The Drift:
Christopher Meerdo

The Drift was a boat excursion down the Kennebec River in Maine, undertaken by faculty resident artist Marie Lorenz and a group of twenty-five participants during the 2013 summer program: Samantha Adler de Oliveira, Luis Alonzo, Trevor Amery, Prerna Bishnoi, John Dombroski, Anastasia Douka, Zachary Fabri, Mauro Giaconi, Daniel Giles, Joshua Haycraft, Shana Hoehn, Mira Hunter, Kristian Blomstroem Johansson, Nicholas Johnston, Lindsay Lawson, Christopher Meerdo, Harold Mendez, Joiri Minaya, Michaela Murphy, Jordyn Oetken, Omar Rodriguez Graham, Erik Swanson, Seneca Weintraut, May Wilson and Lindsay Zappas.

Aimlessness is a quality that has profound aspects of civil disobedience when theorized within the correct framework: as a technique for an anti-dominant ideological critique through the means of the Dérive. Within Guy-Ernest Debord’s framework of prompting us as social revolutionaries to remap our monotonous environments within a psychogeographic context, we can create multiple modes of experimentation, play, and co-optation through his basic framework. This summer, myself and twenty-four other participants of Skowhegan, descended upon the Kennebec River with this prompt in mind. In the small hours of the morning, still feeling the previous night’s keg beer, we bound ourselves by new friendships and matching pink watershoes from the local Walmart and launched ourselves into the dense fog of the morning mist. With Marie Lorenz at the helm, our Dérive brought us to islands, inlets, rapids, embankments, hydroelectric dams, socioeconomically challenged pizza parlors, the rubble of post-industrial logging bridges, and a 1980’s metal cover band concert. Along the way we floated in tandem, alone, backwards, euphoric, constipated, weary, and above all, with enthusiasm and anticipation for our Drift.

As individual makers, our response to the expedition varied: a collaborative drawing tossed into the river in a bottle as a time capsule, accordion shaped drawing pads with reflexive graphite drawings, a tribute song to the Kennebec, a collection of river articles and other ephemera, the contact-microphone recordings of an oar, a rock splash, and an archive of photos and videos. One thing held these different projects together—the immediacy of responding to notions of atmospheres and the aimlessness that prompted them. We can consider these ruptures of passage as ways of pointing, of observing, of catching and releasing. Each bald eagle we passed caused a chorus of participants shouting “Rald Reago!”—a portmanteau of “Bald Eagle” and “Rodrigo,” a fellow participant (who is also lovingly commemorated on this year’s group t-shirt). Inside jokes abound, but in these moments of pointing, we can reconfigure epistemological cartographic systems into a psychogeographic reformulation of memory and joy.

Later in the summer, I produced a television show in collaboration with Lindsay Lawson that aired on the local public access channel and was viewed by the school at the Southside Tavern in town. In the episode, Wesserunsett, the visible TV crew and our tour guide (fellow participant Daniel Petraitis) embark on a Dérive of our own, wandering the grounds of Skowhegan and pointing out objects and spaces, providing misleading and false information about the school. In the piece we address the tightly controlled myth of Skowhegan but also position ourselves as full participants in the reaffirming of that mythology. The film includes a concluding section of 3D scanned Skowhegan environments that produce a digital/mediated/simulacra Dérive that considers more the act of pointing and observation within a psychogeographic space. Through technological simulation, we consider the role of the contemporary Dériver. Can Debord’s prompt be activated through virtual means when those same modes of virtualization are responsible for the rigidity and predictability of our contemporary environments? I think perhaps I should have been live tweeting from my canoe.

In the Theory of the Dérive, Debord reasserts an old Marxist theorem “men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves.” Anthropocentrism aside, The Drift and Wesserunsett occupy different psychogeographic spaces. Both consider contrasting modes of both moving through atmospheres and the resulting documentation, but the two raise the same question that lies at the heart of the methodology of the dérive: what does the act of pointing tell us about ourselves and the way we operate within the dominant frameworks that Debord impels us to explore?  XO

Christopher Meerdo