Why I stopped cycling in Kyoto
A video letter on Psychogeography and filling the gaps in the maps of our mind.
It’s a cold Thursday evening here, and recently I’ve been spending a bit of time thinking about the map of Kyoto — I mean the one that I’ve been piecing together in my head since I got here.
I noticed a bit of a pattern forming. I found out that I have these little “islands” of the city that I know very well — the local supermarket, the route to the post office, and the few blocks around my favourite coffee shops. But everything else in between is a bit of a blur. I spend a lot of time jumping from one point to another, usually on my bike, without ever really exploring how they connect and what’s in the in-between.
The writer Will Self has a great way of describing this. He calls these small islands “micro-worlds.” And in big cities like L.A., London or Tokyo, you can spend your life moving between these places on a train, on the bus or in a car and you arrive at your destination without really knowing how you got there. The city can easily end up becoming fragmented in your mind.
This week’s video was my attempt to fix that feeling.
On a sunny morning earlier this week, I left the bike at home and walked a route I’d never taken before. It was a bit of an exercise in what a Frenchman called Guy Debord used to call the dérive (or the “drift”). Debord was writing in the ‘50s, but I guess the modern-day idea of this is to let the city itself pull you along, rather than Google Maps.
My frequent collaborator and close friend, Cody Ellingham, is a bit of an expert at this as well. We’ve worked together on quite a few projects—most notably Wander the Night. Cody once said that “Night is a special time when things take on new forms. Architecture and places reveal a kind of shadow self in the darkness under the glow of street lights and the moon and it is this ‘other’ that I am trying to capture when I go out and explore.”
That’s a great way to put it. Even in the middle of a Tuesday morning, there is a “shadow self” to the city—the parts that I usually cycle right past because they aren’t on my to-do list or saved in Apple Maps.
In the same interview Cody said: “To see the world you must begin by seeing, and sometimes it is easy to not see that which is right in front of us.” I realised my bike was actually a bit of a barrier to seeing. Walking was the only way to actually notice that lovely bakery I found on that walk or the coffee shop where I had a chat with the old master who owns the place—the bits of the city that were there all along, waiting for me to stumble upon.
The footage in the video is a bit of a collage. Some of it is stuff I shot on that specific walk, but I’ve also woven in some older clips that have been cluttering up my phone’s storage for months. I hadn’t found a place for them before, and that certainly seems to fit the mood of “filling the gaps”.
And if you’re interested in the theory side of things, I’ve linked the Will Self talk that got me thinking about all of this below. It’s worth a watch if you’ve ever felt like your city is just a collection of train stations and bus stops.
A few extra bits:
- Will Self: Psychogeography | Talks at Google
- Guy Debord and the Situationists
- Cody’s Interview that the quotes above are taken from
As always, thank you for noticing with me.
If you’re coming to Kyoto and want to do a bit of “drifting” yourself, I’d love to take you on a sound walk. We take it slow, and we certainly don’t use bikes. You can find more information over at kyotoinsound.com.
SJF
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