The Situationist City - Recombinant City Walks   "I have always enjoyed walking in towns, well, I don't like crowded places, but more desolate spaces, city space with scarce human population. It feels important to walk around, without a specific goal, and without being overtly anal about seeing *everything*. The act of exploring." Idoren. It's perhaps too easy to see the similarities of this kind of exploration to a general "alternative" outlook on life. We are adrift in a sea of meaninglessness, and this state of things is interrupted only by various emotional experiences that only happen occasionally; when one is reading a book, watching a good film, or meeting someone new and interesting. To not be unhappy, we need our information fix, or go cold turkey. The major trick here is to make the mundane interesting. It doesn't *have* to be interesting, it's enough that it seems interesting, and if you're not to queasy, and begin looking under the slacky facade, you can well learn how to pull a trick that was developed by an old-school caste of neuronauts known as the Situationist. They perfected a script, a multithreaded, interactive storyline for instant city exploration. It can turn any city into a place for futant desire, you've just gotta stash up on the right illegal memes needed to turn this activity into a success. The Situationists referred to pointless city walks as "drifts". They were obsessed by how maps (like city maps and subway charts) relate to how cities are experienced by human minds. Is it possible to make maps that can convey the experience of the city, in a more straightforward manner than the standard projection logic used by mapmakers? They weren't very successful in creating their maps, although they sure are thinkworthy art objects, they aren't very useful for describing the experience of the "drift". The situationists knew this for sure - they were trying to keep their knowledge obscure as to keep it from being exploited by the media / spectacle. In some sense that has happened too, situationist lore has been used by the spectacle. Now things have deveoped further: we have the advantage to be able to steal back from the media, to take their advertisement techniques of visualized leisure back to develop a storyboard/filmatic approach for describing various mindframes that the drift can take place in. The drift is a voyeuristic pleasure trip. Although drifting assaults all one's senses at once, it's foremost a visual reverie. By walking, and being mobile, one reassures an identity as casual observer, not connected to the scenery passing by. This unconnectedness is a source of pleasure. The point is to dissociate oneself totally, to observe the surroundings from a detached point of view and laugh at it, or derive pleasure in some other more sinister way. Most accounts about "taoist" or "pantheist" etc thought structures stress the process of "becoming one with nature", but Powerbase is more concerned with becoming totally disconnected - becoming The Other, relative to the rest of the world. The situationist drift is without point, it's more like experiencing the world as a mass of free-floating points, while at the same time experiencing the city as a linear story, a walk that has a beginning and an end. The linear expression comes from the fact that one is walking. The travelling motion through the city is timeless. The space between spaces is emphasized. The experience is also about scrambling, re-coding and de-coding the world into and from different fragments. To be distilled as mindframes, to be used at leisure. The situationist drift is without purpose. Even though it at the same time is a quest for pleasure, it's not possible to have that goal active in your mind when you are drifting, because then you will inevitably fall into a state of stressed out oblivion and worry about everything. The trick is to just be happy that you are experiencing something out-of-the ordinary and fulfilling your destiny as mean-assed happy mutant, this way you'll end up in a positive feedback loop of happiness, not too bad for a day walking around aimlessly in the city streets.