Outpost 080722

Paintings, spatial field grounds, layered paint and paper with photographic inclusions.

Output of Artists’ Studios

Vital space for production, presentation, connection and exchange.

The cyanotype  process in contemporary art practice.

Cyanotype Collages, Karl Blossfeldt

Cyanotype canvas, yellow ochre, sun mappings, spatial space/time forms, apparatuses and diagrams.

Harleston drawing/research, access to archive material.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Enmeshed Experience

A complex interlocking of time, light, material, and detail creates the cinematic whole wherein we can no longer distinguish individual elements.

Filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky speaks of cinematic enmeshing in his description of a scene from Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. A medieval Japanese village. A fight is going on between some horsemen and the samurai who are on foot. It is pouring rain; there is mud everywhere. The samurai wears an ancient Japanese garment, which leaves more of the leg bare, and their arms are plastered in mud. And, when one samurai falls down dead, we see the rain washing away the mud and his leg becoming white, as white as marble.

Enric Ruiz-Geli. Cloud 9 Architects.

Building As Prototype.

In the case of a practice like Cloud 9, driven as it is by inventing, making and testing via the evolving prototype, its buildings are never just a pavilion, a case study, a prototype or even a ‘really nice sculpture’: they are all of them.

Formwork/Prefabricated Coffers/Interior Surface/Exterior Substrate.

An architectural practice driven by the the act of making in which the prototype has a fundamental role in testing performance and performativity for the user.

On-site prototypes, not modelling or mock-ups that just represent design issues, but prototypes that develop with fabricators and builders to become the ‘final prototype’ the completed building.

Case Study House/Pavilion 3

Research Invention/Patenting.

A prototype is something between a patent and the user.

Realizing The Physical Prototype

Prototyping Performance

Prototyping Through Subtraction

Virtual Prototyping

Distinguishing between models and prototypes by attributing to each of them different communication tasks.

Models are a means of visually communicating concepts among the design team, whereas prototypes are for communicating performance as well as helping to envisage and test new ideas.

Mock-ups keep the designer from having a meaningful dialogue with the process of designing-through-making.

Architectural students are beginning to think of new ways of working, including much greater integration between off-site fabrication and on-site assembly.

 Outpost 150722

Cyanotype Durational Sun Print.

Charcoal and Clay trace drawing.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue

Magdalena Broska.

The Transubstantiation of Matter.

Beuys’s materials are not to be understood literally, by their outward appearance.

Beuys emphasises that the brown floor paint is not just a colour but also a plastic substance.

I have chosen brown so as to present a plastic substance and thus express something that relates to every form of substantiality, just as I am trying to do with this superimposed red. I simply want to bridge the gap between a discussion about colour and the problem of substantiality.

Joseph Beuys, Drawings. 1979

For Beuys the real and the concretely employed material is only seemingly real, fully in a philosophical sense: a phenomenon from some essential being that is hidden behind appearances, and that is to be elicited by a kind of counter- image process.

Conceptions of Counter Images/Transformation.

The Homoeopathic Method/Like cures like.

Beuys’s brown and Klein’s blue form a pair of opposites: according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together, a polar way of thinking that seeks resolution.

With his brown oil paint, Joseph Beuys assumed a counter-position to Yves Klein and his blue, which stands for immaterial manifestations, the sky, the sea, and the light of the south, and which conveys space and wide vistas.

In terms of consistency, Beuys’s brown is purely coating paint, as commonly used for rust proofing.

Its visual appearance links it with earth, heaviness, darkness, and also blood.

Idea is, the invisible of this world, which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible

Merleau Ponty

For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for the materialization of the idea force

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy

Responds to every project by re-evaluating the physical, cultural, historical references of the site-time or program, through which he achieves a ‘limited concept’ that establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limited principle for each architectural design process

As the body-subject is perceptually situated into the world by inhabiting space and time, a building is rooted into a specific site and situated by inhabiting, ‘the visible and invisible of the site and situation’

By locating the body, ‘at the very essence of our being and our spatial perception’ Holl redefines architectural space as perceived space with reference to the perceiving-body-subject

Steven Holl uses ‘parallax’ as an experiential tool as well as a design tool in which architectural space is redefined with reference to the moving body’s constantly changing spatial perceptions

Merleau Ponty’s main thesis that phenomenology has potential to put the essences back into existence by re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world through the realm of perceptual experiences drives Steven Holl to search for vitalizing these essences through the experiences of architectural forms, spaces, materials, light and colour

Intellectual and Phenomenal

Philosophical Inquiry

Interplays in his thinking on and making of architecture

Utility/Interpretation

Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, explores the essence of being as it resides in the perceptual situadedness of the body-subject into the world

Perception fundamentally ‘acts’ enabling human beings to inhabit space and time

When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes, what we perceive

Architecture

That which begins as an interaction with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site

Creating the experiential power of architecture

Intertwining, idea-space-material

Anchoring, physics and metaphysics of site

A path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. An architectural journey in which the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site force interact with each other

 BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1

It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.

