Keeping the Unreal Real: Practical Psychogeography for Stroud

Theory:
‘Detournement, as in to detour, to hijack, to lead astray, to appropriate … Detournement sifts through the material remnants of past and present culture for materials whose untimeliness can be utilized against bourgeois culture …’
(Mackenzie Wark)

So, Detournement: multimedia responses to the Derivee process of losing oneself in place and time through the discovery of multiple meanings of place; Psychogeography – imaginative relationships to space and place, looking for the liminal.
Potlatch: the collective production and sharing of creative responses.

Proposal:
A collective rewriting of the official heritage of Stroud …
Collective walking, recording, inventing and writing –
Reworking psychogeography’s urban outlook,
By wandering through both town and five valleys:
“ Imaginative reworking … otherworldly sense of spirit of place,
the unexpected insights and juxtapositions created by aimless drifting, the new ways of experiencing familiar surroundings…”

In and around a mill town in the Cotswolds …

Practice:
Possible Walks:

1. Any seemingly mediocre, nondescript suburban red brick walk; for example, down Rodborough Hill and into Stroud:
Posting and link to follow in the future

2. A walk along the Slad Brook to its edgelands in Stroud:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/may-day-walk-from-source-of-slad-brook.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/edgelands-slad-brook-in-stroud.html

3. A Captain Swing walk from the Hog in Horsley:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/captain-swing-and-stroud-valleys.html

4. A walk from the workhouse to Stroud cemetery and to the Ale House:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-ale-house-in-stroud-strouds.html

5. A walk from the Woolpack to Bull’s Cross and on to Sheepscombe:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/sheepscombe-to-slad-november-walk.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/death-after-night-at-woolpack.html

6. A walk from Purgatory to Paradise:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/walking-metaphor_10.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/cotswold-tales-from-purgatory-to.html

7. A walk across Rodborough Fields to Rodborough Common
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/rodborough-fields-and-john-clare-day.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/rodborough-fields-curse.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/john-clare-150th-anniversary-of-his.html

8. A walk from the Ram at Woodchester to Selsley Common:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/selsley-hill-august-2nd-2013-and-may.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013_08_01_archive.html
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/these-are-my-memories-of-what-i-saw-and.html

9. A Randwick walk
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/randwick-1832.html

10. A Painswick walk
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/walking-through-17th-century-around.html

11. A WW1 walk:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/archibald-knee-and-dorothy-beard.html

12. A Reverend Awdry Rodborough walk:
http://radicalstroud.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/thomas-tank-engine-rodborough-railway.html

13. A Home guard walk:
Posting and link to follow in the future