A Canterbury pilgrimage - but what do you do when you get there?
The 2024 4th World Congress of Psychogeography will be held in Canterbury from 6 t0 8 September. One of the events will be a walk directed by geolocated sounds. Please note that you must be in Canterbury for this to work - just as you must actually go on a pilgrimage to reap the benefits.
A pilgrimage is normally a directed walk. You may start from anywhere, but we all aim to get to the same place, and hope to accrue some sort of benefit from doing so. For whatever reason, you have now come to Canterbury, one of the greatest places of pilgrimage in the UK.
What if there were many things to see here, and the important thing is not what you see, but how you analyse its significance? What if your 'inner voices' suggest new ways of seeing and interpreting signs?
Various thinkers, from Mediaeval Christians via Zen Buddhists to modern Structuralist philosophers, have been fascinated by the relations between the signs we see and the significance we ascribe to them. What you will hear is a semiotic challenge, to interpret what you see in different ways.
Instructions to practitioners:
- Make sure that Location is enabled on your phone.
- Download to your phone the Echoes XYZ app from the Android Play Store or Apple store. It should be free and simple to install.
- Open the app, click on the search icon, and type in Canterbury, and you should see a walk called 'Your own Canterbury pilgrimage'.
- Click on this, then click on 'Stream walk'.
- Stand anywhere within the 'Cathedral Quarter' area of Canterbury (see map). You have to be physically in this area to hear any results.
- Move around and listen. Walk so that the marker moves into one of the circles marked on the map shown on your phone.
- There is no time limit, no path, and no prize for finishing first. Listen and think. Do you get a blessing? Does your life change forever? Was this a mystical experience, an economic structure, psychology, or semiotics? As you and your fellow pilgrims walk around, each sees much the same things, the 'signifiers'. But how do you interpret what you see in front of your eyes? What new concepts and structures form in your mind?
- You may hear advice from characters such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Bernard Stiegler, Sigmund Freud, a Zen Buddhist monk (Thich Nhat Hahn), and a mediaeval mystic (the 'Cloud of Unknowing').
- Just look at what's in front of you, consider it from their perspectives, and move on in whichever direction takes your fancy. Focus on the process of understanding what you see, in the light of what you hear.