Possible rendezvous: art as accident in urban spaces

Baudelaire situated this figure at the 'centre of the world'. For Poe he bathed in the fluidity and flow of the crowd, possessing a 'calm but inquisitive interest in everything'. For Benjamin he lived in a perpetual state of 'anamnestic intoxication'. Poet of the ephemeral, the accidental and the unexpected, the flaneur's obsession with becoming lost in the midst of the infinite and complex distraction of the crowd is synonymous with the development of the modern city and the cosmopolitan imagination. While a figure, and usually a male one at that, the indulged and indulgent wandering known as flanerie is in fact a sensibility that strolls in various guises and genders from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, a chimera whose shadow can be found in the Surrealists' pursuit of la mervellieux in the arcades and boulevards of Paris. Still further into the century it can be traced in the derive of the Situationist International, and further still into the next century in the hypermediated experiments of unsitely aesthetics. This passage traces and reveals the evolution of how the local pedestrian wandered into the networked era as an always---connected, wireless global nomad.