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LIGHTNESS

QUICKNESS

EXACTITUDE

VISIBILITY

MULTIPLICITY

Six Memos for The Next Millennium.

Italo Calvino, 1992.

The difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content.

Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture ‘consistency’ and he planned to write it in Cambridge.

I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.

Esther Calvino.

The Drought.

J.G. Ballard.

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.

Photographic ruins an amalgam/agency of what remains.

Brown and Blue.

A Field in England.

Cyanotype material on canvas with iron pigment.

Developing a spatial serenity/synthesis/synergy.

This amalgam of colour with various substances demonstrates the change and transformation of the material world, which can be interpreted as essentially an alchemistic procedure.

The goal of such procedures is ultimately to resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Yves Klein.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Magdalena Broska.

Air and Dreams.

An essay on the imagination of movement.

Gaston Bachelard.

Shotesham, site based inquiry,studio practice.

Spatial registers around the corporeal and the transcendental.

Ruin its relation to time.

Fragment as ruin and on melancholia as an attitude of retrospective contemplation.

Dialectics at a standstill, a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired, allowing allegory to be understood, felt as a contemplative calm, an equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.

Dialectical thinking involves the clarification of ideas through discussion and contradiction.

What remains after the process of dialectical thinking?

An initial thesis is opposed by an antithesis, then resolved through a synthesis of the two terms, which can in turn become a new thesis.

Objects/inclusions for painting with/layered transitions and movements.

Holga 120WPC, f135.

Ilford Delta 100/8 exposures 92x55mm.

The Gaze of Orpheus.

Maurice Blanchot.

The Essential Solitude

In the solitude of the work, we see a more essential solitude, a self communion.

MULTIPLICITY

The work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality, while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos.

Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands.

The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.

The network that links all things is also Proust’s theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the dimensions of space and time.

The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine.

It is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.

But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Remembrance of Things Past : The Captive.

Infra-ordinary.

Species of Spaces

We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.

But where is our life?

Where is our body?

Where is our space?

Georges Perec.

CHORA : trace/mark/map/body

The drama of encountering space.

Recombinant Poetics via Interventions.

Thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.

Concerned with artworks and architectural projects that reconfigure the temporality of sites, repositioning the relationship of the past and the present in a number of different ways.

Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.

Between Art and Architecture.

Jane Rendell.

Performativity/Drama of Residency

Transient readings and encounters.

Other Enactments,Dialogues,Relationalities.

Sites of evidence/knowledge and understanding.

The scheme should incorporate both careful repair of existing fabric and a significant element of new construction in a contemporary design.

SPAB, design competition.

We are not calling for a new disordered architecture to match the disorder of culture; this would only affirm the chaotic.

Rather, we propose experiments in search of new orders, projections of new relationships.

We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method.

The energy inherent in opening up relationships presents us with a continuity of ordering that compels refection.

Steven Holl.

Correlational Programming, Parallax.

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Perceptual Experience.

On The Nature of Things.

The notion of specific agential intra-actions in architectural practice.

Thingification, the turning of relations into things,  entities, relata, all infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.

Karen Barad sees reality composed of intra-acting elements which together make up a phenomena.

Making Use of Useful Correlations/Meaningful Information.

The actor of this process is not a subject distinct from phenomenal reality outside it, nor any transcendent point of view, rather it is a portion of that reality itself.

Our discourse on reality is itself part of that reality.

The radical questioning of our mental maps of reality.

Lines of thought that take inspiration from, or rooted in quantum physics.

Karen Barad’s utilization of the ideas of Niels Bohr.

Physics seemed to me the place where the weave between the structure of reality and the structure of thought was closest, the place where this intertwinement was subject to the incandescent test of continuous evolution.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores being as it resides in the perceptual situatedness of the body-subject into the world.

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

Perception is considered as the fundamental act that enables human beings to inhabit space and time.

Reality is not composed of things in themselves or things behind phenomena,

but things in phenomena.

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

For Merleau-Ponty idea is the invisible of this world which inhabits this world, sustains it and renders it visible.

Holl is interested in the phenomenal nature of the idea, in his search for connecting the phenomenal properties with conceptual strategy.

According to Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena.

Phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components.

Phenomena are produced through agential intra-actions of multiple apparatuses of bodily production.

