Below you will find the original description of the workshop. Over several weeks during the height of the global coronavirus pandemic a small group of participants gathered outside and moved throughout the semi closed urban landscape, finding new paths of inquiry and led by their creative choices.
“Dérive: It is an unplanned journey through a landscape, usually urban, in which participants drop their everyday relations and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there”. — Guy Debord
The workshop will meet weekly and conduct a drift. A drift for our purposes will be a long meandering walk around the streets of Santa Barbara hunting for new perspectives and points of historic and contemporary importance. Participants will begin with the methods of Guy Debord, later evolving individual techniques responding to personal strengths to accommodate Santa Barbara specifically. The drift is a walk by small groups through urban landscapes in which the participants engage, observe, and reflect on the experience of the built environment. The gesture emerges as part investigation, part documentation, part psychogeographical exercise and part defiant act of self-possession. We are forced to reevaluate our surroundings inside this current era of pandemic and civil unrest. We are learning more about freedom and authority, this workshop will strive to draw a new map of citizenry through the action of possessing the most basic of locations, the outside.
The concept of the dérive has its origins in the Letterist International, an avant-garde collective based in Paris. The dérive was a critical tool for understanding and developing the theory of psychogeography, defined as the “specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organized or not) on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Guy Debord
A flâneur’s active participation in and fascination with street life while displaying a critical attitude towards the uniformity, speed, and anonymity of modern life in the city.
Flânerie – someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll
Time: Wednesdays 12pm-1:30pm First Class Oct. 7th (6 classes at this time)
$120 (class fees discounted for all, scholarships available)
Location: Outdoors (socially-distanced, in small numbers.) Please e-mail the instructor with further questions.
MISC Workshop 
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