CODED GEOMETRY: A Digitally Expanded Game of Psychogeography

The materiality, aesthetics, logics and processes of digitality have infused the physical space of cities. We can no longer speak of a clear distinction between analogue, carbon-based, offline entities and digital, silicon-based, online representations. The relationship between digital technology and the city is a complex, more-than-human one in which the convergence of digital technology and the city can be shown to have expanded not just the space of the city but what the space of the city is.

This article asks whether the Situationist International’s psychogeographic walking practices can be modified to research the specificity of the digital city. Through the practices of CODED GEOMETRY, a walking collective based in East London that uses performative strategies to develop a digitally expanded psychogeography, the article considers the following questions: how does it feel to walk the streets of East London when the city has been expanded by technologies that blur the boundary between the physical world and the digital realm, between physical objects and their representations in the digital field as data?

Read the full article in Streetnotes (2021) 27: 28-45