ABSTRACT
The stark depictions of contemporary cities produced by English artist Laura Oldfield Ford have frequently been associated with the term 'psychogeography'. In describing Oldfield Ford's work as hauntological, he implies that her cityscapes represent the ghosts of an unrealised faith in social progress, shared solutions and optimism for the future that function in dyschronic relation to a contemporary culture of cynicism, individualisation and a crippled futurity. While Fisher's is a powerful interpretation, in discarding psychogeography he restricts one potentially useful reading of Oldfield Ford's practice and its poignant commentary on the haunted quality of space within the neoliberal city. A primary achievement of Oldfield Ford's work is that it enables psychogeography to be once again reanimated as a critical practice, via a hauntological approach. Hauntology is the counterpart to this nostalgia mode. The preoccupation with the past in hauntological music could easily be construed as "nostalgic".
