Lines to where?
hitch // hiking: adventure is dead
gerlach, j. & jellis, t.
09:29, walking the slip-road on the A34, playing another Situationist trick, a dérive of sorts. Hitchhiking to where, we didn’t know, but that, after all, was the point. Thomas and Joe had sketched this psychogeographical experiment in the departmental coffee room a week beforehand, fretting over whether two guys together would ever get a lift, how far they might get and whether hitchhiking was illegal or not1. The aim of the experiment: to trace and animate lines; lines of movement and lines of affect – traces which might point towards, or be generative of, micro-political actions, or what we’ve been calling ‘small acts of repair’2.
We hoped to generate encounters. Different ways of meeting people, engaging with them, ‘doing’ research. We left postcards. Please draw some lines. Perhaps your journey, or journeys. It’s up to you. We’ve put an address and there’s a stamp on it too.
We chose hitchhiking as a field method for two reasons. Firstly, we wanted to recruit other things and other people into the society of molecules; by hitching lifts – intersecting and generating lines with others, we illustrated that abstractions are not so distant from lived experience. Secondly, we wanted to reclaim hitchhiking as a technology of experimentation, a geographical experiment where the only constraint was that we would accompany those who stopped and follow them, wherever it might lead us. An open-ended experiment, in which the lines travelled were constantly unfolding and never fixed.
Chaosmosis3 lent some direction and now we have three postcards back 4. Through a series of co-produced encounters along A-roads, motorways and hard-shoulders we have traced several maps of affects: the scores of everyday lives. Lines drawn, but lines to where? We still don’t know, but following Foucault, we’re all cartographers now. Experimental cartographers, radical empiricsts.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
- Hitchhiking in the UK is not illegal except on Motorways (Highway Code, HM Stationary Office) ↩
- Bottoms, S. & Goulish, M. (2007) Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology and Goat Island. Routledge ↩
- Guattari, F. (1995) Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Indiana University Press. Trans. Bains, P. & Pefanis, J. ↩
- At the time of writing… (end of June 2009) ↩
This post is tagged encounters, hitch-hiking, research materials, travel