Things in phenomena/agential intra action

Steven Holl points out a path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. In this architectural journey the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site-force interact with each other. This interaction begins 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.

The Visible and The Invisible.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Posthumanist Performativity.

Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.

Karen Barad.

A Living Room For The City : V&A Dundee.

Kengo Kuma, Maurizio Mucciola.

Parallax

Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.

Steven Holl.

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Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph’s skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis,wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.

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Radical Perspectives.

Space-time Manifolds.

Intertwined cinemas within a bottle of light.

Fissure space reflection on underside of suspended cinemas.

Concept Studies/Diagrams.

Space was perceived by the body moving through time.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Plastic Media

Performative Apparatuses.

The Observer and The Observed.

A return via the time exposures to the unexpected and a intricate order made up of  patterns, movements and constellations.

New thrilling metaphorical structures.

Beyond the purely visual, to get a flat surface to interact with physical phenomena, which would be recorded without any intervention or involvement. Photographic events in which some images recorded very determined fixed forms, and in other time-exposures the images became more about traces and about movement.

Susan Derges.

Infra-ordinary

Dust Breeding.

Giacometti’s Cell/Studio.

A Species of Spaces.

Intra-acting

Contemporary Architectural Practices.

Spatial Practices/Visual Fine Art.

Quantum Superposition.

At the moment a measurement is made in Beijing, everything remains in quantum superposition with respect to Vienna. The equipment making the measurements, the scientists reading them, the notebooks in which they are written down, the messages in which the results of the measurements are conveyed, are all quantum objects themselves.

Helgoland,Carlo Rovelli.

Quantum intra-acting

The concretization of  colour as substance/matter/movement/agency.

Beuy’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.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue, Magdalena Broska.

Elective Affinities

Susan Derges/Garry Fabian Miller.

The direct use of physical materials, the interest in systematic experimentation and a preoccupation with the fluctuating perception of events depending on the position of the observer and the nature of the light.

Through the realm of perceptual experiences.

Both art and science alter our perceptions and knowledge, whether from philosophy, science or the arts it filters down into our general awareness to affect our world view.

Wondrous essences put back into existence, through re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world.

Plastic media, time based immateriality.

Surface interactions produced from physical phenomena made visible.

Metaphors for phenomena

Patterns as either/both particles and waves.

Unknowing Expectation.

Prints of a scientific exactness.

This reduction of process down to such a simple method.

He felt amazed by the clarity of the procedure, it seemed incredibly releasing and radical, and something to aspire to.

Working series that focusses on the immense through engagement with the specific.

Homeland, the body gains access to the world as a way of living and working.

Making a garden after the making of the mornings pictures, feels like the right way to fill the hours which remain in the day.

Field Studies/Kilquhanity.

Building template for positioning of circulatory pathways.

Garden drawings and sculptural mappings of the passage of sunlight.

Shifting relationships of the real world have been assimilated into her imagery.

In particular her world view was affected by the ideas of contemporary physicists.

New possibilities for plastic media has been that phenomena are no longer seen as static entities in space and time, but as dynamic and interrelated with specific structured laws and principles.

The Darkroom as cell and workroom, a room apart from the world.

Science, Order and Creativity.

David Bohm.

The Implied Observer

Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.

Performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real, performativity is actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.

Thingification, the turning of relations into things, entities, relata, which infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.

In Posthumanist Performativity, Karen Barad advocates agential realism as an alternative to representationist ontologies that split semiotic from material reality.

Barad argues that matter is not a substance but an intra-activity, and that agency is not an exclusively human attribute, but rather the enactment of iterative changes across macro/microscopic levels of matter.

Matter is performative in that it reproduces itself through the effects of its own intra-active dynamic material relationships. Relata do not pre-exist these relationships, but emerge through them in the fluid, diffractive boundaries that crystalize phenomenon/matter into things/thingification that are positioned in a spatial-temporal affective relation.

The subject/object dichotomy is performatively enacted through the specific spatial temporal proximity between the two necessary for apprehension, in which the approximal relationship through which subject and object emerge. The cognitive split that constitues the I is a discursive practice called the agential cut which is a conception of separability between one thing and another that grants the illusion of agency.

For Barad, discursive practices are not only linguistic expressions of human language, but extend to other material specific practices of intra-action entangled with other intra-actions that produce material phenomena. The material apparati which constrain, but do not over determine these practices find within their own diffractive limits possible dynamic reconfigurations of the world.

