Edinburgh psygeo guide



overview
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Edinburgh : a psychogeography guide is the first such guide to the scottish capital (Glasgow’s pioneer is covered here) due out in autumn 2010. There are no ghost stories (reality is much more interesting), no top-10 must-sees. It prompts you instead to take a creative stance by simply engaging senses as well as mind. The guide is richly illustrated and photographed, plus comes with ultra-clear maps and a complete postcode gazetteer for mobileweb use.

Naturally, the commentary is highly contentious in places… and there are plenty of surprises and playful twists.

who’s it for
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The lost. The inquisitive. And especially those without a demographic.

some background narrative from me on what Edinburgh psygeo guide is all about
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“…so recent psychogeography is based on a mixture of the situationist (a hugely influential 1950s/60s politicised arts movement) and marxism, coming about as a reaction to the destruction of many european cities’ cultural identifiers and heritages during WWII (apart from Rome which emerged relatively unscathed). This is now brought to us in a de-radicalised form by writers you’ll know like Iain Sinclair, Rebecca Solnit, J G Ballard, Will Self – but also by a whole range of artists, anti-capitalist activists, creative people not perhaps knowingly using psychogeography, but still looking askance – as Max Planck said, ||When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change||

Firstly I can say that I think many of the insights in Edinburgh psygeo are original, yet they’re not from me. I’ll try and explain that. Some insights have of course come from just walking over old ground in new ways – well this is a guide that uses psychogeography… above and beneath this though, there is a layer that can speak if you use other forms of research – for me that is done by shifting basic known facts to new locations in time and space. So, for instance, the Duke of Wellington’s equestrian statue at the east end of Princes street (Waterloo is in Belgium) takes on different symbolisms if you realise that under the hoofs it marks the northern end of the A1 – the Great North Road – a vein straight to central London. And of course this statue is not a one-off – there are many other uk cities that doppleganger the Iron Duke. So the otherwise banal, meaningless photo-opportunity of horse and rider backgrounded against the Balmoral (previously the tellingly-named North British) hotel takes on a completely new creative and psychopolitical dimension. Actually you could write a book about just this one statue (the iron duke in bronze, by steell, looked down on by Nelson’s column) and its implications and meanings.

Secondly this re-mixed research, often multilayered with different sources across all media, creates a palimpsest of newtruths/untruths/mistakes/conjectures that disrupts the officially sanctioned storybox into Augmented Reality. What this means simply is that you alter the ubiquitous stories by feeding new, apparently unconnected facts into the mix. Now, coupling this augmented reality (via a mobile device) with intuition and sense will then quickly remove preconceptions – most importantly, you arrive at a place of revealed truth. Suddenly the city looks and feels very different. You begin to question everything.”

update August 2010
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Edinburgh psygeo guide will be available to purchase as both 248pp printed book and PDF download at fromztoa.net from October 2010 – click to receive a preview invite

FromZtoA is a psychogeography and urban topography magazine which covers creative, critical, playful urban journeys

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