Phil Smith
Plymouth University, Theatre, Performance and Dance, Faculty Member
- Phil's background is in theatre-making, as a writer and dramaturg, specialising in recent years in performance in... morePhil's background is in theatre-making, as a writer and dramaturg, specialising in recent years in performance inspired by walking, and now moving into dance practice.
His research includes the uses of performance in heritage sites including guided tours, the theory and practice of mythogeography, ideas of spatialization in cinema, contemporary developments of the situationist 'drift' and acting in site-based performance.
There is an account of autobiographical-performance aspects of Phil's work in Deirdre Heddon's 'Autobiography and Performance' (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) pages 105-111.
Two texts from his Crab Walks performances and an essay on walking and mythogeography are published in 'Walking, Writing and Performance', edited by Roberta Mock, Bristol: Intellect, 2009. http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4571/edit
iving in the Magical Mode is for radical-, artist, performance- and everyday-walkers, Situationists and dérivistes; artists and [site-specific] performers who use walking in their work; human, urban and cultural geographers;... more
iving in the Magical Mode is for radical-, artist, performance- and everyday-walkers, Situationists and dérivistes; artists and [site-specific] performers who use walking in their work; human, urban and cultural geographers; psychogeographers; students discovering and studying a world of resistant and aesthetic walking, ecologists, ecosensualists, anyone interested in mythogeography & the aesthetics and practice of civilisational collapse.
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Do you ever feel you live in a world where people see your online presence as more important than your physical one? That online algorithms are penetrating your deepest fears, loves, or aspirations, or even threatening your dreams?... more
Do you ever feel you live in a world where people see your online presence as more important than your physical one? That online algorithms are penetrating your deepest fears, loves, or aspirations, or even threatening your dreams? Instead of selling your psyche wholesale to online retailers and information moguls alike, 'Covert: A Handbook' suggests a way to resist this invasion.
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
Using 30 carefully crafted ‘movement meditations’ – each with an accompanying photo to facilitate it – 'Covert' outlines a straightforward embodied practice to defend and aid inner reflection. Both active and accessible, the 'Covert' practice offers a way to diminish the lure of the screens, sidestep invasive scrutiny, and nurture the dialogue between our conscious and unconscious selves.
By prioritizing introspective interactions with the quirky and complex world around us, 'Covert' proposes that we have the means to cultivate our interior and imaginative selves through a dynamic physical engagement with the wider world.
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From the Preface "This is a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape. A codebook for living in a new/old mode; in which the barriers between humans and cosmos, and between subjective... more
From the Preface
"This is a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape. A codebook for living in a new/old mode; in which the barriers between humans and cosmos, and between subjective beings and objective spaces, begin to disappear. The book is also about mysterious gameboards and rules for old pastimes that we have made up. Games for you to play. There are ladders to climb and snakes to ride. An invitation to make a playful pilgrimage that is attentive to both new and ancient special places, webbed together around a tattoo that is in the earth and in the mind.
However you choose to use this book – solve its mystery, borrow a tactic or two, drill it for ideas – we will feel very happy. Particularly, if you change our work as you work it.
While The Pattern describes a model for art making, we did not start out with one. Instead, the model emerged from our ‘hyper-sensitized’ walking in marginal and disregarded spaces and it has become a kind of ‘web walking’. The model continued to develop as we read our poems and performed actions at events, invited people to take us on walks, ran art making workshops and assembled an exhibition from which the threads ran out in many directions.
The Pattern is then the story of the places we found as we spun those threads wider.
It is also a fictioning (we adopted narratives and characters to find things out). There is a story to follow. This story snakes through the book, but it first snaked through us. Throughout The Pattern, through our alternative selves – the artists Crab & Bee and the wandering Smoke & Mirrors – the threads of the story are unwound; then gathered together into a quest to live in the new/old mode. We hope you will join your thread to it."
"This is a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape. A codebook for living in a new/old mode; in which the barriers between humans and cosmos, and between subjective beings and objective spaces, begin to disappear. The book is also about mysterious gameboards and rules for old pastimes that we have made up. Games for you to play. There are ladders to climb and snakes to ride. An invitation to make a playful pilgrimage that is attentive to both new and ancient special places, webbed together around a tattoo that is in the earth and in the mind.
However you choose to use this book – solve its mystery, borrow a tactic or two, drill it for ideas – we will feel very happy. Particularly, if you change our work as you work it.
While The Pattern describes a model for art making, we did not start out with one. Instead, the model emerged from our ‘hyper-sensitized’ walking in marginal and disregarded spaces and it has become a kind of ‘web walking’. The model continued to develop as we read our poems and performed actions at events, invited people to take us on walks, ran art making workshops and assembled an exhibition from which the threads ran out in many directions.
The Pattern is then the story of the places we found as we spun those threads wider.
It is also a fictioning (we adopted narratives and characters to find things out). There is a story to follow. This story snakes through the book, but it first snaked through us. Throughout The Pattern, through our alternative selves – the artists Crab & Bee and the wandering Smoke & Mirrors – the threads of the story are unwound; then gathered together into a quest to live in the new/old mode. We hope you will join your thread to it."
Research Interests:
Lessons, techniques and ideas for making new theatre for a changing world from the most widely travelled theatre that ever packed a bag. This new book is a wide-ranging account of 40 years in the life of the most successful touring... more
Lessons, techniques and ideas for making new theatre for a changing world from the most widely travelled theatre that ever packed a bag.
This new book is a wide-ranging account of 40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company, playing to over 300,000 people each year. The narrative dances between storytelling, a masterclass on the skills and practice of acting, directing and writing for theatre, considering the role of theatre in different countries and continents and offering a eye-opening history of TNT Theatre.
This new book is a wide-ranging account of 40 years in the life of the most successful touring theatre company, playing to over 300,000 people each year. The narrative dances between storytelling, a masterclass on the skills and practice of acting, directing and writing for theatre, considering the role of theatre in different countries and continents and offering a eye-opening history of TNT Theatre.
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Drawing on almost 20 years of wandering, writing about and researching parts of South Devon (UK), ‘Anywhere’ is the culmination of a project which began with an approach to place and space – which began in performance studies but shifted... more
Drawing on almost 20 years of wandering, writing about and researching parts of South Devon (UK), ‘Anywhere’ is the culmination of a project which began with an approach to place and space – which began in performance studies but shifted closer to geography and ethnography – and was then more formally articulated as a theory and a toolkit in the 2010 publication ‘Mythogeography’. This is the first fully sustained and intensive mythogeographical study of any one place.
The work draws on many walks and performances with groups like Wrights & Sites and GeoQuest and a longstanding fascination with the layers of terrain in South Devon, UK (which reach out far beyond its boundaries). In order to get at its elusive layers and narratives, the book approached its subjects through different authorial voices, pseudo-autobiography, fiction and personal immersion and mythologisation; there have been many journeys, sometimes lone, sometimes convivial.
If ‘mythogeography’ means anything – as a method that anyone can use anywhere, as a practice of lay or expert geography – then it stands or falls by this book. It is intended to provide materials and approaches for others to create their own mythogeographical journeys and accounts, and develop their own methods.
The work draws on many walks and performances with groups like Wrights & Sites and GeoQuest and a longstanding fascination with the layers of terrain in South Devon, UK (which reach out far beyond its boundaries). In order to get at its elusive layers and narratives, the book approached its subjects through different authorial voices, pseudo-autobiography, fiction and personal immersion and mythologisation; there have been many journeys, sometimes lone, sometimes convivial.
If ‘mythogeography’ means anything – as a method that anyone can use anywhere, as a practice of lay or expert geography – then it stands or falls by this book. It is intended to provide materials and approaches for others to create their own mythogeographical journeys and accounts, and develop their own methods.
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In a 1934 lecture, Marcel Mauss said: "A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that... more
In a 1934 lecture, Marcel Mauss said: "A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema."
Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don’t walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don’t walk normally.
There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity.
For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists – Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith – found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on:
prostheses ~ waddling ~ Butoh ~ built-up shoes ~ walking in pain ~ bad legs ~ vertigo ~
falling (and fallen) places ~ hubris ~ bad walks ~ scores for falling down ~
walking carefully ~ disappointment.
This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about stumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet.
As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body’s natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the ‘grounds’ that tripped you up."
Here are the roots of contemporary views of daily-life movement (including walking). We notice people who don’t walk normally. We notice ourselves when we don’t walk normally.
There is, it seems, an intense, invisible pressure to walk normally. Straight is the gait. Call it ambulonormativity.
For about 9 months, two walking-authors/artists – Alyson Hallett and Phil Smith – found themselves wrestling with not being able to walk normally. They wrote to one another about it and, amongst other things, reflected on:
prostheses ~ waddling ~ Butoh ~ built-up shoes ~ walking in pain ~ bad legs ~ vertigo ~
falling (and fallen) places ~ hubris ~ bad walks ~ scores for falling down ~
walking carefully ~ disappointment.
This is their conversation. From it, there emerges an 'Alphabet of Falling', a sustained reflection on the loss of normal capabilities, anecdotes and autobiographical stories, and the beginnings of a larger discussion about stumbling and falling: the pedestrian equivalent of blowing an uncertain trumpet.
As the book concludes: "When you next fall, stay down for a while, see what comes. Then, when you get to your feet again, rather than relying on your body’s natural approximations of space, choose your steps, not anxiously but in an excited kind of wariness; and, with each pace, a little more undo the ‘grounds’ that tripped you up."
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"In this Footbook, Phil Smith extends his critical account of the gentle walking arts to the predatory lurch of the living dead. The author has been a keen observer of the zombie mythos for the past 35 years, and here he draws on the... more
"In this Footbook, Phil Smith extends his critical account of the gentle walking arts to the predatory lurch of the living dead.
The author has been a keen observer of the zombie mythos for the past 35 years, and here he draws on the mass of plots, images and metaphors that can be found swarming in zombie movies and comics. Instead of treating zombie media as a kind of parallel universe, he concentrates on the 'normality' of the zombie apocalypse - showing how zombies have been used to depict, slave labour, wage labour, the consumer, the dispossesed, the disenfranchised and the underprivileged, and then moving on to explain how much more complicated it is than that.
