It was the middle of May in Manchester when twelve adventurous souls gathered at a statue in the centre of the city to start their tour. Instead of consulting a map, one by one, they pulled a piece of paper with a direction written on it out of a hat. Each person was free to interpret the direction as they saw fit, these simple rules acting as the group’s guide to the city. To their surprise, the lack of destination unleashed a spirit of discovery in the urban adventurers and they soon found themselves in the glorious grip of serendipity.

“We went past lots of buildings with plants growing out of the walls, and ended up at an alleyway with a decrepit ‘No Entry’ sign hanging over it,” explains tour organiser Morag Rose, 32, of Manchester. “Of course we ignored it and found a bricked-up door. Next to it was a building site where we were welcomed by a somewhat bemused labourer. He showed us around an old cotton warehouse full of Victorian paraphernalia such as weighing scales and mirrors. It was being transformed into a cable TV station. It felt like a microcosm of the changes in modern Manchester and his hospitality was wonderful.”

Welcome to the world of experimental travel, or psychogeography, as it’s more formally known in certain circles. This is the name given to unconventional travel activities that challenge assumptions most tourists take for granted, such as, what constitutes a destination, a journey, and a site worth seeing, photographing and recording. It’s travel based around games or sets of constraints, not maps and pre-planned tours, and its only guarantee is that it will have you questioning all your pre-conceived notions of travel, leading you towards a type of unique and unusual experience not offered by any mainstream guidebook.
 
Experimental travel has its roots in the playful experiments of the surrealists and Dada artists of the early twentieth century, but its official dean is a Frenchman by the name of Joel Henry, a journalist, writer, photographer and television researcher from Strasbourg. He says he came up with the idea of travelling via a series of experiments, or games, back in 1990, when having dinner with two friends on a barge restaurant fortuitously named Why Not? As the men were contemplating their plans for the summer and looking for ways to avoid the clichéd experience of being a tourist, their first experiment was born.

“Our initial experiment inverted the idea of the guided tour by inviting whoever wished to come along on a visit to a foreign town, with the twist that each person would make their journey not as a group, but under their own steam,” writes Henry in his introduction to The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel, the book that he co-authored with Australian writer Rachael Antony in 2005.
 
Inspired by the sense of freedom unleashed in his first travel experiment, Henry went on to create more travel games and has named his project, which now encompasses a collective of experimental travellers dispersed around the globe, Latourex. He has also compiled an encyclopedia-style list of Latourex travel experiments that can be accessed online at www.latourex.org, many of which are elaborated on in The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel.

In one experiment, Airport Tourism, the authors suggest hanging out at the airport for a whole twenty-four hours. Without the hassle of actually having to fly off somewhere or having to take a passport, you’ll be free to explore the airport at your own leisure, enjoy the comfort of the departure lounge chairs and chat to other travellers as you desire. Or perhaps you could try Blind Man’s Buff Travel. Definitely one of the more extreme of the travel experiments, this one involves spending a day travelling around a new location in a blindfold. Put the guidebooks, map and camera down, the only equipment you’re going to need for this experiment is a willing friend to guide you around for the day while you’re deprived of that most crucial sense: sight.

Airports are hardly recognised for their appeal to travellers. On the contrary, the airport is a pit stop most of us gladly pass through as quickly as possible. And when it comes to blindfolds, well, they might be used in the occasional party game or, under more unfortunate circumstances, in cruel acts of torture, but rarely for sightseeing. All this begs the question: why would anyone willingly put themselves through these bizarre experiments? If you’re asking yourself that right now, you’re not alone.

A quick perusal of the Lonely Planet Experimental Travel blog, established as a forum for fellow experimental travellers to swap and share their experiences, reveals a mixture of responses ranging from the baffled and bemused to the indifferent and the downright outraged. “Some of the ideas are nice, others are simply ridiculous,” writes blogger Daan. “No need to travel around with a horse head. That’s nothing experimental. It’s simply stupid, making a fool of yourself.” Meanwhile, another blogger, who has possibly watched too much Big Brother, suggests it “sounds like a new reality TV show – Travel Challenge!”

