Limited edition CD artwork, and booklet.
Alternative photographic photograms and collages for the CD artwork to promote the ambient music of Kontakte. Limited edition CD artwork, an…
Source: Russell Moreton Axisweb: Contemporary Art UK Network :
AWKWARDNESS.
I work from awkwardness, by that I mean I don’t arrange things.
If I stand in front of something instead of arranging it.
I arrange myself.
Rem Koolhaas, S,M,L,XL.
Working Practice
Possible Strategies/Tools/Agents/Abstractions for “working sites” that occur within a site/field of practice. Interested in the abstraction of information, its collection/registering, its wrapping/framing, and un-wrapping/transmission to inform others, and its relation to embodied knowledge.
A spatial practice that unavoidably inserts the role of the observer into the language and function of “working situations” and to participate in the analysis of “the objective statement” and its subjectivity around “sites activities”.
INFORMATION, THE NEW LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE. Baeyer.
Ockham’s Razor,(economy of expression) Briefer is better. “The philosophical principle that values simpler, briefer explanations over more complex ones.”1 Interesting notion that this could be used a device to “prune the proliferating set of primitive entities, and reduce the number of a priori assumptions that must be fed into a theory.” 2
Fechner’s law, on the magnitude of a sensation being proportional to the intensity of the stimulus. Today regarded as a historical curiosity after serious departures from it in the 1950s, but it is still emblematic of a profound relation. “If the intensity of the material world is plotted along the horizontal axis, and the response of the human mind is on the vertical, the relation between the two is represented by the logarithmic curve.”3After this illustrative definition Hans Christian von Baeyer posits a speculation and retires with this rather enchanting question to his reader.
Could this rule provide a clue to the relationship between the objective measure of information, and our subjective perception of it?
Boltzmann interpretation of entropy. The term entropy invented by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius as a theoretical counterpoint to energy, defined mathematically, entropy is heat divided by temperature. It does however have a peculiar quality not shared with energy. When entropy (heat from a cup of tea) is left out in the ambient and open condition of the surrounding air, the two entropies combine to give an entropic state that will always remain constant or increases, what it cannot do is to become diminished. It displays a one-way set of relational coordinates.
Entropy can be used as a simple additive quantity as in “combining two identical volumes of gas , and you get twice the mass, twice the energy and twice the entropy of one vessel”.4 What Boltzmanns interpretation of entropy was able to supply was firstly a mechanical model which supports the traditional values of entropy, with something that was entirely new to physics. Entropy now gained a strange subjective quality imparted by the number of ways in which a system or more “specifically the number of rearrangements consistent with the known properties of the system.”5
Entropy by this interpretation is not an absolute property of a system, but rather it displays a relational component with is wholly subjective to the amount of “information” that is available.
Boltzmann goes further with these connections, he makes them specific. By “pointing out that since the value of entropy rises from zero , when we know all about a system, to its maximum value when we know least.”6 Hans Christian von Baeyer interprets and theorises this as illustrating that entropy was actually measuring “our ignorance about the details of the motions of the molecules of a system,”7 Which can be interpreted and appropriated to mean that entropy can register our lack of information about a system through the possibility and probability of what occurs and what might not occur in that system.
This intersection of the “relational” both empirical and subjective is an interesting site in which to stage a per formative element with empirical phenomena. This offers up to the “work site” a duality and a paradoxical sense of resonance.
In much the same way in which Democritus understood that all empirical evidence found in science is “collected” through and “mediated” by the senses, “working sites” could help to usher-in this gesture of analysis. This gesture of “sense experiments” creates and affirms and gives insights into our relational reality.
“We are all observers, equipped with both senses and intellects and whilst trying to understand the universe we are trying to understand man. We work from a theoretical objective (not absolute) reality from which we proceed to an understanding of the human senses and its consciousness.”7 The work is in-effect using the notion of the “logarithmic curve” of Fechners law as the route of experiences encountered by interlocutory aspects of the “guest” as they are registered by the “axis’s” of the architectural installation and its laboratory like situation.
Strangely and with some irony as in all scientific theories and break-throughs we inevitable end up learning more and simultaneously knowing less. This duality which contains, a theoretical state of reflection with its exactitudes and phenomena’s held captive on one hand; whilst reflecting our own “un-captiveness” (or perhaps we are captive through un-captiveness) our being constantly temporal and momentary with all relations having to be applied/registered through a human subjectivity.
