KURT BRAUNOHLER, ANYA KHAIT & MICILIN O’DONAGHUE
Urban Disorientation Game
Date: Saturday 9.18
Start Time: 12:00pm
Location: Rosenberg gallery, Barney building
During the Urban Disorientation Game, players are divided into teams, blindfolded, and escorted to parts of the city where they remove their blindfolds, make maps, and explore their surroundings, all the while scoring points and attempting to make it back to home base. Each team of players is supervised by a guide who ensures fun and safe play, tallies points, and sustains the sense of seeing the city as if lost. The first team to return to the destination point does not necessarily “win,” as scoring will be based on a point system that the UDG guides invent. Each team will have discovered collectively, and as individuals, elements of the urban space, their reactions to it, and their reactions to being disoriented in it that would be hard to predict. The inspiration for the Game comes from the types of exercises that early psychogeographers used to intentionally disorient themselves—traveling in one city with a map of another, or using random occurrences to deviate from set courses, for example.
Kurt Braunohler, Anya Khait, and Micilin O’Donaghue have been conducting various exploratory and interactive projects since 2001, in collaboration with Damian Henderson, Calvin Johnson, and Scott Knowles, occasionally under the name Psychogeography Project. Bringing together the influences of the Situationists, urban planning, academia, photography, and improv comedy, this crew has presented work in New York, Rome, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, and New Orleans.
