By Anne Geske
If you’re like a lot of folks, taking a walk is primarily an attempt to squeeze some cardio into a jam-packed schedule. When I’m crunched for time, I follow the same route through my neighborhood: six blocks one way, six blocks back. Done. Within these same blocks, I tend to ruminate on the day’s minutia and almost tune out my surroundings, which sometimes seems like a way to relive stress, rather than relieve it.

While a repetitive walking ritual can be healthy, in the absence of “beginners mind” awareness, it can too easily become a dull routine. We may forget how profound a simple turn in the road can be and miss out on the joy that comes from experiencing a familiar landscape in new and exciting ways.

That’s the lesson a group of mid-century French social theorists hoped to convey when they coined the term “psychogeography” in the late 1950s. Calling themselves “Situationists,” these urban activists experimented with ways of imposing a new perspective on their cityscape to heighten their own awareness and sense of discovery.

“Psychogeography has a lot to do with chance and randomness as a way to break out of your habitual patterns of moving through the city,” says Christina Ray, a Brooklyn-based artist and director of Conflux, the annual psychogeography festival held each fall in New York City.

The original psychogeographical walk was the dérive, or drift. The point of the drift was “locomotion without a goal” — to follow the landscape’s inherent attractions, creating an emotional awareness tied to the land. To try it, you would pay attention to what you feel and walk where you are instinctually drawn.

Of course, that might mean you land at the nearest coffeehouse or pub. Or, you might inadvertently walk the “channel” you routinely follow — which is what the whole concept intended to counteract.

Today, psychogeography (or “psygeo,” as it’s known colloquially) offers a variety of fun and creative strategies for putting discovery back into walking.

Order and Chance
Algorithmic walking — a method of exploring the city using a formula that combines order and chance — is one of psygeo’s many inventive ideas. Developed by a group of Dutch artists called Social Fiction, it’s a set of simple directions (“second right, second right, first left, repeat”) to lead you beyond your habitual route.

“Simply walking toward what attracts you might not actually take you anywhere you haven’t already been,” says Jeffrey Barke, Webmaster for Glowlab, a psygeo Web site Ray created. “Unless you’re able to relax and let go and move with your desire, you might still end up getting ‘channelized.’ Whereas the algorithmic method is guaranteed to take you on a path you’ve never walked before.”

I set out to try it for myself. Venturing to downtown Minneapolis with a friend, we followed the directions past tall buildings, restaurants, shops, the light rail line, the freeway, parking ramps and strip clubs. If we’d been heading straight from point A to point B, we wouldn’t have come across the variety of sights, sounds and smells that we did. Or would we? Downtown is such a confluence of diverse people and places, I wondered if I’d have encountered a similar smattering by going in a straight line.

I was waiting for a lightbulb to come on.

But psygeo experiments often defy expectations, says Magda Knight, a London-based Web designer and psygeo enthusiast. “We found that, while algorithms are purist, humans are not,” she explains. “A group of people can be given the same instructions and the same starting point, and end up in completely different locations. Who is to say what really constitutes that second left? Is it the shady alley that you can see leads to a dead end, or is it the next road with a convenient and inviting pub? To my mind, psygeo is not a science, but an endearingly human — creative, intuitive and fallible — sense of personal experience superimposed on the environment. That is its delight, and, to me, the whole point of it,” says Knight.

New Avenues
I decided to try the algorithm in my own neighborhood. But as I started out, my mind immediately began to wander. Here I go again, I thought. I’m not paying attention to the sights, the sounds, the smells. What if I need to look for something subtler? What about noticing what’s inside me, not just outside of me?

As I began shifting my attention, I began to observe smaller changes in my surroundings. Soon, I came to a small business district with an old-fashioned meat market, a soul food restaurant and a small grocery store I had never noticed before. I was intrigued. These discoveries inspired me to keep exploring. I began to sense how I’d been limiting myself.

I asked myself why I’d been taking the same walk over and over again. But I knew why: It’s familiar; two of the other directions lead to higher-crime neighborhoods, and another direction takes me to a busy intersection.

What I hadn’t been asking was, Why not? Why not try something different for the sake of mental exercise, creativity, or just for the heck of it? Perhaps there were new avenues to explore in my own mind.

I can’t fully explain it, but there was something about following the algorithm that made turning every corner a surprise. And maybe that’s the wonder of it. This sort of randomness seems to be the perfect counterbalance to a life that bends toward predictability.

In a “been-there-done-that” world, psygeo might be just the thing to bring a renewed sense of adventure to even our own neighborhoods.

Anne Geske is a Minneapolis-based freelance writer. This is reprinted from the fall 2007 edition of MOQ: Minneapolis Observer Quarterly. A version of this article first appeared in Experience Life magazine.