This interrogative compound of the theoretical and the temporal sensuality of being, of becoming relational to self/other/others and its/their placement in worlds forms the main-spring of my practice.
We live in worlds that are in effect part of a “participatory universe” according to John Wheeler(dean of American theoretical physicists).In worlds in which “the observer cannot be redacted out of the picture”.8As such the observer must therefore set-up some sort of apparatus were the subjectivity of its information also quantifies the effect of the observers presence and perspective. Unfortunately the choice of apparatus, even if freely made will partially determine the possible answers to the question at hand. The apparatus fundamentally makes things “knowable” through its ability to formulate a measurement (in the world of things) in the context/inquiry of a particular question.
What if this apparatus which gives measurement was situated not to give evidence to a context of questioning criteria, but was allowed to record/register without relevance to any specific question or questions, but just to record a empirical condition or occurrences, perhaps a sensor more than an actual apparatus, something that doesn’t produce information, which is already already positing a value, a recognition of a question. If the abstractive data information from this sensor was “without determination” other mechanics could be “framed up” so as to allow a relational space frame to render-up a temporal subjective perspective and hence give a relational enactment of being.
Being in the atomic perspective of the universe.
1 Hans Christian von Baeyer, Information, The New Language of Science (London: Weidenfeld &Nicolson, 2003) page 17.
2 Ibid., Page 40.
3 Ibid., Page 85
4 Ibid., page 96
5 Ibid., page 97
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., page 13
Working Spaces/Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue. Canterbury 2010
Mechanisms Of Seeing/Architectures and Images
Perception is in the “condition” of an interruption.
Rehearsal is the creative part of any performance.
Interested in the speculative nature of work-sites that contain a narrative intervention via a device that registers and records the documentary and its rehearsal.
Work as revealed into a final sequence of superimposures on a surface created from the collective transparency of the text.
Thresholds that reveal the interspace between the Human and its condition/environment.
MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.
The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret.
The significance of the hut.
“He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle.
But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar.”
Gaston Bachelard.
TRANSPARENCY AND THE DIALECTICAL IMAGE AS AN ARCHITECTURAL SURFACE.
A “PLAY” CONSOLIDATED INTO BOTH SURFACE AND PROJECTED FORM.
Temporal issues in and around activities of “SITE” and its Performativity/drama of encounter and residency.
Notes from introduction/Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.
Between ART and ARCHITECTURE. Jane Rendell.
A way of thinking about temporal issues of SITE/Situation and event.
VISUAL
MATERIAL
SPATIAL REGISTERS
Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things. Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.
DRAMAS- sadness at the transience of life, represented as nature petrified in the form of fragments of death, and as civilization disintegrating as ruins of classical monuments and buildings.
ALLEGORIES OF THE HUMAN CONDITION 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/equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.
DIALECTICAL THINKING involves the clarification of ideas through DISCUSSION/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.
Proposal to use pinhole camera to capture/explore threshold space of image/architecture/environment
An architectural darkness is a silent solid, but light gives texture to its stillness
The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.
Draft Proposal/itinerary/Layout for “Forum Presentation UCA”
Move assembled group from lecture room to studio space to start presentation as a situation in which to arrange oneself, the group, the fieldwork and research.
Work Experience/early art works and influences; note any traits that have remained faithful to ones formative years.
Closer analysis on the nature of SITE and its performative role in the Practice. Material Soundings, Drawing and Photography, Sculpture and installation in-situ work.
Dialogues and Proximities in performative of making space recorded in-situ as a surface/membrane of the architectural structure.
Photographic surface of relational gestures becoming consolidated and simultaneously projected into what is now an altered reality. The architectural “text” remains as a collaborative custodian to the light entering the building.
Transparency as a “custodian value” and interface for the interaction of encounters and farewells.
Requiem of surface inscriptions that allows light to overwrite its projection in a visionary present.
Photographic surface of events, a visual entropy resolved as a history of consolidated exactitudes/enactments.
The photographic surface shows that which no longer exists, it concretizes contingences on offer into an image of irreversibility.
