It all adds up to this: Today’s incarnation of psychogeography has entered our cultural psyche more profoundly than in the 1960s.

“It’s important to maintain that link, from the Situationists all the way through to the highest technology that’s now available,” said Christina Ray, who is Mandl’s Glowlab collaborator. The continuum goes way back past the ’50s, past Burton even and Livingston and Homer. I asked a leading “infiltrator” in New York about his quest. “Isn’t there something magnificent, on the face of it, about a skyscraper that just begs to be explored?” he said. “We’re not going to discover the shortest route around Africa. We’re going to discover something that’s a little bit more intangible, something more esthetic, something more artistic. It’s not easy unless you’re a real poet to put words around what it is you find out the first time you stand on the statuary on the roof of Grand Central Station or on the top of the Manhattan Bridge. You gain something; you gain a kind of knowledge.”

If you are a white pawn stranded at F7 in downtown Providence, there is a good chance that a stranger walking toward you on the street is secretly a rook or bishop moving in to do away with you. And in a rush of sickness, you understand the predatory ecosystem of chess, of the city and the life of a neglected corner.

But just standing here, being a part of this neglected street, creates its own intellectual moment. This kind of understanding is so utterly unquantifiable, the methods are becoming more important than what is found. We’ve never managed to fully connect to our cities as we felt we were destined to because, quite simply, most of us do not try hard enough. Or perhaps our cities are so big, so complex, the idea of connecting is simply too hard.

Finally, the cellphone rings. A voice on the other end tells me that black has won. I have not left F7.

Back at the gallery, I hear the same comment, repeated like a mantra. Pawns and knights living in Providence for years have just spent a monotonous morning staring at the back of some unremarkable fire escape. They’re giddy! They have “a whole new appreciation for that corner.” That innocuous spot they had never looked at twice suddenly has a secret. It has significance. This is the point of psychogeography’s bundle of exploratory tricks, which invariably come down not to finding our way from A to B, but to teaching us to find ways to complete the synapse between citizen and city that had become so frayed. Because if some crumbling corner in some crumbling city is worth engaging, perhaps the wider world around us doesn’t have to be lost too. 

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