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Against the illusory architecture of Half-Life 2
In “On Dérive,” the titular act is explained through text and your own movements through a virtual environment. To dérive (to drift), is to let yourself wander through the city with no prior aim or destination in mind; a spontaneous journey through the urban stage. The point of it is to demonstrate the specific design of a city, how its deliberate topography affects us subconsciously to guide us down certain paths, or as French writer and theorist Guy Debord puts it: “cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vertexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.” The On Dérive demo, created…