Klub Londinium was the creation of the conceptual art-pop collective Sudden Sway and took place across the streets of London during the early 1990s. It created a three-dimensional immersive landscape which superimposed a journey into the psychologies of various personality types over a walk through physical space and urban history. Combining music with aural atmospheres, an internal voice, and a narrator Klub Londinium pioneered the psychogeographic experience by creating a club with no specific location in time or space, one which allowed participants to travel in and beyond themselves whilst experiencing a London simultaneously located in its past, present and future…

The experience began with participants being directed towards secret locations where they met with the Klub Londinium doorman. The doorman assisted them in completing a questionnaire which placed them within one of four personality types: Materialist, Mystic, Hedonist and Outsider. Participants were then assigned a tape-guided walk through corresponding areas of London based upon a personality wholly distinct from their own This forced them to confront their own identity and to experience differing ways of perceiving and thinking about their environments. As participants were guided through these different parts of London as Outsiders, Hedonists, Materialists or Mystics their aural landscapes were not only perfectly synchronised with sights and transitions in the external landscapes, but also with actors situated along the different routes who would interact with them in predetermined ways. These actors would highlight and flavour what the participants were experiencing on their walks, sometimes adding threat or menace, at other times directing their attention to specific objects, posing riddles or heightening their emotions. The effect was to emphasize the otherworldly nature of the seemingly mundane and to leave participants unsure about what was real in what they were witnessing or how far it was a product of the personalities they were temporarily inhabiting.

Klub Londinium anticipated the interest in psycho-geography and immersive theatre which have since become contemporary staples but did so in a time just before the internet and the smart-city, digital society it prefigured. Using largely analogue recording techniques and media it was able to create a series of many layered sonic textures which underpinned the visual and sensory experience of the walks. In the 30 years or so since it was first staged, the physical landscape of London, like that of other world cities has, inevitably changed, But the emotional, psychological, historical and geographical landscapes Klub Londinium explored remain as ever present traces of a deeper, shared subjective universe, a world which is always there to be excavated and re-encountered.