He uses his analysis of zombie media to set out a groundbreaking way to have presence in everyday life. Invoking slowness, fragmentary consciousness, thickness and thingness, the author describes in theory and in practice, how to walk from Night to Day and away from the old Dawn into a radical nothingness.
Drawing examples from across the spectrum of zombie media, with plenty from its margins, Phil Smith celebrates and berates the zombie; then turns it into a meditation, a manifesto, a dance score and the herald of a social movement.
Starting with the three key principles of Interiority, Carnival and an End to Ends, The Footbook of Zombie Walking offers a way back to a vital Life and an art of Living. It is the next step, beyond Mythogeography, to ending media predations, putting subjectivities back on the streets and coming to be present in everyday life."
The author has been a keen observer of the zombie mythos for the past 35 years, and here he draws on the mass of plots, images and metaphors that can be found swarming in zombie movies and comics. Instead of treating zombie media as a kind of parallel universe, he concentrates on the 'normality' of the zombie apocalypse - showing how zombies have been used to depict, slave labour, wage labour, the consumer, the dispossesed, the disenfranchised and the underprivileged, and then moving on to explain how much more complicated it is than that.
He uses his analysis of zombie media to set out a groundbreaking way to have presence in everyday life. Invoking slowness, fragmentary consciousness, thickness and thingness, the author describes in theory and in practice, how to walk from Night to Day and away from the old Dawn into a radical nothingness.
Drawing examples from across the spectrum of zombie media, with plenty from its margins, Phil Smith celebrates and berates the zombie; then turns it into a meditation, a manifesto, a dance score and the herald of a social movement.
Starting with the three key principles of Interiority, Carnival and an End to Ends, The Footbook of Zombie Walking offers a way back to a vital Life and an art of Living. It is the next step, beyond Mythogeography, to ending media predations, putting subjectivities back on the streets and coming to be present in everyday life."
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edited by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann 54 intriguing ideas for different ways to take a walk - for enthusiasts, practitioners, students and academics. This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander: 54... more
edited by Claire Hind and Clare Qualmann
54 intriguing ideas for different ways to take a walk - for enthusiasts, practitioners, students and academics.
This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander: 54 intriguing encounters produced by artists involved with the Walking Artists Network and beyond.
Pop it in your back pocket, leave it in your rucksack, share it with friends and take them on a walk, use it in creative workshops, read it as if each instruction were poetry, engage with each page as visual art or as a performance activity, let it remind you of places you’ve been or walks you’d like to do. When the moment takes you be inspired by the variety of inventive and reflective ideas mapped out here and then simply… wander.
Readership
Ways to Wander is intended for anyone who makes, or wants to make, walking art or walk-performances - and for anyone interested in psychogeography, radical walking, drift and dérive.
54 intriguing ideas for different ways to take a walk - for enthusiasts, practitioners, students and academics.
This is your invitation to some of the many different ways to wander: 54 intriguing encounters produced by artists involved with the Walking Artists Network and beyond.
Pop it in your back pocket, leave it in your rucksack, share it with friends and take them on a walk, use it in creative workshops, read it as if each instruction were poetry, engage with each page as visual art or as a performance activity, let it remind you of places you’ve been or walks you’d like to do. When the moment takes you be inspired by the variety of inventive and reflective ideas mapped out here and then simply… wander.
Readership
Ways to Wander is intended for anyone who makes, or wants to make, walking art or walk-performances - and for anyone interested in psychogeography, radical walking, drift and dérive.
Research Interests: Walking (Art) and Walking
An unravelling of psychogeography from its early roots, assessing its contribution to the state of the walking arts, and looking forwards/around to what might come next. a partial mapping of the ‘evolution’ of walking that looks at... more
An unravelling of psychogeography from its early roots, assessing its contribution to the state of the walking arts, and looking forwards/around to what might come next.
a partial mapping of the ‘evolution’ of walking that looks at ‘stages’ in that evolution.
a helicopter view that allows walking artist/practitioners to place themselves in historical and artistic context.
important new ideas about abusive semi-public spaces (in the wake of scandals in the UK and elsewhere involving public figures, the church and others) – suggesting how radical walking can act against ‘the spectacle’ and power.
a compelling theory about romanticism and the postmodern in relation to walking.
a World Brain for walking.
strategies, tactics and a full manifesto for Radical Walking.
- See more at: http://www.triarchypress.net/walkings-new-movement.html#sthash.bepJ0513.dpuf
a partial mapping of the ‘evolution’ of walking that looks at ‘stages’ in that evolution.
a helicopter view that allows walking artist/practitioners to place themselves in historical and artistic context.
important new ideas about abusive semi-public spaces (in the wake of scandals in the UK and elsewhere involving public figures, the church and others) – suggesting how radical walking can act against ‘the spectacle’ and power.
a compelling theory about romanticism and the postmodern in relation to walking.
a World Brain for walking.
strategies, tactics and a full manifesto for Radical Walking.
- See more at: http://www.triarchypress.net/walkings-new-movement.html#sthash.bepJ0513.dpuf
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""On one level On Walking... describes an actual, lumbering walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in Dunwich, Lowestoft, Southwold, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo, Bungay, Halesworth and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost... more
""On one level On Walking... describes an actual, lumbering walk from one incongruous B&B to the next, taking in Dunwich, Lowestoft, Southwold, Covehithe, Orford Ness, Sutton Hoo, Bungay, Halesworth and Rendlesham Forest - with their lost villages, Cold War testing sites, black dogs, white deer and alien trails.
On a second level it sets out a kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and the Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it.
Finally, on a third level, On Walking... is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.""
On a second level it sets out a kind of walking that the author has been practising for many years and for which he is quietly famous. It's a kind of walking that burrows beneath the guidebook and the map, looks beyond the shopfront and the Tudor facade and feels beneath the blisters and disgruntlement of the everyday. Those who try it report that their walking [and their whole way of seeing the world] is never quite the same again. And the Suffolk walk described in this book is an exemplary walk, a case study - this is exactly how to do it.
Finally, on a third level, On Walking... is an intellectual tour de force, encompassing Situationism, alchemy, jouissance, dancing, geology, psychogeography, 20th century cinema and old TV, performance, architecture, the nature of grief, pilgrimage, World War II, the Cold War, Uzumaki, pub conversations, synchronicity, somatics and the Underchalk.""
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""Focusing on signs, simulacra, objects and places that prove to be more, less or other than what they seem (all illustrated throughout the book) the author encourages us to look afresh at our quotidian urban and rural surroundings to see... more
""Focusing on signs, simulacra, objects and places that prove to be more, less or other than what they seem (all illustrated throughout the book) the author encourages us to look afresh at our quotidian urban and rural surroundings to see what lies just beneath the surface.
Once identified, these absurd, empty, recalcitrant enchantments can transform the way we live and think and occupy our inner and outer landscapes.
Urging us to “hypersensitize ourselves to the full blast of contemporary landscape’s intensity”, Phil Smith explains how to “let our tentacles unfurl” in order to explore and see the world around us in all its glory.""
Once identified, these absurd, empty, recalcitrant enchantments can transform the way we live and think and occupy our inner and outer landscapes.
Urging us to “hypersensitize ourselves to the full blast of contemporary landscape’s intensity”, Phil Smith explains how to “let our tentacles unfurl” in order to explore and see the world around us in all its glory.""
Research Interests:
This is a handbook of theory, strategy and tactics for turning tourists into performers. Designed for use in heritage tourism sites, the book suggests various pathways for users, including complex interventions and even long-term 'open... more
This is a handbook of theory, strategy and tactics for turning tourists into performers. Designed for use in heritage tourism sites, the book suggests various pathways for users, including complex interventions and even long-term 'open infiltration' of heritage institutions, but all are bound together by the tactics of the pedestrian visit.
Research Interests: Tourism Studies, Museum Studies, Heritage Studies, Heritage Tourism, Museum Education, and 9 moreCultural Tourism, Cultures and heritage tourism, Museum Interpretation, Cultural Heritage Management, Intangible Cultural Heritage (Culture), Museums, Heritage, Museum and Heritage Studies, and Museum Education and Communication
This is a pocket-sized book of counter-touristic tactics for use in heritage tourism sites. They inform visits with the aesthetics of performance and the hypersensitization of the psychogeographical 'drift'.
This book is both an account of the Hidden City Festival of site-based performances held in Plymouth in 2008 and a handbook of models of practice based on the experiences of the organisers. I have written an essay for the Handbook on... more
This book is both an account of the Hidden City Festival of site-based performances held in Plymouth in 2008 and a handbook of models of practice based on the experiences of the organisers. I have written an essay for the Handbook on tactics for exploring sites and performing (in/about/beside) them.
'Mythogeography' takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of performers, artists, ‘alternative’ walkers and... more
'Mythogeography' takes the form of a documentary-fictional collection of the internal documents, diary fragments, letters, emails, narratives, notebooks and handbooks of a loose coalition of performers, artists, ‘alternative’ walkers and lay geographers.
The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. 'Mythogeography' celebrates that interweaving and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.
The fragmentary and slippery format recognises the disparate, loosely interwoven and rapidly evolving uses of walking today: as performance, as exploration, as urban resistance, as activism, as an ambulatory practice of geography, as meditation, as post-tourism, as dissident mapping, as subversion of and rejoicing in the everyday. 'Mythogeography' celebrates that interweaving and is an attempt at a handbook for those who want to be part of it.
This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes of development,... more
This collection charts three projects by performance-makers who generate autobiographical writing by taking walks. It includes performance texts and photographs, as well as essays by the artists that discuss processes of development, writing and performance.
The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores “an ethics of autobiographical performance”. In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.
The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.
The Crab Walks and Crab Steps Aside are performances made by Phil Smith based on an initial exploratory walking of an area of South Devon where he was taken for childhood holidays and then on to Munich, Herm and San Gimignano. Both shows were accompanied by the distribution of maps seeking to provoke the audience to make their own exploratory walks. Mourning Walk is a performance that relates to a walk Carl Lavery made to mark the anniversary of his father’s death. Lavery shows how a secret can be both shared and hidden through the act of communication as he explores “an ethics of autobiographical performance”. In Tree, the result of a multi-disciplinary collaborative process, Dee Heddon occupies a single square foot of soil, and discovers that by standing stationary and looking closely she can travel across continents and centuries, making unexpected connections through an extroverted autobiographical practice.
