my walk in the first place which I did. The area did not look very impressive especially at night, so I decided it will be a great idea to record a video instead of taking pictures. I decided to upload the video on YouTube since, it is quite quick on a software programme I have installed on my laptop called Piscasa. It uploads it on YouTube without any hesitation. YouTube is a video-sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos and that’s only website that I have an account to share my media. Sharing media is an opportunity to share the streets of Leicester to other people who may want to study in Leicester in the forth coming years.  Since I started this video from scratch, I knew I would have fun in customising my video with putting effects in it and a soundtrack. I used windows film maker to edit my video. I used Barbara Streisand by Duck Sauce as my soundtrack throughout the video, indicating that I am a fun, bubbly person. Overall it was fun a project to do and my friends enjoyed contributing to my video and I enjoyed the randomness and discovering a new route.