The act of “blocking in “ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio- temporal markers or determinants.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.

Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4

1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) page 193.

2 Ibid.,page 192.

3 Ibid.,page 192.

4 Ibid.,page 192.

 Outpost 080722

Paintings, spatial field grounds, layered paint and paper with photographic inclusions.

Output of Artists’ Studios

Vital space for production, presentation, connection and exchange.

The cyanotype  process in contemporary art practice.

Cyanotype Collages, Karl Blossfeldt

Cyanotype canvas, yellow ochre, sun mappings, spatial space/time forms, apparatuses and diagrams.

Harleston drawing/research, access to archive material.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Enmeshed Experience

A complex interlocking of time, light, material, and detail creates the cinematic whole wherein we can no longer distinguish individual elements.

Filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky speaks of cinematic enmeshing in his description of a scene from Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai. A medieval Japanese village. A fight is going on between some horsemen and the samurai who are on foot. It is pouring rain; there is mud everywhere. The samurai wears an ancient Japanese garment, which leaves more of the leg bare, and their arms are plastered in mud. And, when one samurai falls down dead, we see the rain washing away the mud and his leg becoming white, as white as marble.

Enric Ruiz-Geli. Cloud 9 Architects.

Building As Prototype.

In the case of a practice like Cloud 9, driven as it is by inventing, making and testing via the evolving prototype, its buildings are never just a pavilion, a case study, a prototype or even a ‘really nice sculpture’: they are all of them.

Formwork/Prefabricated Coffers/Interior Surface/Exterior Substrate.

An architectural practice driven by the the act of making in which the prototype has a fundamental role in testing performance and performativity for the user.

On-site prototypes, not modelling or mock-ups that just represent design issues, but prototypes that develop with fabricators and builders to become the ‘final prototype’ the completed building.

Case Study House/Pavilion 3

Research Invention/Patenting.

A prototype is something between a patent and the user.

Realizing The Physical Prototype

Prototyping Performance

Prototyping Through Subtraction

Virtual Prototyping

Distinguishing between models and prototypes by attributing to each of them different communication tasks.

Models are a means of visually communicating concepts among the design team, whereas prototypes are for communicating performance as well as helping to envisage and test new ideas.

Mock-ups keep the designer from having a meaningful dialogue with the process of designing-through-making.

Architectural students are beginning to think of new ways of working, including much greater integration between off-site fabrication and on-site assembly.

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TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM.

Maya Deren’s 1948 film, Meditation on Violence.

Two parabolic arcs describe three types of Chinese boxing in a single continuous movement.

The last portion of the film is printed in reverse motion.

DURATION

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid, flowing time is interwined with an experience of being where past, present and future merge. If one extreme of time is the experiential time of individual being, the other extreme is the abstract, anonymous, measured time of science.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

The Great Hall of Ascension can receive 10,000 people; its floor and ceiling are made of glass. It is intersected by the glass cages of nine elevators, each rising to its respective destination, traversing the other interiors with a discreet hiss. On the elevator shafts, electronic billboards announce different libraries. With fragments of texts, titles, names, songs descending in a continuous movement, the entire building seems supported by signs in a perpetual countdown to takeoff.

Rem Koolhaas.

Into The Frame Enters

The foreignness of the intimate or the violence and charity of perception.

R. Bruce Elder.

Kairos

The Movement and its Moment

Being Alive

Tim Ingold

Jannis Kounellis

At Castelvecchio, Sparpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition.

An Attitude to History, Carlo Scarpa.

It cannot be, it has gone!

They believe that we can do the same sort of work in the same spirit as our forefathers whereas for good or evil we are completely changed and we cannot do the work they did.

William Morris.

There is no stage at which human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre.

Autopoises and Cognition

The Realization of the Living

Humberto R. Maturana

Francisco J. Varela

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation, by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process.

For colour and against line and drawing.

Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator’s construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on film-making, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

The concept of pure colour in a monochrome.

I seek to put the spectator in front of the fact that the colour is an individual, a character, a personality. I solicit a receptivity from the observer placed before my works.

This permits him to consider everything that effectively surrounds the monochrome painting.

Thus he can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him.

Thus, perhaps, he can enter into the world of colour.

Yves Klein.

Colourspace that is not visible but within which one is impregnated.

Parallax and the free movement of the landscape through physical forms.

To resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Presenting Pure Pigment.

I did not like colours ground with oil. They seemed to be dead.

What pleased me above all was pure pigments in powder like the ones I often saw at the wholesale colour dealers.

They had a burst of natural and extraordinarily autonomous life.

Living and tangible colour material.