The work of all three artists, taken together and separately, raises important issues about memory, ritual, life writing, textuality, subjectivity, and site in performance.
Research Interests:
In this article we (artist-researchers Crab & Bee) describe a process of tracking minerals and strands of significance through three contrasting landscapes (Llaneirwg/St Mellons in the Cardiff suburbs, the Hemmerdon mine between Plymouth... more
In this article we (artist-researchers Crab & Bee) describe a process of tracking minerals and strands of significance through three contrasting landscapes (Llaneirwg/St Mellons in the Cardiff suburbs, the Hemmerdon mine between Plymouth and Dartmoor, and the Seaton River in Cornwall) using a performative and hyper-sensitized web walking. The paper explains the plotting of these strands onto a geographical pattern, grounded by what anthropologist Gilbert Simondon has described as beacons of immersive orientation or ‘privileged points’ and, at the same time, onto an emergent pattern of stories that unevenly connects the three sites. We then describe how we drew on such connective strands, stories and patterns to create a diagram for a performance, Webs, Nets and a Carrier Bag, at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, in September 2021, as part of celebrations for the launch of Making routes: journeys in performance 2010 – 2020 (Triarchy Press).
The article recounts the mapping of the three sites, and how we could draw on ideas from Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the Lessons in Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis and the Arachnean web making of Fernand Deligny to help us make a performance container and draw a diagram in performance using colour-coded costumes, ribbons, and totemic objects to indicate the interlacing of the three storylines. We describe performance materials passing from body to body in observable and demonstrable patterns, and how attention is given to the diagramming of transcorporeality; how through the monstrous hybrid assemblages of these place-tales and by ‘being there’ – with water, limestone, tungsten, tin, copper, kaolin and arsenic – patterns are absorbed and passed on through performing bodies.
The article recounts the mapping of the three sites, and how we could draw on ideas from Ursula le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the Lessons in Hydrofeminism of Astrida Neimanis and the Arachnean web making of Fernand Deligny to help us make a performance container and draw a diagram in performance using colour-coded costumes, ribbons, and totemic objects to indicate the interlacing of the three storylines. We describe performance materials passing from body to body in observable and demonstrable patterns, and how attention is given to the diagramming of transcorporeality; how through the monstrous hybrid assemblages of these place-tales and by ‘being there’ – with water, limestone, tungsten, tin, copper, kaolin and arsenic – patterns are absorbed and passed on through performing bodies.
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An account of a 'performance walk' in London from Dolphin Square to the MI6 building in Vauxhall, for the Walkative Project organised by tutors from the Royal College of Art
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In this article, we make an argument for addressing place-based narratives as ‘tissues of meaning’ rather than as discrete linearities. We look at how this allows us to skirt certain hierarchies of value in order to address narratives... more
In this article, we make an argument for addressing place-based narratives as ‘tissues of meaning’ rather than as discrete linearities. We look at how this allows us to skirt certain hierarchies of value in order to address narratives inclusively; tracing their continuity and morphology across literary novels, folklore records, information boards, church pamphlets and village names. Drawing examples from Crab & Bee projects including ‘Plymouth Labyrinth’ (2018–9) and ‘The Pattern’ (2020), we draw analogies between the role of sheets of fascia (gristle, jelly, fat, connective tissue, cartilage) in the human body – as a means of disrupting the assumed linearity (one step after another) of walking – and the idea of a narrative-fascia that stretches across different fields of literary production rather than a linear storyline. In conclusion, we argue for a radical inseparability of text and space and write of the need to read them both through the whole body.
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This paper describes an experimental project conducted by artists/researchers Crab & Bee (Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith). The project was put together in response to the Covid Lockdown restrictions during 2020 in the UK and drew upon... more
This paper describes an experimental project conducted by artists/researchers Crab & Bee (Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith). The project was put together in response to the Covid Lockdown restrictions during 2020 in the UK and drew upon an art and performance practice that had been unfolding since 2018. ‘Testing Scores for Performing Placestories’ describes the testing of a group of scores (with accompanying avatars, gameboards, narratives and images) for participants to perform in their own homes, for their effectivesss (or lack of it) in encouraging participants to make displaced performances by ‘fictioning’ with unhuman agents. The scores were based on narrative features of a terrain around the Tamar river system (a post-industrial landscape of former mining sites, ruined quays and hollow lanes, with a troubled ecology and a varied folklore) gathered by Crab & Bee during performative visits to these sites. The players were encouraged to use the games to immerse themselves, in displaced domestic settings, in the materials and folkloric revenant of the wounded terrain and then invited to respond to their experiences. The second half of the paper addresses what the 22 detailed responses from the participants reveal, and draws some provisional conclusions.
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In the process of an empirical collection of 1830s to the 1930s Exeter street performance and public ritual events certain patterns of development have begun to emerge, inviting a theoretical engagement. In Exeter these patterns of... more
In the process of an empirical collection of 1830s to the 1930s Exeter street performance and public ritual events certain patterns of development have begun to emerge, inviting a theoretical engagement. In Exeter these patterns of development, weaving and woven together (some in common with other English cities, others more localised and specific), have combined to generate a local culture that is remarkably, though not uniquely, translucent and insubstantial, particularly given the city’s reputation as an “historic” one: “Exeter is emphatically a city of the past.” (p.239, Freeman). Central to this ‘hollowing out’ has been an antagonism to theatricality and symbolism, which continues today. The consequences of this for new kinds of public performance in the city are propitious.
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This paper/chapter examines examples of UK-based walking arts practitioners who work around the boundaries of everyday or leisure walking; part of an identifiable ‘meshwork’ with unevenly shared principles, aesthetics and narratives. The... more
This paper/chapter examines examples of UK-based walking arts practitioners who work around the boundaries of everyday or leisure walking; part of an identifiable ‘meshwork’ with unevenly shared principles, aesthetics and narratives. The chapter then examines representations of the “why” of conventional recreational walking (hiking and rambling) as expressed in popular walking publications and concludes by identifying philosophical affordances in leisure and radical walking for mutual engagement.
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This paper addresses queer conviviality across Crab & Bee’s “Plymouth Labyrinth” project (2018–19); a 6-month activity including group walks, ritual sharings, group readings, postal art, poetry groups, site-specific dance, exhibition and... more
This paper addresses queer conviviality across Crab & Bee’s “Plymouth Labyrinth” project (2018–19); a 6-month activity including group walks, ritual sharings, group readings, postal art, poetry groups, site-specific dance, exhibition and making workshops. Based around convivial web-walking, the account examines how, through spinning out of collaborations and unfolding new forms, a web of work and activity was generated to support intensity and connectivity. The paper attends to queer aspects of conviviality, such as attention to unhuman partners, becoming-animal, simultaneity/plateauing in haecceity, dispersals of subjectivity and relations of threads (lines of desire) to web making.
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Abstract Mining the myths and stories in a Whovian landscape Helen Bilinghurst & Phil Smith In this paper we discuss an expansive area of china clay pits and tungsten mining on the southern fringes of Dartmoor; an otherworldly terrain... more
Abstract
Mining the myths and stories in a Whovian landscape
Helen Bilinghurst & Phil Smith
In this paper we discuss an expansive area of china clay pits and tungsten mining on the southern fringes of Dartmoor; an otherworldly terrain we have repeatedly returned to explore through walking and hypersensitization, discovering so many strange stories and mysterious atmospheres, we refer to it as the ‘Doctor Who Zone’.
Walked from one end of the considerable site to another, the ‘Doctor Who Zone’ unfolds in a manner comparable to the television series itself. Each episode emerges from a different aspect of the site: an immense industrial mine dramatically reveals itself through an eerie mist; a tiny hamlet is abruptly abandoned due to catastrophe or plague. Weddings with phantasms of wolves, apocalyptic games, alien fungi, hollow hills, space/time distortions, ambient hums and deafening silences are interwoven with a single plot-line that threads through the entire site: that of a bitter struggle to resist and disrupt a sinister corporate giant called Wolf.
Through our repeated interrogation of this site, we expose how the Dr Who we watched as children – the ‘Dr Who in us’ – continues to resonate, inform the way we see the world, and re-enchant such exploited and ecologically degraded landscapes. Drawing from Mark Fisher’s writings on the eerie, Simon O’Sullivan’s work on Myth-Science and Jane Bennett’s discussion of enchantment and modernity, we ask whether, more than metals and materials, it is the stories and myths of these deranged and unsettling landscapes that are their most precious resources in a struggle for ecological repair
Mining the myths and stories in a Whovian landscape
Helen Bilinghurst & Phil Smith
In this paper we discuss an expansive area of china clay pits and tungsten mining on the southern fringes of Dartmoor; an otherworldly terrain we have repeatedly returned to explore through walking and hypersensitization, discovering so many strange stories and mysterious atmospheres, we refer to it as the ‘Doctor Who Zone’.
Walked from one end of the considerable site to another, the ‘Doctor Who Zone’ unfolds in a manner comparable to the television series itself. Each episode emerges from a different aspect of the site: an immense industrial mine dramatically reveals itself through an eerie mist; a tiny hamlet is abruptly abandoned due to catastrophe or plague. Weddings with phantasms of wolves, apocalyptic games, alien fungi, hollow hills, space/time distortions, ambient hums and deafening silences are interwoven with a single plot-line that threads through the entire site: that of a bitter struggle to resist and disrupt a sinister corporate giant called Wolf.
Through our repeated interrogation of this site, we expose how the Dr Who we watched as children – the ‘Dr Who in us’ – continues to resonate, inform the way we see the world, and re-enchant such exploited and ecologically degraded landscapes. Drawing from Mark Fisher’s writings on the eerie, Simon O’Sullivan’s work on Myth-Science and Jane Bennett’s discussion of enchantment and modernity, we ask whether, more than metals and materials, it is the stories and myths of these deranged and unsettling landscapes that are their most precious resources in a struggle for ecological repair
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
We slide sideways down the road to Stalowa Wola, through a break in the heavy traffic, uninterrupted towards a snow-filled ditch. As company dramaturg, I have been giving notes on the previous day's performance. As the van tips I say:... more
We slide sideways down the road to Stalowa Wola, through a break in the heavy traffic, uninterrupted towards a snow-filled ditch. As company dramaturg, I have been giving notes on the previous day's performance. As the van tips I say: 'Relax into it.' I am directing the accident. We thump into the ditch. Thrown back in our seats, I tear my notes in half. Pause. Enzo announces: " We are alive. " In attempting to keep to the striated route of the tour, an excess of control-over-braking –has made a broken line to smooth space, packed snow close to chaos, our glide sustaining the crisis. It was better than fear.
