Conflux Festival, imagining the urban territory

Conflux Festival

From 14th to 17th of September New York another rich edition of the contemporary psychogeography New York festival Conflux (former Psy-Geo-Conflux as it was called in 2003 and 2004). This is one of the few festivals able to rethink the urban territory globally. This shared territory can be thought as a system, where everybody can experiment, changing, exploiting or inventing rules and seeing how the social active body reacts. Many performance, guided tours and happenings are in the program as the brilliant street text cut ups of Sue Huang, or the seats installed in unusual places by Caroline Woolard (‘Have a Seat’), the personal surroundings touristic tours of ‘Artistic Souvenirs from Brooklyn’ by Suvi Aarnio, the disguising ‘You Are Not Here’ Baghdad/New York juxtaposition tour, finding the inner connections between avenues (‘Avenue 5.5’ by Odin Cappello), the anti-advertising in outdoor spaces interview triggered by a pedestrian passage (‘AAA Portable Sound Units’ by Sara Dierck, Michael Dodge, and Steve Lambert), video of conversations made while sharing an umbrella (‘From Here to There Under an Umbrella’ by Chris Barr, or the obsession of listening to the city (via always on mobile phones in ‘Scout: The City in Audio’ by Emily Conrad, Todd Holoubek, Jeffrey Galusha). Many of these actions changes the urban space in a game board, a social stage, a mapping cornucopia or, in the end, a shared territory on which inventing new immaterial and transparent juxtaposed levels of reality.