Magdalena Broska

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Fire Pictures

Rain Sculptures

Air Architecture

Cosmogonies

Although it was a room painted totally in white, the artist spoke of an extraordinarily intense experience of blue: it was a true blue, the blue of the blue depths of space.

The demonstration of nothingness, the void of a white space.

Klein wanted to demonstrate the idea of a development from blue, a visible, tangible colour, via white to immaterialised blue.

There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within, in which Bachelard’s beautiful sentence resides: First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then a blue depth.

Blue blood of sensibility

Bachelard/Shelley.

A wide variety of different expressions for the process of progressive dematerialisation.

The release of colour from the binding agent.

Work with dematerialised materials such as the elements fire, water, air and dust.

The term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema’s historical and cultural architectures of reception into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined.

Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema, seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices.

Film/Expanded Cinema.

Temporal Spaces/Surfaces.

Transparency/Translucency, littoral and Phenomenal.

Mark Burry and Jane Burry

Prototyping for Architects.

Steven Holl

Parallax.

Designing buildings as serial prototypes.

Spatial Clocks/Theoretical Objects/Entanglements.

Materials imbue the wind-permeable wall with rich textile qualities.

The whole house acted as a prototype, not only showcasing the latest developments in green technology but also exploring at full scale, the performance of the house and the way in which people interacted with it.

The artists wanted to make the same gesture that many cultures make when marking the land through which they have passed, the placing  of one stone on top of another to signal a route back.

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The Thinking Field/Speculative Curriculums.

The Body-In-Action/Making Spaces between Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology.

Sequences of actions that add up to an observational-heuristic procedure.

Conserved without restoration of lost detail.

The problem of historical materials, which we can never ignore but can’t imitate directly either, is an issue that has always concerned me. I am primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio.

Lime Wash, Field Chalk, China Clay.

Human Figure Drawing.

Waxed Paper, Canvas.

Charcoal, Clay, Liquid Iron Oxide.

Essential Work Only.

The SPAB Approach.

The Society’s approach very often involves carefully considered inaction.

Where no problems exist, or where a problem has no major effect on use or conservation, an old building is best left alone and simply enjoyed.

Problems need to be tackled, but the society encourages work which is no more, but no less, than is essential.

Restricting work to these things helps ensure the maximum survival of historic fabric.

Site Sequencing/The Infra-Thin/The Viewing Chamber.

Tactically posed surrounds that contrast/entangle one segment of world with another.

Mapping Photons/Subjectivity.

Architectural Body/Collaged Users

Procedural Movements of Conservation/Care and Repair.

Extracting that which has become interred.

Observing quotidian detail within the ruins of a  fabric of building.

Domestic and intimate details that create poetic themes that are universal and transcendent.

Wanting to see what things look like photographed/interrogations.

Pushing the photographic image to the point of failure, using the fading twilight to create new abstractions of light and movement.

The intermediate space of the negative.

A gap created between the mechanical attentive and unassumptive nature/vision of the camera and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye.

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty struggled with the development of a theory of vision that would take account our embodied relationship to it, describing the ‘chiastic’ relationship between the viewer and the world, an intertwining through which the world was bought into a kind of visibility.

What needed to be put into question and seen as problematic was how the viewer came to be seen as separate from the world, how the visual ever became positioned as something other, something differentiated and separate from the spectator.

The force of presence/presentness.

Stillness and Time, 2006.

Still Video Portraits and the Account of The Soul.

Joanna Lowry.

The Visual, is predicated upon the construction of a distance between the spectator and the world, a distance maintained through the work of culture and the work of technology.

Photographic technologies have provided one key cultural mechanism for defining the place of the visual and positioning it in relationship to us.

In representing the subject they also define the site of the subjects’s visibility, the place at which he or she can be seen.

They cut through the world, interrupt it, producing difference and distance and projecting it onto the surface of the paper or the screen.

They produce a differentiated space of the visible within which the subject and the spectator are made aware of their otherness and their distance from from each other.

Photographic Drawings/Haiku.

Luminous/Insubstantial Spectral Abstractions.

Focus and detail  would drag it back to our world.

Vision is the place where are continuity with the world conceals itself, the place where we mistake our contact for distance, imagining that seeing is a substitute for, rather than a mode of, touching, and it is this anaesthesia, this senselessness, at the heart of transparency that demands our acknowledgement and pushes our dealings with the visual beyond recognition.

Stephen Melville.

Recombinant Poetics

Pinhole Photography/Qualitative Visual/Haptic Soundings.

St Martins, Shotesham. SPAB

Camera Room/Still Life

Paintings from the overlaying intervals of materials and processes of construction.

The Essential Solitude

Maurice Blanchot

Self Communion.

The person who is writing the work is thrust to one side, the person who has written the work is dismissed. What is more, the person who is dismissed does not know it.

This ignorance saves him, diverts him and allows him to go on.

The writer never knows if the work is done.

What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another.