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Research Interests:
By learning the movement scores of the Romero dead, stripping them of the “fantasy of nastiness”, and adopting an “accidental.... co-operative community”, I ask in this chapter if it is possible to give free rein to instincts for pleasure... more
By learning the movement scores of the Romero dead, stripping them of the “fantasy of nastiness”, and adopting an “accidental.... co-operative community”, I ask in this chapter if it is possible to give free rein to instincts for pleasure focused not on flesh and predations upon it, but instead, redirecting those instincts (and here I was drawing on my taxonomies of zombie space) to the vibrancy of places and things?
With a view to recruiting such vital terrains, as co-performers in a post-dramatic theatre of zombie movement, I worked with first year Theatre students at Plymouth University’s School of Humanities and Performing Arts to make an experiment; preparing in studio space and then exploring in public spaces.
With a view to recruiting such vital terrains, as co-performers in a post-dramatic theatre of zombie movement, I worked with first year Theatre students at Plymouth University’s School of Humanities and Performing Arts to make an experiment; preparing in studio space and then exploring in public spaces.
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This paper considers the exploration of, and performance on, a single street in Exeter (UK), as guided by an idea of ‘mythogeography’ and a determination to address a place as a multiplicity of meanings, objects, accretions, rhythms and... more
This paper considers the exploration of, and performance on, a single street in Exeter (UK), as guided by an idea of ‘mythogeography’ and a determination to address a place as a multiplicity of meanings, objects, accretions, rhythms and exceptions. It explores the virtues of and obstacles facing a performance made ‘on the hoof’ in both senses - ambulatory and improvisatory.
It draws on the idea of ‘mythogeography’ originated in the work of Wrights & Sites, sprung from a growing awareness of how the multiple meanings of certain sites, particularly those designated as “heritage” or “touristic”, are ‘closed down’ and an aspiration to represent multiple and diverse meanings resistant to such a monocular politics of place.
Contrasted with previously ‘exemplary’ work, enacting only the possibilities that a mythogeographical approach to place and space might offer, the paper explores how far a performative ‘mis-guided tour’ (titled in publicity A Tour of Sardine Street) was able to generate a work of ‘realised’ geography applicable to the street and the city as an analysis as well as an aesthetic provocation.
It draws on the idea of ‘mythogeography’ originated in the work of Wrights & Sites, sprung from a growing awareness of how the multiple meanings of certain sites, particularly those designated as “heritage” or “touristic”, are ‘closed down’ and an aspiration to represent multiple and diverse meanings resistant to such a monocular politics of place.
Contrasted with previously ‘exemplary’ work, enacting only the possibilities that a mythogeographical approach to place and space might offer, the paper explores how far a performative ‘mis-guided tour’ (titled in publicity A Tour of Sardine Street) was able to generate a work of ‘realised’ geography applicable to the street and the city as an analysis as well as an aesthetic provocation.
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In this essay, from a position as participant or participant observer, I describe the emergence and development of an engagement with heritage narratives and spaces from within the site-based artists collective Wrights & Sites (Exeter,... more
In this essay, from a position as participant or participant observer, I describe the emergence and development of an engagement with heritage narratives and spaces from within the site-based artists collective Wrights & Sites (Exeter, UK), influenced by the ‘mainstream’ guided tour and by the ‘dark tourism’ (abject, terrorising and apocalyptic) content of many of such tours, and informed by psychogeographical and mythogeographical walking arts (Smith, Mythogeography, On Walking) and by site-specific theatre (Pearson & Shanks, Pearson). I pursue these developments until a single performance – Water Walk – draws together different strands of this development in a manner which suggests a new kind of relationship between performer/guide and tourist/audience.
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Abstract: This paper charts a changing relationship to ruins over fifteen years of making site-specific performance. It looks at three sets of ruins (a nineteenth-century water tower and a chapel and almshouses, both of medieval origins)... more
Abstract:
This paper charts a changing relationship to ruins over fifteen years of making site-specific performance. It looks at three sets of ruins (a nineteenth-century water tower and a chapel and almshouses, both of medieval origins) and records how they each acted as the beginning of three separate post-dramatic performance projects. By re-visiting and walking between the three sets of ruins, the author tests his own changing understanding of their materiality: from inert properties waiting for invasive or re-compositional acts to unfinished and vibrant materials actively recomposing themselves as allies in resistance and ‘slow revolution’.
This paper charts a changing relationship to ruins over fifteen years of making site-specific performance. It looks at three sets of ruins (a nineteenth-century water tower and a chapel and almshouses, both of medieval origins) and records how they each acted as the beginning of three separate post-dramatic performance projects. By re-visiting and walking between the three sets of ruins, the author tests his own changing understanding of their materiality: from inert properties waiting for invasive or re-compositional acts to unfinished and vibrant materials actively recomposing themselves as allies in resistance and ‘slow revolution’.
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Artist and choreographer Siriol Joyner (Aberystwyth, Cymru) and writer and mythogeographer Phil Smith (Exeter, England) worked together with overlaps and collisions of place, dance, description, objects and narratives as part of a series... more
Artist and choreographer Siriol Joyner (Aberystwyth, Cymru) and writer and mythogeographer Phil Smith (Exeter, England) worked together with overlaps and collisions of place, dance, description, objects and narratives as part of a series of Opening Line events by Artlink. They combined description, history and storytelling in response to locations around Edinburgh in performances for sighted, partially sighted and blind audiences.
Working for three days in Cramond, Siriol and Phil explored an edge-place, drawing both on research about it and on their physical and emotional encounters with it. Playing at the edges of overlapping senses and spaces, they explored the meeting place of sacred and non-sacred space; searching for what is there and what is changing there; for what can be told, performed, what can be felt and touched; reaching for what eludes, listening and waiting for what might emerge.
They next took a group on an exploratory journey around the grounds of the Old City Observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. This descriptive performance, designed for sighted, non-sighted and blind audiences, responded to the historic and evocative site of Calton Hill by overlapping and colliding place, dance, description, objects and narratives. Phil and Siriol invited the group to experience the site in different ways, challenging our perception of the space through a series of actions, moments and stories.
This is their report on the two events.
Working for three days in Cramond, Siriol and Phil explored an edge-place, drawing both on research about it and on their physical and emotional encounters with it. Playing at the edges of overlapping senses and spaces, they explored the meeting place of sacred and non-sacred space; searching for what is there and what is changing there; for what can be told, performed, what can be felt and touched; reaching for what eludes, listening and waiting for what might emerge.
They next took a group on an exploratory journey around the grounds of the Old City Observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. This descriptive performance, designed for sighted, non-sighted and blind audiences, responded to the historic and evocative site of Calton Hill by overlapping and colliding place, dance, description, objects and narratives. Phil and Siriol invited the group to experience the site in different ways, challenging our perception of the space through a series of actions, moments and stories.
This is their report on the two events.
Research Interests:
This paper describe a transition from specialised performance interventions – for example, GeoQuest and A Tour of Sardine Street (both 2010) – in heritage sites to a handing over of the tactics of those performances to general tourists... more
This paper describe a transition from specialised performance interventions – for example, GeoQuest and A Tour of Sardine Street (both 2010) – in heritage sites to a handing over of the tactics of those performances to general tourists and visitors for the making of their own performance-like counter-touristic visits. This change is based on a re-valuing; moving away from assumptions that tourists are essentially passive in making their visits and that the sites of those visits are neutral spaces to a valorisation of tourist visits as constructive and agentive and of the sites as places of ‘chorastic’ potential.
The paper describes the use of a multi-modal research methodology; predominantly mixing participant observation and practice-as-research. It narrates the key moments of transition in the research: a double movement of exorcism and spectral return on a ‘mis-guided tour’ (Water Walk, 2010), the discovery that volunteer panel members were not simply observing tours but beginning to re-perform them, the shift from a dispersal of specialised, technical knowledge to a more generally accessible toolkit model exemplified by the publication of A Sardine Street Box of Tricks in 2011, and a series of experimental visits by the author (some accompanied by panel members) to heritage sites on which ‘tactics’ were both tested and new ones devised.
The paper sets the emergence of a performative counter-tourism strategy as a development of practices and ideas informed by or originating in site-specific performance, contemporary Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, walking arts (including disrupted versions of the standard guided tour), and mythogeography.
The paper describes the use of a multi-modal research methodology; predominantly mixing participant observation and practice-as-research. It narrates the key moments of transition in the research: a double movement of exorcism and spectral return on a ‘mis-guided tour’ (Water Walk, 2010), the discovery that volunteer panel members were not simply observing tours but beginning to re-perform them, the shift from a dispersal of specialised, technical knowledge to a more generally accessible toolkit model exemplified by the publication of A Sardine Street Box of Tricks in 2011, and a series of experimental visits by the author (some accompanied by panel members) to heritage sites on which ‘tactics’ were both tested and new ones devised.
The paper sets the emergence of a performative counter-tourism strategy as a development of practices and ideas informed by or originating in site-specific performance, contemporary Performance Studies and Tourism Studies, walking arts (including disrupted versions of the standard guided tour), and mythogeography.
Research Interests: Tourism Studies, Tourist Behavior, Museum Studies, Performance Studies, Heritage Studies, and 13 moreMuseum, Heritage Tourism, Performance Art, Performance, Museums, Heritage, Tourism, Tour Guiding, Museum and Heritage Studies, Tourist Motivation, Tourist Guiding, Tourist Guiding and Interpretation, and Guided Tours
In ‘From Theatre To Dispersal’ (Performance Research 12:2) I recounted a journey from TNT’s touring theatre (its roots in para-theatre and popular performance) – within which, as company dramaturg, I had a brief ‘to enhance... more
In ‘From Theatre To Dispersal’ (Performance Research 12:2) I recounted a journey from TNT’s touring theatre (its roots in para-theatre and popular performance) – within which, as company dramaturg, I had a brief ‘to enhance theatricality’, resting on a semi-fictional notion of nineteenth century German dramaturgs adapting the conceptual plays of poets for the practical stage - to a dispersed performance of journey, site and ‘walking as art’ with Wrights & Sites. But there has always been a complementary motion, a plane of activity sliding in relation to dispersal that began in the theatricality of a ‘rough’ dramaturgy. Through a spacing and thinning out of that theatricality, this dramaturgy has returned, in certain kinds of performative intervention, as remnant, revenant and trace: assemblage and weaving, vernacular intervention, character in myth, separatedness (the ‘ands’), sitedness (acting machine and theatre building as media not containers), the simultaneous dissimilarities of the grotesque, folding back, and framing. The usefulness of these spectral remains to the growing practice of non-theatrical relational interventions in the fields of site and journey is what I want to explain here.
