The cormorant council

The cormorant council (kormorantrådet) named itself after the avian oracle of Mattias Forshage's novel "Dreamgeography naturegeography" and launched a swedish-language blog for dreamgeographical projects. For your knowledge, here is translation of their inaugural texts (excluding a piece with irrelevant praise of the novel).

The cormorant council collects field notes, hunches and theories around the interface between dream and geography, wants to sharpen the attention towards this area through exchanging experience and theoretical deepening, breeds, publicises and coordinates dreamgeographical research projects, believes in conditionless enquiry but gladly and especially emphasise, in the spirit of surrealism, the poetic aspects of being.

With dream geography research we mean (for the moment):

a) Geographical observations in the dream and in dreaming.

More specifically observations on how places, events, experiences and relations are distributed in sleep-dreaming, active imagination and whisful thinking.
It should also be possible to make geographical observations in the unconscious habits and representations, that is, based on the activism of absentmindedness which can make us commit decisive dreamgeographical slips such as loosing our way, mistake one city for another, etc.
The basic question becomes in what way dream geography is distinguished from awake geography, both in a general sense (theory) and regarding how this exploration can enrich our ways of living, moving, looking at the world around us and within us (biopolitics).
Any definitive answers to these questions we will not willingly find. The section we place between dream geography and awake geography will necessarily be polyphonic and anecdotal.

b) Psychogeographical phenomenology in general

That is: whatever makes us perceive geography in one way rather than another, what maps show and what they don’t show, what desires and notions are tied or could be tied to certain places.
This means that the question arise what kinds of causal relations condition our activities, and where the decisive factors for such formative processes are to be found, and what possibilities and freedoms can be generated through making these conscious – and manipulating with them.
As a consequence of this we want of course to continuously develop and apply experimental methods making it possible for us to perceive the limitations and possibilities of geography.

(…)

An invitation to participate in this research is hereby issued. Participation is primarily attained by focusing on the dream-geographic spirit; sharpening the gaze for the dream-geographical experiences; taking notes, experimenting, communicating, involving others, modifying habits. Such discrete disturbances of behavior and perception will now occasionally (but far from always) appear trivial or pointless, but in the long run they can change the structure of everydaylife radically.