How's your psychogeography?

British artists from four disciplines came to Blanchardstown recently to share their observations on the way rapidly changing urban landscapes can affect our emotions and behaviour. Brian Boyd was there

For the French social philosopher, "psychogeography" is "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals". More a device than a discipline per se, psychogeography can be used to great effect in art and literature.

While a recent talk at Draíocht, Blanchardstown, was not defined by psychogeography, it was certainly informed by it. Four British artists from various disciplines gathered to discuss Suburbs and Cities: Artists' Responses to Changing Urban Landscapes.

The highly informative talk was part of the Critical Voices programme, an Arts Council-sponsored initiative curated by Helen Meany. It is an interdisciplinary programme of events and talks by visiting speakers.

Gathered at Draíocht were writer Iain Sinclair, theatre director Lisa Goldman, composer Graeme Miller and photographic artist Andrew Cross. Chairing the talk was art critic Gemma Tipton, who, directly addressing the theme, noted that the location of Draíocht was interesting in that it was close to some houses that boasted helicopter pads, and also alongside other areas that were disadvantaged. Tipton's idea was to get each artist in turn to explain - and, with the use of a computer screen, illustrate - their work and how what they do is informed by their particular urban landscape.

Iain Sinclair remembered how he had studied at Trinity College Dublin in the 1960s and commented on how dramatically the city has changed. Sinclair is a fascinating author in that he melds literature, history, geography. His novels include Dining on Stones, which was described as "an extended meditation on the A13 [ motorway] and the nature of authorship". In his non-fiction, he digs deep into the myth and matter of his native London, whether the subject matter be Jack the Ripper or London's ring road, the Orbital.

He noted how, on his way to the venue, he had seen "a bungalow-type shop building which was divided into two - one side was a funeral parlour and the other was an Indian head massage service shop". He went on to recount how specific research on places informs his writing and mentioned his Sorry Meniscus essay, a devastating attack on London's Millennium Dome.

"This was a project that New Labour inherited from a moribund Tory Party and was a disaster," he said. "If you look at its actual location, it's built on what used to be a toxic wasteground, a place where they used to hang pirates. Farther back still, it represented a sort of dividing line between where the Vikings were in Essex and where the Saxons were in the west side of the country.

"I remember looking at the plans for the Dome on a laptop. It was incredible how they envisaged it. The river looked bluer than blue, it was all tree-lined avenues - it looked great, but didn't turn out that way."

Sinclair has a fascination with what spaces used to represent and what they have changed into. "The building in London which was the model for Dracula's palace in Bram Stoker's book is now a Shell oil refinery and some of the old lunatic asylums are now gated communities with preposterous names," he said.

He finished his talk by mentioning something he had seen earlier in the day in Dublin: an information leaflet for "Castleknock Marina". "But surely the idea of a marina implies you are beside the sea?" he asked.

THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR of London's Soho Theatre, Lisa Goldman, showed parts of her short film, Hoxton Story, a "walkabout performance" set in the east London area of the same name. "I'm from east London myself and know the area well," she said. "What struck me about Hoxton was how it used to be an almost predominantly white and working-class area. It was also an area where the National Front had a lot of support.

"In the 1980s and 1990s, though, the area changed substantially. First there was a more diverse ethnic mix and then there was this influx of artists who brought a real buzz to the area. The property developers then bought it all up and there is now what I could only describe as a 'Berlin Wall' type divide between the 'gentrified' part of Hoxton and the more run-down part of Hoxton.

"The redevelopment brought about almost a sort of social cleansing and a lot of the old public buildings were sold off. What I did in the film was to travel around the area, using a mix of actors and local people, to illustrate what had changed."

Unfortunately, for time reasons, Goldman was unable to show all of her film, but she did get her point across in a trenchant and informative manner.

Some fascinating visuals helped illustrate how composer and artist Graeme Miller approaches his work.

When he uses the term "composer", he says he means "a composer of many things that may include music". He recounted how he grew up in a suburb and always felt that he was "lost in a place".

He talked about how he likes to "interrogate cities" in a seemingly arbitrary manner.

"I was in Birmingham and I wanted to find out where the exact city centre was," he said. "No one seemed to know, but I eventually found a building which could be described as the centre. I used a large-scale picture of the city and superimposed an Islamic pattern - a pattern that had 30 points off it. I then went to each of these 30 places in the city to capture their sounds. It's all very serendipitous. Some places you think would be interesting aren't, and the other way around. It was all about looking for the microcosm within the macrocosm."

Photographic artist Andrew Cross had the splendid idea of running his silent film, An English Journey on the overhead screen during his talk.

Cross's photographic collections of trains in the US, called Some Trains in America, was an acclaimed publication, but here he talked about his video art work.

"I've always had a passion for being in a fixed position and watching things passing me by - hence the work on trains," he said. "I based An English Journey on the book of the same name by JB Priestley and it was to look at the question 'what does England look like?'

"I put a camera on the window of a heavy goods vehicle that was travelling from Southampton to Manchester and recorded the journey. I deliberately chose the lorry because I think the lorry is now the workhorse of the road-based UK economy".

An oddly hypnotic work - sort of the visual equivalent of ambient music - Miller's film threw up some interesting information.

"Lorry drivers, unlike car drivers, are eight feet high where they are sitting," he said. "This allows them look over all the hedges and fences along the way. I found out that the height a lorry driver is at is the exact same height as a person riding horseback."

GIVEN THAT ALL four contributors were working within the confines of a two-hour talk, they got through a lot of ground and offered rare insights into how they approach their work. A question-and-answer session with the audience after the four talks threw up a debate about the whole notion of artists planning for cities and the political position of the artist.

As an "artists' response to changing urban landscapes", this Critical Voices talk gave its audience more than we'd bargained for, in that each of the contributors, though coming from different backgrounds and disciplines, all directly addressed the intangible qualities of location and shed light on why, and how, a sense of place is important to their work.