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In this talk for a Postgraduate Research Seminar at Plymouth University I attempt to creep up, quietly, on a zombie. By pretending that I’m talking about zombie movies and how their atmospheres, characters and representations of bodies... more
In this talk for a Postgraduate Research Seminar at Plymouth University I attempt to creep up, quietly, on a zombie.
By pretending that I’m talking about zombie movies and how their atmospheres, characters and representations of bodies and places can be used in walking, and then, when I’m close enough, I try to walk into that dead zombie body, walk into that thing that walks, and see where it takes us.
By pretending that I’m talking about zombie movies and how their atmospheres, characters and representations of bodies and places can be used in walking, and then, when I’m close enough, I try to walk into that dead zombie body, walk into that thing that walks, and see where it takes us.
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This article assesses aspects of the troubled and disputed practice of the dérive some half a century after its Lettriste inception. Rather than seeking to draw a 'virtuous' layer from the multiplicity of practices presently grouped... more
This article assesses aspects of the troubled and disputed practice of the dérive some half a century after its Lettriste inception. Rather than seeking to draw a 'virtuous' layer from the multiplicity of practices presently grouped around the category of 'derive', the article identifies generative properties in their contradictions and variegated connections. Particular attention is given to the spatial question, to the politics of the everyday and 'anywhere', to the limitations of aesthetic and occult psychogeographies – suggesting their dispersed and hybrid redeployment – and to the dérive as a socialized rather than individual practice. The article addresses the relationship of the dérive to relational aesthetic practices as a means to renew a connection with a critique of the spectacle, with the distributive trajectories of labour and capital, and with the creation of 'situations' in a society that has, for some time, accommodated them.
Research Interests: Geography, Performance Studies, Psychogeography, Urbanism, Walking (Art), and 17 moreSituationism, Situationist International, Walking and Exploring, Walking in literature, Walking, City Walking, Situationisms, Psychogeography, landscape history, Literary Psychogeography, The Situationists, Situationisme International, Situationist Aesthetics, Situationists, Post situationism, Walking With Artists, Artists Walking With Me, and Psychogeography deep topography
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Through the prism of A la Ronde (near Exmouth, UK) – an 18th century property owned by a leading UK conservation body, the National Trust – I have been exploring the possibilities of combining paranoid and recuperative approaches to a... more
Through the prism of A la Ronde (near Exmouth, UK) – an 18th century property owned by a leading UK conservation body, the National Trust – I have been exploring the possibilities of combining paranoid and recuperative approaches to a site of performance. This work of knotting and entanglement occurs within overlapping contexts, including a programme of my own performative interventions in touristic and heritage sites (performed to mixed audiences of those with an interest in interventional ambulatory performance and general visitors to these sites) and a particular development of the situationist practices of dérive and détournement that emphasizes resistance to the commercial and bureaucratic homogenization of space and celebrates the multiple meanings of specific sites ('mythogeography').
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This paper describes the educational properties of an exercise for undergraduate theatre and performance students that draws upon the apocalyptic narrative of the zombie mythos; the exercise involves an exploratory walk in the persona of... more
This paper describes the educational properties of an exercise for undergraduate theatre and performance students that draws upon the apocalyptic narrative of the zombie mythos; the exercise involves an exploratory walk in the persona of the last human survivor of a zombie apocalypse. Examining reflective accounts of students’ experiences during the exercise written by members of a 2014 undergraduate class and contrasting them with accounts written by experienced walking artists and exploratory walkers of the same exercise, the paper seeks to draw out what can be gained for participants in this exercise and its uses for teachers. Having identified the contradictory properties of a post-1968 living dead mythos, the paper argues for its efficacy, when carefully deployed, as a means to seeing anew the everyday world. The paper identifies, as useful outcomes of the exercise, students’ heightened perceptions of urban and rural terrains, embodied practice, immersive exploration and imagination, transformed perceptions of everyday space and a developing critical view of landscapes.
In this essay I consider the relation between mythogeography and psychogeography; in particular, how developments within radical walking arising from performance and live art have challenged some of the assumptions of British... more
In this essay I consider the relation between mythogeography and psychogeography; in particular, how developments within radical walking arising from performance and live art have challenged some of the assumptions of British psychogeography, including the dominance of literary outcomes and historical/occult narratives. The essay will describe the origins of mythogeography in the work of Wrights & Sites, and how they first distanced themselves from situationist practices and later made some accommodations with that tradition. I will consider the central role of multiplicity in mythogeography and how that has reconnected it to certain strands within British psychogeography such as the workings of Alan Moore and Tim Perkins and the ‘drifts’ of organisations like the Loiterers Resistance Movement. I will argue that mythogeography continues to pose a challenge to certain limited and revivalist elements within British Psychogeography, but at the same time celebrates the panoply of practices that even where there is no acknowledgement of the influence of the tradition of the International Lettristes/Situationist International (IL/SI) betrays a knowledge of them. I will conclude by referring to the latest ‘ambulant architectures’ project of Wrights & Sites in which mythogeography is now addressing the built environment in a way that evokes (but develops) the urban détournement of the IL/SI.
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This article discusses a series of performative walks made in terrains suggestive of the fictional landscapes of living dead cinema and literature. Drawing on the idea that the living dead sub-genre provides the dominant vision of... more
This article discusses a series of performative walks made in terrains suggestive of the fictional landscapes of living dead cinema and literature. Drawing on the idea that the living dead sub-genre provides the dominant vision of apocalypse in the present stage of capitalist development, the walks explore how real world referents of this fictional apocalypse are unfolding in everyday spaces. The article describes the assembling of a taxonomy of ‘zombie spaces’, drawing on a review of the fictional spaces of living dead film and literature, and how its categories are deployed on five performative walks in towns and cities in Devon (UK). It then discusses some of the findings from the walks, including new categories to add to the taxonomy, the illumination of real world ‘apocalypse’ at the level of the everyday, and reflections on how this category-driven performative walking might be developed in future.
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This chapter (from Tourism Methodologies - New Perspectives, Practices and Procedures, ed. Jane Widtfeldt Meged, Samfunds Litteratur) describes a flexible research methodology. It focuses on a research project studying the effects of a... more
This chapter (from Tourism Methodologies - New Perspectives, Practices and Procedures, ed. Jane Widtfeldt Meged, Samfunds Litteratur) describes a flexible research methodology. It focuses on a research project studying the effects of a series of performances or performance-like visits through heritage sites that sought experimentally to depart from or disrupt those sites’ dominant discourses. The practices considered included a subverted form of guided tours and a re-imagining of the tourist visit. This chapter describes a ‘messy’ multi-modal research methodology at times characterised by interruption, breakdown and reparative weaving and stitching. Methods deployed at different times included Practice-as-Research, participant observation, case studies, shorter assessments and other documentation of practices (including films), panel surveys including a series of questionnaires, informal dialogues, and group panel discussions, plus desk-based research in the overlapping disciplines of Tourism Studies and Performance Studies. The chapter describes how this hybrid and mediated approach led the research from findings applicable to specialists in performance, guiding and the heritage industry to the development of provocative tactics for the general tourist. http://samfundslitteratur.dk/bog/tourism-methodologies
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Research Interests:
The aim of this paper is to make an argument for strategies and techniques devised by practitioners of walking-based arts as a potential resource for tour guides. It summarises problematical characteristics of guided tours, based on a... more
The aim of this paper is to make an argument for strategies and techniques devised by practitioners of walking-based arts as a potential resource for tour guides. It summarises problematical characteristics of guided tours, based on a study in the city of Exeter (UK), and suggests how these might be addressed by tactics from walking arts. It argues that walking artists, and the critical theory informing their work, could be fruitfully studied by tour guides. It describes the growth in ambulatory arts practice as variously described and evaluated in general reviews of the practices [Careri, F. (2002). Walkscapes. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili; Coverley, M. (2012). The art of wandering: The writer as walker. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books; Solnit, R. (2000). Wanderlust: A history of walking. New York, NY: Viking.] and from practitioners' perspectives [Smith, P. (2010). Mythogeography. Axminster: Triarchy]. The paper describes genealogies of practice (including the situationist dérive, sculptural walking, performative elements in Land Art) and of ideas (including psychogeography, dematerialisation of the art object and the importance of the everyday). The paper describes the robustness of the form of the guided tour in the face of its détournement as grounds for risk-taking in exploring the possibilities for innovative and dispersive guided tours, while drawing attention to the potency of “voids” as destabilising spaces for ambulatory arts, guided tours and heritage practices in general.
Some tentative suggestions about the cultural connectedness of the walk of some 'non-living' or 'post-death' characters in European horror movies of the 1970s, particularly those provoked by the Living Dead movies of George Romero, and... more
Some tentative suggestions about the cultural connectedness of the walk of some 'non-living' or 'post-death' characters in European horror movies of the 1970s, particularly those provoked by the Living Dead movies of George Romero, and European traditions of walking as an aesthetic or political practice: the Dada tours, the ambulations of the Surrealists, the 'derive' of the situationists, the ‘traces’ of Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, the explorations of Rome's Stalker group, etc.
Focussing on Ossorio’s Blind Dead quartet, the two Zombie Flesh Eater movies inspired by Dawn of the Dead, and Demons and Demons 2, I will attempt to draw some conclusions from the particular motion of the walking dead in these movies, their relations with the terrains of the modernist city, ‘historic’ ruins, the ‘natural stage’ of the sea and the cinema itself and their similarities with certain aesthetic and subversive everyday walking strategies.