Double Occupancy , Dwelling with the critique and its realization of an uncovering event, criticism collides with and into the work. Deleuze, Baroque house (65).
DRAWING INTO THE READING ROOM
FLEDGLING ARCHITECTURE IN THE MAKING ISOTROPIC SPACE
SOCIALIZED SOCIABLE
INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.
Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.
APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS
THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD
Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory as being part built/part still under development through drawing, (monuments as instruments/astronomical, Japor, India).
AWKWARDNESS. I work from awkwardness, by that I mean I don’t arrange things. If I stand in front of something instead of arranging it. I…
Source: Architectures within the photographic process : Intermediary Surfaces of Information and Affect
Site Drawing : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices
Site Writing/Place Making
Collage/Enumeration of photographic elements
Antique Glass Sample : Seedy Handblown
Photograph of light, surface/shadow and projection
Reading Room
Research Collage
Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory Site Drawing : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices Site Writing/Place Making Collage/E…
Source: Immaterial Architecture : Collage/Enumeration of Visual Information
DID SOMEONE SAY PARTICIPATE? AN ATLAS OF SPATIAL PRACTICE.
Edited by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar
A few notes relating to thoughts and critical theory around which I am beginning to formulate about my practice and its application as a site from which to “stage a performative discourse of exchange”. My Spatial Practice becoming more like a curatorial trans-disciplinary producer of “on-site” exchanges and relations.
PREFACE
PARTICIPATION LASTS FOREVER Hans Ulrich Obrist
The Museum as oscillating between object and process; the “ elastic museum ” as being flexible allowing displays to be placed within an adaptable building. Alexander Dorner,
Ways Beyond Art.
Hans Ulrich Obrist notes Dorners critical remark ’’the museum as a bridge built between artists and a variety of scientific disciplines”. This observation has been taken-up by contemporary curatorial practice with the inclusion of architects, philosophers, political thinkers/theorists and visual artists into the production of exhibitions and events. The contemporary exhibition can be viewed as part of an on-going and indeed a “complex dynamic learning system” quotes Obrist.
One should renounce the closed, paralysing homogeneity of the traditional exhibition master plan. Artworks would be allowed to extend tentacles to other works- and other fields of knowledge. The curator must not stand in the way of such growth. Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Working Spaces, Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue, Spatial Practices, Canterbury 2009
OPEN TEXTS.
Allow readers to have multiple interpretations, they allow for the possibility of “determinations”.
Relationality
Gaps between connecting and disconnecting.
Notion that categories hide and weaken our perceptions of reality.
Fluctuating networks of existential events.
Emergent state of contingences that create materials for relationality.
For me this curatorial setting could be an interesting set of relations that might be rehearsed and re-presented within a “site” ( an intervention and interruption into our notion of place and placed relations).The notion that one could become an active agent and on-site translator amongst this “ trans- disciplinarily” would be worth investigating . The opportunity to be in the position to have dialogue with other practitioners and to negotiate and expand that dialogue between the different realities and fields made apparent by “site“ could produce new relational meanings.
My particular interest is with the production of ephemeral values and situations, free spaces and sites created from the interruption of place. Photography and installation have been used as an intervention into place. The artists Jane and Louise Wilson have successfully used it to present work around the psychology of architectural spaces. This value of psychology tied up with our psychological reality created by the motion of our own emotions as we project ourselves into space, could be presented by some analogy (working device) to theories, or rather theorising with the camera obscura.
Photographic Laboratory, roving camera and apparatuses during the arts event 10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester.
Performative work using the simple enchantment of the pinhole camera to question and explore the extrusive nature of time, performativity and site.
Proposed Title, Molecular Sieve/Photographic Apparatus/Theorising Object
Currently using a spatial practice to investigate issues around architectural influences on the placed self. Utilising the mobility and awkwardness of an appropriated object as an apparatus to both theorise and register spatial relations/phenomena. interested in using the values and traits of transparency and superimposures to describe the dimensionality of dwelling in place, how might these “on-site” recordings become registered into the possibility of a surface membrane of material metaphors of memory?
A performative documentation that makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it accumulates and is deposited on a photographic surface.