Because being is not a static relationality but a doing, that always entails constituting exclusions, a posthumanist engagement with performative matter must not only account for the sites of human/non human cuts, but also challenge the ethical stakes of such cuts.

Summary Notes : Karen Barad, Posthuman Performativity, S.A. Colclough.

Intra-actions produce material phenomenon.

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Architectural Prototyping.

Formative Ideas.

Setting things adrift in the direction of other assemblages.

The Refrain.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound, a moment of pure presence.

The Wonder of Minor Experiences.

Jane Bennett.

Enchantment requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience, it is a state of interactive fascination.

Capacitive Environments, a building that seeks to both communicate with its users and provide a spectacle for onlookers.

The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object’s difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

Constructional mock-ups used to determine the optimal installation of the ETFE cushions both to the substructure and between adjacent frames.

Asif Khan. Beatbox Pavilion, London 2012 Summer Olympics.

The Blueprint : Map 2, creative designations.

Mapping hidden spaces between precision and indeterminacy.

Spatial Agency/Issues of Relational Spaces.

Collage/Cognitive Mappings.

Discursive spaces between agencies/representations.

The Stride of The Mind, Patti Smith.

Formal qualities/events between materials

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Peripheral Vision : Relationality.

Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality, but they also hide its underlying complexities.

Robert Cooper, 2005.

Developing a constitutive nature within practices.

Qualitative Reseachers.

Entangled practices are productive, and who and what are excluded through these entangled practices matter, different intra-actions produce different phenomena.

It is in and through an understanding of these entangled practices presented by Barad that we can begin to understand how diffractive readings can help us in our work as qualitative reseachers to produce knowledge differently.

Interactions Matter.

Spatial Agency.

Walking

Wayfinding in the City.

Thinking intra-actively.

Thinking with Barad’s intra-action helps us fashion an approach that re-inserts the material into the process of analysis. It is a reclaiming of the material absent in its modernist limitations. It is the work of Karen Barad and other named as ‘new materialists, or material feminists’ to ask how our intra-action with other bodies (both human and nonhuman) produce subjectivities and performative enactments.

Such questioning shifts our thinking away from how performative speech acts or repetitive bodily actions produce subjectivity, but also how subjectivity can be understood as a set of linkages and connections with other things and other bodies, both human and nonhuman.

The Discursive Text/Material.

Phenomenology is interested in the now, what we see, how we perceive, and how those perceptions shape or come the world that is constitutive both of our environment and us.

The Keatsian concept of negative capability, that of being with uncertainty, of seeking to transcend and revise contexts, to reject constraints and open up dialogue as a throughfare for all thoughts, to ask questions and develop empathy.

John Keats 1795-1821.

Local artists and writers respond to the University of Winchester’s

Magdalen Hill Archaeological Research Project.

On-site, co-directors Dr Simon Roffey and Dr Phil Marter talk about process.

A negative, destructive archaeology of taking away, of context sheets for a cut (negative) or a deposit (positive): how the processes are physical and sensory as well as interpretative, how their work is forensic, piecing together, visceral, more instinct than intellect, tactile and haptic, sculptural, revealing, never final, and as much an art as a science.

The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists.

The artist’s role here is to bring their own kind of knowledge setting aside logic and reason, to use the imagination and senses, to express through body and mind, the self, the messiness and uncertainty evoked by these material traces, mystery and wonder.

Colin Renfrew, Figuring It Out, 2003.

Spatial Diffractions in Interior Design.

A final diffraction is to think about how the office space itself creates a diffraction.

The office door, the opening, the threshold, can be viewed as the place through which waves pass, creating a diffraction.

This diffraction passes both ways: in inviting those who enter and those who fail to enter.

This opening further serves to reconstitute the office door as a threshold to be crossed, or as a threshold that welcomes. One invites, the other excludes.

We presented examples of how Sera and Cassandra were produced differently through intra-actions with office space, other bodies, clothing, and furniture, and similarly how their entanglement with these material fixtures resulted in a mutual constitution of the material and discursive.

It is through an enactment of a diffractive analysis and a re-thinking of our relationship to/with data, and to/with the material in our research sites, that we see much productive potential for research methodologists.

