In collaboration with Christina Ray Gallery & Conflux Festival, UDG will be presented at Festival of Ideas for the New City on Saturday, May 7th @ Noon. Festival of Ideas for the New City is a major new collaborative initiative in New York involving scores of Downtown organizations working together to harness the power of the creative community to imagine the future city and explore ideas that will shape it. The Festival will include a three-day slate of symposia; an innovative StreetFest along the Bowery; and over eighty independent projects and public events.  Click here for more information on the festival.


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.

Since 2001, Calvin Johnson, Scott Gabriel Knowles, Kurt Braunohler, Micilin O'Donaghue, Anya Khait, and Damien Henderson have been conducting various exploratory and interactive projects, 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. 

To participate in UDG please RSVP via email or on our facebook page here.  Please note however, that slots are limited to 24 players and while an RSVP does indicate your interest in participating, you must be present at the starting location at 12 noon on Saturday May 7 in order to play.  Participants will be selected in priority order until all slots are filled.  We will also reserve a handful of slots for day-of registrants.  

The starting location is on the Northeast corner of of Bowery and Rivington, just a few doors south of the New Museum, which is located at 235 Bowery.  Decompression, discussion and happy hour drinks will be at Lakeside Lounge from 5-7. Lakeside Lounge is located at 162 Avenue B.

Follow us on Twitter before and during the event @psychogeography. 

Thank you for stopping by and we hope to see you there!!

To visit our gallery click here.