In Spring 2013, I invited my friend & artist Ocean Viva Silver for a birthday drift through Paris starting at the Debord exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. This drift, using dice as tools for chance navigation, led us to various places we had never explored before,  following the banks of the Seine, ending up in an indoor community music event somewhere in the suburbs. This psychogeographic itinerary became a fascinating narration unfolding beyond time and space. An experience that needed to be repeated, expanded and shared…

The urban Drift, know in French as the « Dérive » is traditionally associated with Situationists who somehow made it popular. Nevertheless Guy Debord and his (underrated) partner Michele Bernstein partly drew their inspiration from other theoreticians of the City like French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and Dutch architect Constant Nieuwenhuys.

In this Nouvelle Dérive project, the political exercise in psychogeography has been mixed with the games devised in the art field since the beginning of the 20th century, from Dada to Surrealism and Fluxus via the indeterminacy experiments of John Cage.

As a continuation of Duchamp’s merging of life and art, the Cagean « Scores » for performance, channelling chance operations, became a major feature of the Fluxus activities. By associating the systematic spirit of these Scores with the non-interventionist aesthetics of Situationism we are hacking and appropriating both set of codes into a participative cultural mash-up.

For documentation and more info, Fluxsituations.