Current PhD

Emotive Terrains: Exploring the emotional geographies of the city through artistic walking methods and embodied media practices.

[Bill Psarras © 2011-present]

This section gives a brief indication of what Bill’s practice-based PhD is all about. Bill Psarras explores personal and collective emotional geographies of the city, by using urban walking as his main artistic practice through the use of embodied media practices; balancing between metaphor and action; between the real and the virtual; between the poetic and political and finally between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

Three main areas inform his research and practice: urban walking, senses and city.

§ The first focuses on the critical reflection of theories of urban walking (flanerie, dérive) as an aesthetic, creative and critical method. Bill is mainly inspired by Situationists International (1957) and their psychogeographical walks as well as from cultural metaphors; mostly from Walter Benjamin’s (1924) on ‘botanizing on the asphalt’, Michel de Certeau’s (1984) on ‘walking as urban text’ as well as J. Schafer’s ‘on tuning’ (1976).

§ The second includes the investigation of the sensorial aspects of walking in the city and the role of embodied media practices. He mostly focuses on a series of texts around the consideration of urban landscape as a site of various affect. An indication of sources on the senses, walking and city can be consisted of George Simmel (1903), Edward Hall (1966), Richard Sennett (1996), David Howes (2004), Nigel Thrift (2004), Juhani Pallasmaa (2005) and Jennie Middleton (2009).

§ The third area touches on a critical approach of theories on the post-modern city and public space, mostly following the texts of Kevin Lynch (1960), Lewis Mumford (1961), Marc Augé (1992), Rem Koolhaas (1995) and Edward Soya (2000). Bill’s main focus stands mostly on spaces of transition [tube, terminals, streets] and thus he pays special attention to a series of spatial/psychological notions such as the in-between, the non-place, the edge, the liminal and the terrain vague – concepts that have a huge impact on his further artistic body of work.

For more info about his research, do no hesitate to contact him.