The Situationist Movement had a few exercises to help bringing their ideas to live. Some of them are the Psychogeography and Dérive, Détournement and Automatic Drawing.
Debord defined psychogeography in 1955 as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals." His concept was influenced by Ivan Chtcheglow's "Formulaire pour un urbanisme nouveau" ("Formula for a New Urbanism") (1953). Debord advocated for, "active observation of present-day urban agglomerations, "to discover how environments effected the behavior and feelings of individuals and, conversely, how to make new environments that created the possibility for "a new mode of behavior." The concept encouraged experimentation in all aspects of art and architecture, as seen in Constant's decades long work on New Babylon (1957-74), a reconfiguration of urban environments to allow for creativity and play. Influenced by the 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire's concept of the flâneur, a kind of dandy who wandered the city, dérive, or drift, was defined by Debord as, "the practice of a passional journey out of the ordinary through a rapid changing of ambiences." The concept, which was also called Situationist drift, was an essential component of psychogeography, as a place was 'mapped' by individuals wandering freely through the urban environment and finding their own ambient sites. Debord's Psychogeographique de Paris. Speech on the Passions of Love (1957), reconfiguring a map of Paris as a number of disparate but ambient units connected by random paths, was a visual representation of both concepts. His collaborations with Asger Jorn on books like Fin de Copenhague (End of Copenhagen) (1957) similarly approached the book as if it were a kind of environment through which the reader could wander, as words and energetic drips of paint drifted across the page. Ralph Rumney's The Leaning Tower of Venice (1957), was hailed by Debord as, the "first exhaustive photographic work applied to urbanism," as Rumney combined text and photographs to create a psychogeographic Venice
Guy Debord's concept of détournement emphasized superimposing revolutionary content on mainstream images and text to subvert commodity capitalist culture. In the User's Guide to Détournement (1956) Guy Debord and Gil Wolman wrote: "The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes...Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp's] drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation". The most frequent use of détournement was described by Wolman and Debord as using "an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all of its meaning from the new context in which it has been placed. For example, a press clipping, a neutral phrase, a commonplace photograph". As the movement stated, "There is no Situationist art, only Situationist uses of art". The emphasis upon misappropriation informed the SI's emphasis upon collage in artworks and in the group's many posters, brochures, and graffiti, most of which were produced anonymously and collaboratively, further challenging the notion of a single and inspired "artist".
Salvador Dalí
André Masson
Joan Miro
Automatic drawing is one of the major contributions of the Surrealist
movement to the Modern and Contemporary Art. This unique method of art
making has been largely used not only by surrealists, but by the
Situationists International as well. Theory of art puts French painter
André-Aimé-René Masson at the place of a pioneer of automatic drawing.
Automatic drawing was rapidly influencing many prominent artists of
the 1920s (mostly surrealists), including Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí,
Jean Arp and André Breton
Automatic drawing can be described as “expressing the subconscious.”
It is implied that one should draw randomly across the paper, without
any rational thinking. There is no rational control at all. As a
product, there is a drawing, produced by subconscious with the goal to
discover something about the psyche of an author. In case that the
author uses ratio or mind in his/her drawing, the subconscious would
be repressed and no single link with the depths of a person’s psyche
could be expressed. That is why channeling a spirit is one of the main
goals of automatic drawing with completely free hand "putting" psyche
onto surface.