In contrast to US zombie ‘living dead’ movies the European dead are rarely inhibited by the forces of the state. If they are policed it seems more by history, by the ideological exchange of ideas and images, or by nature. I will attempt to show how this ‘free’ walk of the European ‘dead’, their interaction with their environments and their derivatively driven re-making of extreme events as an “everyday” all echo and finesse crucial theoretical and tactical cultural practices: the “mobile city” of de Certeau resisting the “conceptual city”, the atmosphere, ‘dread’ and ambience of neo-romantic English and situationist writing and exploring, and the construction of ‘situations’ that resist the reduction of social relations to an endless accumulation of the means to survive.
Focussing on Ossorio’s Blind Dead quartet, the two Zombie Flesh Eater movies inspired by Dawn of the Dead, and Demons and Demons 2, I will attempt to draw some conclusions from the particular motion of the walking dead in these movies, their relations with the terrains of the modernist city, ‘historic’ ruins, the ‘natural stage’ of the sea and the cinema itself and their similarities with certain aesthetic and subversive everyday walking strategies.
In contrast to US zombie ‘living dead’ movies the European dead are rarely inhibited by the forces of the state. If they are policed it seems more by history, by the ideological exchange of ideas and images, or by nature. I will attempt to show how this ‘free’ walk of the European ‘dead’, their interaction with their environments and their derivatively driven re-making of extreme events as an “everyday” all echo and finesse crucial theoretical and tactical cultural practices: the “mobile city” of de Certeau resisting the “conceptual city”, the atmosphere, ‘dread’ and ambience of neo-romantic English and situationist writing and exploring, and the construction of ‘situations’ that resist the reduction of social relations to an endless accumulation of the means to survive.
Research Interests:
In this paper I explore the nature of the creative challenges confronted while working on a commission to create texts for a viewing platform on the refurbished Royal Terrace Gardens (more commonly known as ‘Rock Walk’) at Torquay during... more
In this paper I explore the nature of the creative challenges confronted while working on a commission to create texts for a viewing platform on the refurbished Royal Terrace Gardens (more commonly known as ‘Rock Walk’) at Torquay during early 2010.
The paper attempts a critical evaluation of the project as a means to interrogate some aspects of a creative method favouring détournement over originality.
Specifically, it addresses an engagement with the different spaces and ‘stages’ of the site: the bay under different gazes, the ‘Gardens’ with their tumultuous geological history, disputed uses and cinematic exploitations, and the relation of viewing platform to other vantage points.
The paper describes attempts to identify and contest various gazes (historical and predicted), to set in motion (and in question) a number of usually discrete historical and fictional narratives, and to redeploy the conventions of tourists’ and residents’ uses of the site (strolling, contemplation, reading, etc.) as the multiple means to generating a complex and ‘disturbed’ re-looking at the objects of the gazes.
With detailed reference to the use of the viewing platform as a performative site, recruiting its different elements (engraved text, facilitation of view and information boards) as means to animate the visitor as witness, reader and inquirer, the paper relates the question of creativity to the principle of place-specificity.
The paper attempts a critical evaluation of the project as a means to interrogate some aspects of a creative method favouring détournement over originality.
Specifically, it addresses an engagement with the different spaces and ‘stages’ of the site: the bay under different gazes, the ‘Gardens’ with their tumultuous geological history, disputed uses and cinematic exploitations, and the relation of viewing platform to other vantage points.
The paper describes attempts to identify and contest various gazes (historical and predicted), to set in motion (and in question) a number of usually discrete historical and fictional narratives, and to redeploy the conventions of tourists’ and residents’ uses of the site (strolling, contemplation, reading, etc.) as the multiple means to generating a complex and ‘disturbed’ re-looking at the objects of the gazes.
With detailed reference to the use of the viewing platform as a performative site, recruiting its different elements (engraved text, facilitation of view and information boards) as means to animate the visitor as witness, reader and inquirer, the paper relates the question of creativity to the principle of place-specificity.
In this paper Phil Smith examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave ‘as signposts’. It describes the circumstances from which the proposal arose, a particular moment in the work of site-specific... more
In this paper Phil Smith examines the proposal of Simon Persighetti of Wrights & Sites for actors to behave ‘as signposts’. It describes the circumstances from which the proposal arose, a particular moment in the work of site-specific artists/performers Wrights & Sites, and argues for the wider application of the proposal to the making of site-based theatre and performance. The paper describes four main features of the proposal for ‘actors as signposts’ – pointing to specificity, movement from anti-character to collective subject, performance as trajectory, and the restoration of corporeality – illustrating these with reference to the work of Punchdrunk, Francis Alÿs, and geographer Michael Zinganel, among others.
A Mis-Guided Tour Phil Smith performs ‘Beer, Beef and Royal Steps’, a détourned guided tour of the Royal William Yard, Plymouth. Filmed by Siobhan McKeown. Commissioned for the Hidden City Festival, 2008 by Part Exchange. Phil... more
A Mis-Guided Tour
Phil Smith performs ‘Beer, Beef and Royal Steps’, a détourned guided tour of the Royal William Yard, Plymouth.
Filmed by Siobhan McKeown.
Commissioned for the Hidden City Festival, 2008 by Part Exchange.
Phil Smith, one of the core members of Wrights & Sites, deploys the ideas of mythogeography, placing the fictional, fanciful, mistaken and personal on equal terms with factual, heritage and municipal histories. Since 1998 he has been creating subversions of the ‘standard’ guided tour. In an exploration of ideas and images in motion about the Royal William Victualling Yard at Plymouth, UK, this ‘mis-guided’ tour combines trapezoidal geometry, Smith’s family history and a packet of Party Rings biscuits to throw off the architectural grid and celebrate at least one history that never happened.
Funded by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Plymouth,
Phil Smith performs ‘Beer, Beef and Royal Steps’, a détourned guided tour of the Royal William Yard, Plymouth.
Filmed by Siobhan McKeown.
Commissioned for the Hidden City Festival, 2008 by Part Exchange.
Phil Smith, one of the core members of Wrights & Sites, deploys the ideas of mythogeography, placing the fictional, fanciful, mistaken and personal on equal terms with factual, heritage and municipal histories. Since 1998 he has been creating subversions of the ‘standard’ guided tour. In an exploration of ideas and images in motion about the Royal William Victualling Yard at Plymouth, UK, this ‘mis-guided’ tour combines trapezoidal geometry, Smith’s family history and a packet of Party Rings biscuits to throw off the architectural grid and celebrate at least one history that never happened.
Funded by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Plymouth,
This paper proposes that certain patterns of discourse can be detected in ‘official’, ‘civic’ contemporary touring-guiding within the city of Exeter (UK), and that these patterns create certain problematical relations with, and... more
This paper proposes that certain patterns of discourse can be detected in ‘official’, ‘civic’ contemporary touring-guiding within the city of Exeter (UK), and that these patterns create certain problematical relations with, and problematical representations of, the sites of these tours. As a result, these guided tours (or, generically, the ‘standard’ Exeter tour) miss many of the opportunities afforded by their sites for critical, embodied, revelatory and investigative engagements. The paper develops this critique to suggest that an alternative model might better accept these opportunities and provisionally proposes the practice of ‘mis-guiding’, developed in the city of Exeter, as a constructive move towards such a model. .
A special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance (vol 34 issue 3, 2014).
Research Interests:
In this article I describe ‘Plymouth Labyrinth’ (2018-19), a multi-faceted collaborative art-making project, organised by ‘Crab & Bee’ (Helen Billinghurst and myself), in which we tested an ‘Arachnean’ practice, informed by concepts... more
In this article I describe ‘Plymouth Labyrinth’ (2018-19), a multi-faceted collaborative art-making project, organised by ‘Crab & Bee’ (Helen Billinghurst and myself), in which we tested an ‘Arachnean’ practice, informed by concepts proposed by the radical educator and film maker Fernand Deligny, as our means to address certain constricted place stories under conditions of climate crisis.
Research Interests:
A reconsideration of the ailing zombie body in the context of the 2019/2020 coronavirus pandemic, this essay attempts to ‘round up’ and end 15 years of academic study, talks and performance interventions in relation to the body of the... more
A reconsideration of the ailing zombie body in the context of the 2019/2020 coronavirus pandemic, this essay attempts to ‘round up’ and end 15 years of academic study, talks and performance interventions in relation to the body of the Romero zombie. It argues that a qualitative shift has taken place in the mythos, in response to a changing culture, that renders the zombie ineffective and preparative to its replacement by an ecological one.
Research Interests:
Through the lenses of mythogeography and radical walking, this is an analysis of the rise of a new ruling class, the conspiracy theory ruling class. The paper seeks to explain the nature and origins of this class. It then counterposes to... more
Through the lenses of mythogeography and radical walking, this is an analysis of the rise of a new ruling class, the conspiracy theory ruling class. The paper seeks to explain the nature and origins of this class. It then counterposes to conspiracy theory, a politics that orients first to state-based reformism and then to a post-pilgrimage to (and making) invisible architecture as a response to, and resistance against, the dominant conspiratorial tendency in contemporary politics.
Research Interests:
This paper describes the assembling of a taxonomy of 'zombie space', consisting of categories of fictional urban space drawn from zombie films and other expressions of a living dead 'mythos', and presents a provisional set of these... more
This paper describes the assembling of a taxonomy of 'zombie space', consisting of categories of fictional urban space drawn from zombie films and other expressions of a living dead 'mythos', and presents a provisional set of these categories. The paper places this assembling in the context of the use of taxonomies in alternative ambulatory practices such as the Dadaist de-ambulation, the situationist dérive, and contemporary 'walking as art' practices. It concludes by describing the problems, specifically the paucity of theoretical detail and the lack of practical models, faced in the deployment of such a taxonomy when moving beyond an observational or experiential walk to one that is part of the construction of 'situations'.