Only one blogger, Andie C, expresses disappointment at the lack of creativity, courage and inspiration being thrown around on the site. He implores the group, “what is that all about? Youth? Lack of experience? Lack of education? Lack of openness? But if you give it a go, you might find that life might just become a smidgen more fun or interesting. What is there to lose?”

A lot, actually. Dignity. Your semblance of sanity. It takes a certain type of tourist to truly revel in the possibilities of experimental travel. A sense of humour is obligatory because, yes, you will look ridiculous doing most of these experiments. Other basic requirements include faith in the mysterious workings of fate, and openness to the possibilities of chance and randomness. As Joel Henry explains, “experimental travel focuses on the mental journey, the sense of play, and the possibility of discovery. All destinations are equal – in fact the destination is often unknown, and sometimes you don’t even know if you’ve arrived. Anyone can be an experimental traveller, regardless of where you might be or the size of your bank balance.”

These sentiments are echoed by Manchester psychogeographer Morag Rose, who says that he practises pyschogeography because it feels like a place where a lot of his interests intersect. As a writer, artist, founder of a social anarchist collective and the Loiterer’s Resistance Movement, Rose explains that he is “interested in the effect cities have on people, but also the forces affecting the city, and how we find little bits of beauty and magic in hidden places.”

Considering how so many experimental travel games can lead to the unearthing of unexpected treasures, it comes as no surprise that for many, experimental travel is an innovative way of making art. This is especially true of the New York-based collective Glowlab, whose annual Conflux festival is one of the most important events on the global psychogeography calendar. Last September saw Glowlab host its third Conflux festival, a four-day happening of contemporary psychogeography events that brought together artists and urban adventurers concerned with re-imagining the urban territory of New York City.

One Conflux artist, Suvi Aarnio, turned the idea of a sightseeing tour on its head by putting out a call for locals to take her on tours of their neighbourhoods for her found art project, Artistic Souvenirs from Brooklyn. During her neighbourhood tours, Aarnio collected different materials relating to the significant places that she saw along the way, which she later transformed into small-scale art objects, or artistic souvenirs, if you like. She then gave these artistic souvenirs back to those who had acted as her tour guides.

Other Conflux art projects have proved so popular they have taken on a life of their own. Yellow Arrow, a Conflux experiment that began on the Lower East Side of New York in 2004, has since grown to have a global presence. The collaborative effort of a team of four: Jesse Shapins, Christopher Allen, Brian House, and Michael Counts, Yellow Arrow is a system of sharing stories online and on location via mobile phones.

“One of my favourite arrows was placed by the user at the beginning of the project that invited people to look down while in the middle of the bustling visual chaos and listen to the ‘symphony of the city’”, says Shapins. “I think this is a great example of changing people’s experience of urban space by shifting people’s perception in unexpected ways.”
 
It’s arguable that any experiment is also going to have a novelty value. This will be a turn-on for some and a turn-off for others. Experiments, it seems, whether they be travel or art-related, have a curious way of dividing people. Yet study any of these experiments carefully, and you’ll soon realise they all share a common longing for enrichment. In the case of Yellow Arrow, it’s about using technology to add another dimension of communication and interaction to a sometimes cold and sterile city, while Blind Man’s Buff involves getting in touch with the layers of sensory experience that can only be opened up when one is deprived of a vital sense.

An experiment also challenges you to break out of a routine, whether it’s the daily commute to work or the pre-programmed route of a well-worn backpacker trail across Europe. But an experiment is, by nature, impermanent. Is there a future, then, for experimental travel? Remaining true to its whimsical and anti-authoritarian roots, it seems that while the idea of experimental travel may be taking hold in some people’s hearts, it’s unlikely to seriously challenge the conventional modes of travel any time soon. In Manchester, Morag Rose says the Loiterer’s Resistance Movement is currently planning further actions and at some point may even publish their manifesto. Of course, speaking as an anarchist psychogeographer, he means “manifesto” in the loosest sense of the word.

“Its central tenet will probably be that we are like flowers growing out of the side of buildings,” says Rose. “And yuppification makes us sad.”