Project Spaces/Presentations.

Diagrams, maps and charts are all a symbolic depiction that emphasises mapping relationships.

Keywords: Agency, Spatial Agency, Practice, Making, Architectural Body,Relational Movements,Outreach, Urban Walking, Interactions, Cultivation Field,  Foraging, Finding, Gathering, Harvesting, Organism, Person, Environment, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art,

Discursive and practical apparatuses, both drawing on the other in the act of agency.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Spinoza : Practical Philosophy by Gilles Deleuze

Bento’s Sketchbook : John Berger

Beams and Netting: Negotiations in the chamber, Hyde Abbey Gatehouse, Winchester.

Clay, hessian, drawings and transparencies, drawing frame, antique glass, lead and nylon lines.

‘Leylines’ has been appropriated and employed as both a practical and as a conceptual strategy to inquiry into places and localities. Site visits and sensitive dialogues with the other artists at a number of locations have further brought materials and processes into the creative realm. The spatial practice of setting-up this work has produced a social narrative of its own invention.

This intervention into a listed building has become a temporary refuge for a work in progress. The work attempts to show a creative agency as it encounters a host of installed hierarchies and conditions. The architectural motif on the drawings has been derived directly from the open apertures of the chamber.

Artist’s Book: white and coloured pages

A hand-bound book comprising of five signatures each with four folios. This book contains a collection of postcards made from contact prints and photograms from Tidbury Ring using the cyanotype process.

THE PRESENCE OF THE BUILT OBJECT IN THE WORLD

THROUGH THE MANNER IN WHICH IT IS BUILT.

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

Eric Lapierre, Caruso St John, The phenomenology of construction.

Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity.

Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.

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The Quadruple Object.

There are two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities, real and sensual in both cases.

Real objects and qualities exist in their own right, while sensual objects and qualities exist only as the correlate of some real object, whether human or otherwise.

I am not saying that a work of Art reveals the secret of life and being to us.

A work of Art affords the peculiar pleasure, an aesthetic performance in which the inwardness of things, their executant reality is opened to us.

Ortega.

Giacometti.

Created a visual lexicon of nothingness and being, of community and isolation.

Making fleeting visions, interactions between the modelling object and the space within which it exists. Concentrating, extracting a female nude from the atmosphere of a city, creating a space that oscillated with their shared community and isolation.

There is no direct knowledge of anything only relations-on-knowledge.

The real object withdraws inaccessible from the scene, as the new object generated by metaphor takes over the situation.

The real objects at stake in aesthetics are ourselves.

It would be more accurate to say that in Art the part of the image which looks towards the object is always subordinated to our efforts, because as basically Thespian beings we become the new object generated by metaphor.

Object-Oriented Ontology.

A New Theory of Everything.

Graham Harman. 2018

Aesthetics Is The Root Of All Philosophy.

Robert Mangold.

Creating a new mysterious real object with new sensual qualities.

Compound Objects

Assemblages

The Quadruple Object.

Since objects cannot exist without qualities and vice versa, there are only four possible combinations.

In Object-Oriented Ontology real-sensual objects and qualities always come together.

Object Relations

Potentiality/Receptivity

The Theatricality of Metaphor.

Art makes explicit the tension between qualities that are experienced in the real/sensual object.

I myself am the sole real object in all experience, encountering any number of sensual things.

Every objective image, on entering or leaving our consciousness produces a subjective reaction.

Art is primarily theatrical in nature, since the spectator becomes a sort of ‘method actor’ a theatrical actor acting out the structure of metaphor.

Ortega, An Essay in Esthetics By Way of a Preface.

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with ultimate questions of what reality and real things are.

Bruno Latour, defines modernism as the view that there are two permanently distinct kingdoms, known as nature and culture and that it is the task of modernity, to purify these two domains from each other.

Metaphor is not knowledge about a pre-existing object, rather it  brings about the production of a new object.

All we are saying is that the real object at stake in metaphor is neither the absent cypress-object to which we never gain direct access, nor the human being who takes note of it. But rather the new amalgamated reality formed from the reader who poses as a cypress-object and the qualities of the flame.

The successful metaphor much like the successful joke, will occur only when the reader or auditor is sincerely deployed in living it.

The metaphor is theatrical, in the same sense as one is living one’s role on stage.