Research Interests: Human Geography, Urban Geography, Film Studies, Film Analysis, Psychogeography, and 27 moreUrbanism, Walking (Art), Monsters and Monster Theory, Walking and Exploring, Zombie Films, Walking in literature, Zombies, Walking, Mythogeography, Monsters, City Walking, The Walking Dead, Deep Origin, Inspiration, Psychogeography, Monsters and the Monstrous, Zombie Capitalism, Zombie, Zombie Studies, Zombie Fiction, Memory Maps and Psychogeographies, Zombies Related to Media, Sociology of Zombies, Psychology Behind Zombie Movies, Zombies Meaning of Capitalism, Culture and Monsters, Zombie Apocalypse, Vampires and Zombies, and Psychogeography deep topography
Looking back to the ideas and practices from which ‘psychogeography’ emerged, and examining them through the prism of very recent developments among radical walkers and psychogeographers – what Tina Richardson has called ‘the New... more
Looking back to the ideas and practices from which ‘psychogeography’ emerged, and examining them through the prism of very recent developments among radical walkers and psychogeographers – what Tina Richardson has called ‘the New Psychogeography. Drawing out what from the legacy of ‘psychogeography’ is most valuable and where it might take us now. Looking briefly at different phases of psychogeographical activity in the UK – from the literary and the occult, through the struggles of the neo-situationist groups of the 1990s - and celebrating the recent explosion of publishing around these ideas and practices, bringing things up to date with a quick review of what the recent exponential growth in radical and aesthetic walking might mean.
I will finish by suggesting some of the challenges and opportunities that are now there to be met not only by ‘the New Psychogeographers’, but by anyone who avails themselves of the unprecedentedly deep resource of ideas and tactics of far greater range of imagination and technique than ever before.
I will finish by suggesting some of the challenges and opportunities that are now there to be met not only by ‘the New Psychogeographers’, but by anyone who avails themselves of the unprecedentedly deep resource of ideas and tactics of far greater range of imagination and technique than ever before.
Research Interests:
This is a transcript of a performance lecture given as part of Material City, a programme of interdisciplinary conversations and fieldwork led by Situations in partnership with Arnolfini and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology... more
This is a transcript of a performance lecture given as part of Material City, a programme of interdisciplinary conversations and fieldwork led by Situations in partnership with Arnolfini and the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol. Wrights & Sites (A Mis¬Guide To Anywhere) presented a performance-lecture on their site and walking¬based practices that overlap with architecture, urban exploration, activism and autobiography.
Research Interests:
Dancing the Plague – Undoing Narratives of Social Media Connectivity This joint paper discusses Dance Plague with Flanker Origami, a social media danced promenade, performed in the theatres and streets of Edinburgh and live-streamed on... more
Dancing the Plague – Undoing Narratives of Social Media Connectivity
This joint paper discusses Dance Plague with Flanker Origami, a social media danced promenade, performed in the theatres and streets of Edinburgh and live-streamed on Facebook Live in May 2023. The event is part of an ongoing practice research project and stems from a creative collaboration between performer-researchers Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean as Organic Theatre and Dr. Phil Smith, mythogeographer, writer and artist specialising in walking and site-specific performance. Led by the characters of Flanker Origami, from a digital performance created in 2021 by the company for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the promenade breaks and destabilises normative social behaviour in public sites through couple dancing, dopamine dressing and acts of bodily assemblages within the urban landscape.
Engendering queered and unruly site-specific practice, the promenade upsets and demystifies neoliberal modes of gatekeeping and fruition of cultural sites in the festival city, opening questions about the ontological status of hybrid characters, edging between digital and physical embodiment. In choosing to become interlopers in the daily life of theatre buildings, Flanker and Origami dance through and occupy the backstage whilst deserting the theatre auditorium. They hover in the adjacent streets, in search of found sets, streamed on social media like ghosts of a lost digital spectacle. In so doing the promenade actively (and ironically) counteracts and challenges capitalistic notions of cultural consumption, surveillance and social control, reframing the narratives of post-pandemic social spaces, both online and in presence. Through technologically enabled performance, the dance manifests itself both as the metaphorical plague of a market-driven creative industry struggling to keep up with its own vulnerable economy, and a possible cure which can reclaim and release hybrid and heightened spaces of connectivity in the private and public domains of theatre organisations.
This joint paper discusses Dance Plague with Flanker Origami, a social media danced promenade, performed in the theatres and streets of Edinburgh and live-streamed on Facebook Live in May 2023. The event is part of an ongoing practice research project and stems from a creative collaboration between performer-researchers Bianca Mastrominico and John Dean as Organic Theatre and Dr. Phil Smith, mythogeographer, writer and artist specialising in walking and site-specific performance. Led by the characters of Flanker Origami, from a digital performance created in 2021 by the company for the first hybrid edition of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the promenade breaks and destabilises normative social behaviour in public sites through couple dancing, dopamine dressing and acts of bodily assemblages within the urban landscape.
Engendering queered and unruly site-specific practice, the promenade upsets and demystifies neoliberal modes of gatekeeping and fruition of cultural sites in the festival city, opening questions about the ontological status of hybrid characters, edging between digital and physical embodiment. In choosing to become interlopers in the daily life of theatre buildings, Flanker and Origami dance through and occupy the backstage whilst deserting the theatre auditorium. They hover in the adjacent streets, in search of found sets, streamed on social media like ghosts of a lost digital spectacle. In so doing the promenade actively (and ironically) counteracts and challenges capitalistic notions of cultural consumption, surveillance and social control, reframing the narratives of post-pandemic social spaces, both online and in presence. Through technologically enabled performance, the dance manifests itself both as the metaphorical plague of a market-driven creative industry struggling to keep up with its own vulnerable economy, and a possible cure which can reclaim and release hybrid and heightened spaces of connectivity in the private and public domains of theatre organisations.
Research Interests:
A talk for Burren College of Art, Ireland, reviewing my recent walking arts projects and looking ahead to future developments in my research.
Research Interests:
In this talk I will be addressing a particular thematic finding from a series of journeys, almost all on foot, that I have been taking around the towns and cities of South Devon (UK) and across the land between. During these walks I have... more
In this talk I will be addressing a particular thematic finding from a series of journeys, almost all on foot, that I have been taking around the towns and cities of South Devon (UK) and across the land between. During these walks I have been using techniques of limited paranoia and hyper-sensitised state, walking in relation to a particular fiction invented for this project, and using various existing literary and cinematic sources – including William Beckford’s ‘Vathek’, Dennis Wheatley’s ‘The Haunting of Toby Jugg’, and the 2013 found-footage horror ‘The Borderlands’ – as levers in the landscape.
While this project, the culmination of twenty years wandering, exploring and performing in the area, has generated multiple findings, in this talk I will particularly focus on how a series of material and imaginary meshworks and narratives, often entangled, have been revealed in the process. These meshworks, like the hollow ways that reach deep into the fabric of the cities, transgress the city/countryside boundary. They challenge assumptions about the city as a concentration, of centres as the defining points of communities, burrow and crawl under walls and boundaries with multiple myths of caves and tunnels, and excavate patterns of dispersal and relaxed spacing that underlie more recent social architecture.
In a search for traces of H.P. Lovecraft’s Devonian ancestors, a watery Dumnonian landscape emerges that leads me to a martyr’s well in a city centre vegan café. Memories of Michael Jackson’s healing mission to Exeter City’s football ground evoke iconographies of flow in High Street ornaments and on re-emerging roods screens. In seeking access to ‘The Old Grotto’ at Torbryan rationalist nineteenth century palaeontology and fairy cities become tangled. A stone circle in an urban playpark is spirited away.
Drawing on ambulatory explorations, on gothic texts from the prophesies of Exeter servant Joanna Southcott to the ‘Atomic Consciousness’ of Whimple’s ‘James Bathurst’, giving close attention to textures and materials (to the geological serpent coiled beneath), and given the emergence of the journey’s own narratives, I will propose a more loosely lived and more distantly connected model of urban landscape.
While this project, the culmination of twenty years wandering, exploring and performing in the area, has generated multiple findings, in this talk I will particularly focus on how a series of material and imaginary meshworks and narratives, often entangled, have been revealed in the process. These meshworks, like the hollow ways that reach deep into the fabric of the cities, transgress the city/countryside boundary. They challenge assumptions about the city as a concentration, of centres as the defining points of communities, burrow and crawl under walls and boundaries with multiple myths of caves and tunnels, and excavate patterns of dispersal and relaxed spacing that underlie more recent social architecture.
In a search for traces of H.P. Lovecraft’s Devonian ancestors, a watery Dumnonian landscape emerges that leads me to a martyr’s well in a city centre vegan café. Memories of Michael Jackson’s healing mission to Exeter City’s football ground evoke iconographies of flow in High Street ornaments and on re-emerging roods screens. In seeking access to ‘The Old Grotto’ at Torbryan rationalist nineteenth century palaeontology and fairy cities become tangled. A stone circle in an urban playpark is spirited away.
Drawing on ambulatory explorations, on gothic texts from the prophesies of Exeter servant Joanna Southcott to the ‘Atomic Consciousness’ of Whimple’s ‘James Bathurst’, giving close attention to textures and materials (to the geological serpent coiled beneath), and given the emergence of the journey’s own narratives, I will propose a more loosely lived and more distantly connected model of urban landscape.
Research Interests:
“Victorian Machines and the Recovery of A Malevolent Vampirism Phil Smith (University of Plymouth) I would like to continue my longstanding and ongoing engagement with vampire literature through a critical consideration of the... more
“Victorian Machines and the Recovery of A Malevolent Vampirism
Phil Smith (University of Plymouth)
I would like to continue my longstanding and ongoing engagement with vampire literature through a critical consideration of the Victorian dystopian fantasy novel by the enigmatic W. Grove, ‘The Wreck of a World’ (1889).
Set in a fictional 1948, against a backdrop of the “decay of religion and the cultivation of a gospel of selfishness”, ‘The Wreck of a World’ is a technology-based nightmare. It opens in the USA at the Yellow Creek Works where engineers have created “self-feeding, self-supplying, even self-repairing” steam locomotives that learn how to reproduce themselves without the help of humans. These newly agentive machines turn on their human masters and begin to lay waste to cities, with their advantage of “the absence of affections and a nervous system”.
In this paper I will argue that the novel’s portrayal of “soulless machines, with all their.... blind implacable fury” are comparable to portrayals of the Victorian undead by Stoker (and others) and may have some bearing now on the vampires’ continuing relevance in an era of VR and AI.
Drawing on my previous theoretical and artistic engagements with vampires, (from reading Moretti’s essay ‘The Dialectic of Fear’ and mounting political horror story writing competitions [both 1983] to writing ‘Horror Story’ for Avon Touring Theatre [1984] and ‘Dracula and the Eco-Warrior’ for TNT Theatre [2016]), I will try to develop an argument around W. Grove’s metal vampires in relation to the increasing importance of themes of the undead in an age of climate crisis, and how they might help us make alliances with inanimate and ‘soulless’ things in our coming post-industrial adventures.
