06 – Alli Schaaff: Dérive

All it took was one dérive; I'm fascinated. I was worried starting out that my group wouldn't find anything interesting. What if we wandered the suburban streets for hours without stumbling upon something interesting? But luckily, we ended up on that crazy defunct railroad bridge everyone was talking about in class today, watching the crew team row by. We followed the tracks back into the overgrowth, where we found a homeless person's camp, complete with his or her own curious additions to the landscape. Whoever it was had snapped off branches of the trees and stuck empty beer bottles on the remaining nubs. I saw this as a unique kind of art, in a strange way. A sort of, "Brooks was here" statement - a sign to the world that he or she had once been there. My group thought he or she was just drunkenly messing around. Either way.


I liked the big community art project the bridge has become, plastered with graffiti as it is.

Like everyone else, I found the unstructured time so refreshing. My primary worries were silly, because the very nature of the dérive makes it impossible to find nothing. I think the dérive needs to be habitual to take full effect, so I plan on embarking on another soon.


The existance of a locale's psychogeography is a really interesting concept. It made me think of a city like Providence as a stream, full of eddies and currents that tug your subconscious along an invisible path. It's strange to contemplate these currents, whether they're strongly ingrained or more tenuous, and how many people are swept up by their flow.


Alli