After five years living on my small town's main street, which can be described as a war zone, I've finally moved to a building and neighborhood that's a tad quieter, although I'm beginning to suspect that nothing will ever be quiet enough for me until the cemetery. I'm pretty much across the street from the hospital. From my room in the back, I see this:
A peaceful housing estate where no noise comes from, day or night, surrounded by vegetation – groves of trees, uncultivated gardens, vacant lots where almost secret paths wind through the tall grass. The main source of pure noise is the airstrip a few dozen meters from my living room; from time to time I have to pause my movie in the evening while the helicopter harvesting the unhealthy bodies lands or takes off. It doesn't last very long and has a little apocalyptic charm that I actually like.
Low-rise buildings, helicopters, vegetation, apocalypse: all this is very similar to S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Call of Pripyat, which I started to play during the last few months, perhaps sensing my change of (place of) life...
When I FINALLY reached the last level – the city of Pripyat itself – and wandered around in an almost second state of mind, so much so that the general scenery of the game stirred me, I realized that these landscapes of abandoned housing estates with kitsch colors from the 60s and 70s touched me for a very simple reason: they reminded me of the scenery of my childhood. They were the setting of my childhood.
I have never lived, strictly speaking, in this kind of towers, but they have always been part of my horizon, scattered here and there on the landscape, around my kindergarten and elementary school, for example, which were in fact quite of the same style, and which when I was a child were painted in much brighter colors than today, with geometrical patterns worthy of a Mondrian or a Soviet urbanistic delirium.
In fact, there is something of a vaguely communist experience (and a vaguely prison-like one, too, but HEY IT'S THE SAME THING) in early childhood – in my memories of early childhood, at that time, anyway. One is separated from one's family, a little left behind, alone in the midst of one's fellow human beings, and one walks in rows through corridors that smell of dusty radiators, detergent and chocolate milk. You are priced into a flow, whether you like it or not, and without asking yourself if you want it or not. It's vaguely alienating and vaguely comfortable, warm, protective. It gets very bad as you grow up.
Like the school (in my hometown, and in general), society and myself, a number of these towers are rotting on their feet, today, like the one above, where I entered in 2006, while it was still inhabited, to deliver a TV or whatever, when it was my job. There were holes in the walls, in the stairwells, that looked like the result of a shooting or a blast; through some of them it was possible to pass the head or the arm.
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In the first S.T.A.L.K.E.R there is a machine called Wish Granter in the heart of the Chernobyl power plant, which (supposedly) grants the secret wish of every person who reaches it. Power, money, immortality... But the whole Zone, in reality, is a Wish Granter. Walking in the Zone is walking in an image, a metaphor of the ruins of my own childhood, of the world I knew at the time – in the most concrete sense: the architecture, the colors of the buildings – and for me, who really had a teenage run of ruins of all kinds and of the abandoned houses that flourished in my city, to walk in these dead sceneries, in this after-world is the realization of old and deep fantasies.
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Video games take us back to the real world, to sometimes lost places in the real world, and give us a chance to walk through them again – but sometimes it's the real world that starts to look like a video game, or a "set" in general. The very bright spotlights that illuminate the municipal stadium near my home also violently illuminate the trees by the water and unintentionally make them look fantastic, or like a stage set. Along the river, on the path, the pockets of light formed by the streetlights at night are like waypoints through the darkness, in a game. In another district, the street that climbs steeply towards the cemetery, where old bourgeois houses with black windows follow each other as soon as night falls, leads to a plateau dotted with violently illuminated housing projects, giving the impression that one is arriving in another level of some game. Like when you discover places, settings, and you don't know yet who you will meet and what you will have to do there; you walk in the game, for free, by pure pleasure of exploration. This is the relationship to the world, this is the way people like me who grew up with adventure games explore reality. It is not the game in which we take refuge to compensate for the lack of reality, no. It is the material world that ends up becoming a game – in a terrifying unreality, or in a playful, new and marvelous relationship; depending on how you look at it.
Sometimes all it takes is a street, an unfamiliar neighborhood, to get us out of the routine in which we live like automatons, for the program to stop. One feels fully present in the world; each of its objects is new, unique; each fork in the road, one guesses, an adventure or another potential life; each house contains a universe. The mind works at full speed, one would suddenly like to talk to people, to multiply discoveries, one would like to reinvest the world; one feels alive.
It would take a new science to understand what happens in these moments, without ever judging the world as a landscape. To understand what happens in our mind when a new street upsets us. And to learn how to trigger these states, to elaborate a technique to maintain ourselves at this level of consciousness.
Psychogeography as I conceive it is only of interest when coupled with what we could call geopsychology: the exploration and study of the mental landscape. The external world to be rediscovered, new, playful, in order to understand what is deep inside. The inner world, to be understood, to be made to speak, to fully reinvest daily life.
In what it reveals of our relationship to space, the video game is for us a fundamental experience. We felt with incredible strength the impression of being in a game, during certain walks, certain wanderings in unknown districts; all the paths seemed open to us, just waiting to be explored; all the passers-by, potential "contacts", allies, enemies, indicators, extras; the world seemed to us a formidable playground where everything is possible and allowed, all the choices conceivable.
And what is life itself, if not all this? What else should it be?
The video game experience has "accidentally" plunged us into a state of re-enchantment. We must now understand how the everyday environment can be permanently re-enchanted. How it can be exploited to maintain a high level of consciousness.
We are made of mental landscapes, fundamental images that sometimes obsess us since childhood; a tree in a garden, a network of alleys near the sea, an old room in the family house. These fundamental images interfere with our vision of the world; they are superimposed on other trees, other rooms, other alleys; they enter into resonance with other, newer experiences and upset us; they seem to us to be flashes of a previous life or of a life in another, more "real" world, where we are more ourselves...
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