Phil Smith (University of Plymouth)
I would like to continue my longstanding and ongoing engagement with vampire literature through a critical consideration of the Victorian dystopian fantasy novel by the enigmatic W. Grove, ‘The Wreck of a World’ (1889).
Set in a fictional 1948, against a backdrop of the “decay of religion and the cultivation of a gospel of selfishness”, ‘The Wreck of a World’ is a technology-based nightmare. It opens in the USA at the Yellow Creek Works where engineers have created “self-feeding, self-supplying, even self-repairing” steam locomotives that learn how to reproduce themselves without the help of humans. These newly agentive machines turn on their human masters and begin to lay waste to cities, with their advantage of “the absence of affections and a nervous system”.
In this paper I will argue that the novel’s portrayal of “soulless machines, with all their.... blind implacable fury” are comparable to portrayals of the Victorian undead by Stoker (and others) and may have some bearing now on the vampires’ continuing relevance in an era of VR and AI.
Drawing on my previous theoretical and artistic engagements with vampires, (from reading Moretti’s essay ‘The Dialectic of Fear’ and mounting political horror story writing competitions [both 1983] to writing ‘Horror Story’ for Avon Touring Theatre [1984] and ‘Dracula and the Eco-Warrior’ for TNT Theatre [2016]), I will try to develop an argument around W. Grove’s metal vampires in relation to the increasing importance of themes of the undead in an age of climate crisis, and how they might help us make alliances with inanimate and ‘soulless’ things in our coming post-industrial adventures.
Research Interests:
In this talk I describe two rather different approaches to making change. The first is a strategy for change that I devised about 10 years ago; I’ll explain how this strategy came to be devised, specifically for tourists and visitors to... more
In this talk I describe two rather different approaches to making change.
The first is a strategy for change that I devised about 10 years ago; I’ll explain how this strategy came to be devised, specifically for tourists and visitors to use against the heritage industry, its institutions and properties. And then in the second half of the talk I’ll address what I do now, working with what I call ‘placestories’ in different terrains. I begin with some very general ideas about change; in particular, regress and progress.
The first is a strategy for change that I devised about 10 years ago; I’ll explain how this strategy came to be devised, specifically for tourists and visitors to use against the heritage industry, its institutions and properties. And then in the second half of the talk I’ll address what I do now, working with what I call ‘placestories’ in different terrains. I begin with some very general ideas about change; in particular, regress and progress.
Research Interests:
In this talk I present an informal survey of my solo and collaborative performances since 1998 through some of the lenses of hauntology. I begin with a general description of hauntology, summarise the performance work and then subject it... more
In this talk I present an informal survey of my solo and collaborative performances since 1998 through some of the lenses of hauntology. I begin with a general description of hauntology, summarise the performance work and then subject it to some hauntological perspectives.
Research Interests:
That Which Walks In this presentation I try to identify a shift in walking arts, and advocate for shifting further, from a focus on the psychogeographical affects of human subjects, with roots in former collectivities, to a shared... more
That Which Walks
In this presentation I try to identify a shift in walking arts, and advocate for shifting further, from a focus on the psychogeographical affects of human subjects, with roots in former collectivities, to a shared activity with unhuman players that include place-stories, metals and their subterranean networks, and sites of rewilding. Noting the rising importance of ‘animism’, decolonialisation and challenges to anthropocentric perspectives, I will seek to address what is happening, and might happen, to human subjectivities in walking arts if we acknowledge and give attention to the fractures of past apocalypses in which we walk.
In this presentation I try to identify a shift in walking arts, and advocate for shifting further, from a focus on the psychogeographical affects of human subjects, with roots in former collectivities, to a shared activity with unhuman players that include place-stories, metals and their subterranean networks, and sites of rewilding. Noting the rising importance of ‘animism’, decolonialisation and challenges to anthropocentric perspectives, I will seek to address what is happening, and might happen, to human subjectivities in walking arts if we acknowledge and give attention to the fractures of past apocalypses in which we walk.
Research Interests:
In this talk, for the 2021 4th World Congress of Psychogeography, Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith advocate for a shift in the balance of agency in psychogeographical walking from human subjects to shared activism with unhuman players,... more
In this talk, for the 2021 4th World Congress of Psychogeography, Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith advocate for a shift in the balance of agency in psychogeographical walking from human subjects to shared activism with unhuman players, including place-stories, subterranean networks and sites of rewilding. Noting the rising importance of challenges to anthropocentric perspectives. The artists will illustrate this discussion with examples from their recent ritual games projects, including shrine making and burning.
Research Interests:
An account of the 1908 walk by Charles Hurst, recorded in 'The Book of the English Oak' (1910), from Manchester across the North West of England and parts of the Midlands planting acorns, and my walk almost a century later following his... more
An account of the 1908 walk by Charles Hurst, recorded in 'The Book of the English Oak' (1910), from Manchester across the North West of England and parts of the Midlands planting acorns, and my walk almost a century later following his route.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Through the political spasms of the last year, clumsy expressions of deep rhythms of change, a new kind of Spectacle is emerging from its old ‘integrated’ form into a new meshwork of ‘post-truths’. This trend to vaporisation is thinning... more
Through the political spasms of the last year, clumsy expressions of deep rhythms of change, a new kind of Spectacle is emerging from its old ‘integrated’ form into a new meshwork of ‘post-truths’. This trend to vaporisation is thinning the relationships between different landscapes (including rural and urban) - and the jellies are coming!! In this presentation I attempt to describe how psychogeographers can draw on the tensions within such changes and exploit them for their own ‘drifts’, arming their bodies in transit. I will describe a ‘war on subjectivity’, the opportunities for walking in the ripples of atomic suburbs and a new kind of pilgrimage-like dérive for developing a resistant psyche, adapted to the conditions of the ‘war’. I will conclude with a few findings from my recent ‘Anywhere’ project about how we can use the abandoned ruins of New Babylon curled up inside hidden dimensions of the hypermodern city.
Research Interests:
With Lee Miller, Roberta Mock, and Phil Smith: This collaborative lecture will explore and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through contemporary understandings of performance. It will also suggest ways that zombies might act as... more
With Lee Miller, Roberta Mock, and Phil Smith: This collaborative lecture will explore and celebrate zombies as a cultural phenomenon through contemporary understandings of performance. It will also suggest ways that zombies might act as models to help us to understand theories of performance that centre on participation, presence, space, representation, mediation and embodiment.
My contribution focuses on film-maker Maya Deren's ethnographic research into Haitian voodoo ceremonies and rituals, and the phenomenon of trance states, and her own experience of voodoo trance, of becoming zombie.
Lee Miller is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance; he is interested in landscape, collaboration, the ability of the body to endure. Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies; her research focuses on gender, sexuality, culture, place and the performing body. Kayla Parker is Lecturer in Media Arts; her research centres on subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, from feminist perspectives. Phil Smith is Research Fellow in Performance and the Everyday; he researches and practices in the fields of walking, performance and counter-tourism.
Lee, Roberta, Kayla and Phil are co-organizing an academic symposium Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance at Plymouth University 12 + 13 April 2013: www.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/hpa/zombies
email: livingdead@plymouth.ac.uk
My contribution focuses on film-maker Maya Deren's ethnographic research into Haitian voodoo ceremonies and rituals, and the phenomenon of trance states, and her own experience of voodoo trance, of becoming zombie.
Lee Miller is Associate Professor in Theatre and Performance; he is interested in landscape, collaboration, the ability of the body to endure. Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies; her research focuses on gender, sexuality, culture, place and the performing body. Kayla Parker is Lecturer in Media Arts; her research centres on subjectivity and place, embodiment and technological mediation, from feminist perspectives. Phil Smith is Research Fellow in Performance and the Everyday; he researches and practices in the fields of walking, performance and counter-tourism.
Lee, Roberta, Kayla and Phil are co-organizing an academic symposium Zombies: Walking, Eating and Performance at Plymouth University 12 + 13 April 2013: www.plymouth.ac.uk/schools/hpa/zombies
email: livingdead@plymouth.ac.uk
Research Interests: Religion, Parapsychology, Anthropology, Folklore, Performance Studies, and 17 moreAltered States of Consciousness, Psychedelics, Magic, Performance Art, Shamanism, Paranormal, Spiritualism, Anthropology of Consciousness, Maya Deren, Zombies, Mediumship, Trance, Vodou, Vodun, Voodoo, Paranthropology:, and Vodoun
This short paper, presented at the Bethlem Gallery, addresses some of the subjective and therapeutic possibilities of 'disrupted' walking in the traditions of psychogeography and walking arts.
Research Interests:
After a review of recent psychogeographical practice and publications, this talk addresses the challenges for contemporary psychogeography from a multiplicitous and invasive global Spectacle that has shifted beyond its former 'integrated'... more
After a review of recent psychogeographical practice and publications, this talk addresses the challenges for contemporary psychogeography from a multiplicitous and invasive global Spectacle that has shifted beyond its former 'integrated' state. The talk proposes that psychogeography make its own shifts in relation to a shorter and more flexible situational-'dérive' (and away from the ideal of the 'permanent 'dérive''), embracing the principle of disturbance and the practice of encoding and re-encoding space. It also discusses the uses of fictional totalities in psychogeography, experiment, and the uses for the 'mess' of the situationist milieu.
Research Interests: Human Geography, Urban Geography, Performance Studies, Psychogeography, Everyday Aesthetics, and 16 moreWalking (Art), Situationism, Site-Specific Art, Sociology of Everyday Life, Situationist International, Walking and Exploring, Everyday Life, Walking in literature, Walking, Random Walks, City Walking, Literary Psychogeography, Walking in the City, Memory Maps and Psychogeographies, Walking With Artists, and Art and psychogeography
This is a recording of the talk I gave at Carleton College, Northfield (MN) in May 2016. It covers my shift from theatre and site-specific performance to a walking arts practice and describes the coincidental growth of this practice,... more
This is a recording of the talk I gave at Carleton College, Northfield (MN) in May 2016. It covers my shift from theatre and site-specific performance to a walking arts practice and describes the coincidental growth of this practice, varieties and tactics within the practice, and issues around its future development.