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Mobile Culture Studies The Journal
>mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020
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184 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page Pairing abstracted drawings with typewritten words, Molesworth’s narrative oscillates between the specific and the universal in order to illustrate the tension in psychogeography between the individual self with its specific experientiality and the seemingly objective outside world. While his drawings do not pre-establish any temporally or geographically fixed locale, inviting the reader to complete the visual narrative with knowledge of their own experiences, the text situates the walk by naming its place, time, and aim, as well as personal reflections. Even though Molesworth shares these specific details right at the start of his documented journey, he gives his readers the opportunity to go through whole passages of drawings with- out interruption [see Fig. 5]. Between paragraphs that specify his walk, he thus creates visual sequences of immersion and ‘closure’. Consequently, the experience of reading the zine mirrors that of psychogeography, as it depicts the subjective lens of the singular walker’s psyche — with their specific memories, traumas and identities, looking out onto a world that can speak for itself, whose story waits to be listened to. Molesworth establishes in the beginning that ‘by making this walk I hoped to learn something new of a place I had never been, rather than vis- iting known a area [sic] and risk anticipating a pre-ordained set of ideas, and risk not capturing anything at all’ (Molesworth 2016: 3). Psychogeography is a constant negotiation between two simultaneous aims: On the one hand, it seeks to uncover unseen discourses and histories of a place by reflecting them, and by letting the scenery affect oneself in its own right. On the other hand, it provides the means to find one’s own voice and presence in the process and serves as a technique to come to terms with one’s inner condition and place in the world. Independent of any media-specific guidebook and untouched by editorial hands, the zine provides the space to mediate psychogeography in that it not only retells one particular walk, but also to some degree provides the infrastructure to read psychogeographically. For the armchair traveller, the zine reproduces the conditions and difficulties faced by a psychogeographer, letting the reader dither between the specific subject and the general feeling of place. In addition, the eclectic pages of A Long Walk highlight how the environment is travelled in situated ways, according to one’s personal dĂ©rive of the eye. Fig. 6 illustrates how zines, unlike most comics, do not direct the reader onto a particular path towards deciphering the content of the page. Even though the medium borrows a multitude of representational forms, it does not inherently predetermine specific ways of reading. While there is indeed a continuous narration structured by the convention of chronological page-turning and the various chapters represent- ing the neighbourhoods travelled by Molesworth, the zine’s smallest narrative instance, the page, does not exhibit such a conventional sequence. Rather, linearity is at odds with the microcosm of the page: The zine here illustrates how the travel experience of walking tours, while showing a continuous pathway, is always already comprised of simultaneous impressions coming from all angles of one’s spatial existence. Both kinds of double pages shown in Fig. 6 foreground this simultaneity, with the drawings even abandoning the structural outline of a conventional comic-style grid in favour of an unstructured mosaic of panels. The deliberate ambiguity in sequential order derives from the unorthodox positioning of the panels, but is further reinforced by the fact that most images are transitioning from aspect-to-aspect.9 This means that, rather 9 It may be argued that some of them are non-sequiturs, “offer[ing] no logical relationship between panels what- soever” (McCloud 1993: 72) and thus also creating a sense of disorientation and an even greater vacuum for imagination.
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>mcs_lab> Mobile Culture Studies, Band 2/2020
The Journal
Titel
>mcs_lab>
Untertitel
Mobile Culture Studies
Band
2/2020
Herausgeber
Karl Franzens University Graz
Ort
Graz
Datum
2020
Sprache
deutsch, englisch
Lizenz
CC BY 4.0
Abmessungen
21.0 x 29.7 cm
Seiten
270
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