In 1956, Guy Debord published Théorie de la dérive, a short text proposing a new mode of urban experience. The dérive was not a walk. It was a calculated loss of control, a passage through environments guided by their psychogeographic contours rather than utility or habit. The practitioner lets the city speak. Attraction zones, dead ends, charged corners, terrain as score.
Fifty years later, cities have become hyper-readable. Every displacement is logged, analyzed, monetized. The smartphone knows where you are, where you were, and where you’ll likely go. Urban movement has been colonized by data.
DÉRIVE works against that grain. It records your trajectory, not to store it, but to transform it. GPS coordinates never leave your device. What travels is only the rendered shape: a minimal glyph, a trace abstracted from geography, reduced to its essential gesture.
The glyph captures three things: disorder (the average angular deviation of your path, 0 for a straight line, 100 for constant redirection), footprint (the convex hull of your movement relative to your bounding space), and return (how far you end from where you started). These are not metrics of efficiency. They are readings of how you moved through the world.
Each trace is anonymous. Each trace is unique. Over time, all shared traces accumulate into a collective figure, a superposition of drifts that no single person planned or authored.
The accumulation is the work.