This performative investigation utilises a large pinhole chamber which is allowed mobility through the attachment of castors to its base and the use of a sack-barrow for undulating terrain. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into the “space” a theoretical device centred around and relational to spatial values and influences. My aim is to utilise this device as a means of registering “worksite” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-per formative state. The mobility of this research device could be used to investigate, register and illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall surfaces or even a “sandwich-board” could render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities could be arranged on-site to complement this work as a “working site” functioning within the orbits of both the other works and their prospective guests.
Contextual Issues. Urban Fallow-Sites.
Brief description about methodologies and goals. Urban Fallow,
Solentcentre for architecture and design.
Urban Fallow aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.
Urban Fallow is interested in using vacant urban land and spaces. The project is about reanimating these sites through the use of artists, architects, performers and other professionals, all of which have an interest in engaging with the public. This could be undertaken by the use of temporary events and per formative interventions, this would also have an effect on reducing urban blight and help to reinvigorate interest in these sites for potential investment.
Other longer term legacies might include the provision of longer term public access and cultural use even the possibility of a permanent change of use for a chosen site. To help to deliver an “improved perception and identity of the space for the public together with current user groups and prospective developers.”
Winchester, Hyde Abbey Laundry.
A site of approximately 1500 square metres made up of redundant industrial buildings together with a yard. The property is close to Winchester School of Art and the town centre. The Laundry closed in 2007 and has been vacant ever since then. The building in its current state of dis-repair is unsuitable for most purposes. However it is being viewed by creative practitioners from a broad range of practices as potential studio spaces.
Other Documents,
List re, Participating artists, actors, writers, musicians and chef.
Artist Statement/Work Statement as public handouts, made available (resting on apparatus) for visitors. 10 Days at the Laundry, on flickr site with installation images.
The Apparatus/Device/Research Collage
Time as both a structure and an event, photographic image from a moving apparatus
Brief comment around my use of “apparatuses” researched and questioned through the text “The Apparatus” Vilian Flusser.
Definitions, An Apparatus would be a thing that lies in wait or in readiness for something, and a preparatus would be a thing that waits patiently for something.
The photographic apparatus (a camera) lies in wait for photography. A camera is a tool whose intention is to produce photographs. Tools inform the materials, they “work” them.
This fact/interpretation that tools inform materials has interesting consequences. Flusser states, ’’The object( the thing the tool acts on) acquires an unnatural and improvable form, it becomes cultural. The issue is to keep the definition of “apparatus” open and refrain from referring it as a “tool in the service of photography.”
Other issues regard the “recording of something” as an image and the “registering of information” about a specific duration or experiment. Further issues of “intension” and “reading for what destination/purpose” will need to be clarified to continue. At this point I began to view the perspective of the “apparatus” as a sort of carrier and container, a sensor for some type of “isotope.” I imagined that the apparatus was just some sort of “litmus paper” something that functioned as a sort of barometer in the proximity of “site relations” the architectural. The sociological and the encountering and relational element of human curiosity. This rather spatialised concept envisaged human subjectivity as a mapping around scientific and sociological phenomena, a geography brought about by the performativity of place, time as both a structure and an event.
Francis Aly’s, POLITICS OF REHEARSAL
“While everything Aly’s creates has a simplicity that makes it instantly accessible, his work also offers a complexity that continues to resonate long after it has been seen”. Anne Philbin Directors Forward, Politics of Rehearsal;
Francis Aly’s work has up to this point emphasized issues of place (Mexico City in particular becoming his adopted home).Aly’s originally trained as an Architect and was practicing as such in Belgium. When he moved to Mexico City in the early 1990s where he began to experiment with art which reflected his own inclination to avoid definite conclusions.
In this sense he was already formulating the notion of a “rehearsal for a presentation that may or not be completed”.1 The use of interventional tactics and strategies as a result of a “reaction” to Mexico City and also a way of positioning himself. It is interesting that Aly’s continues to make fresh interventions into apparently completed works.
Aly’s describes his work in these terms ”a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America”.2
The Politics of Rehearsal deals with issues around the concepts of rehearsal and repetition, with its “open ended” process which allows specific details to be retained whilst also allow the possibility of others to be reviewed/worked over and possibly changed. This creates an “open site” prescribed around “key” or interlocutory relations that can then be literally presented as being a “presentation” of a process rehearsing for its re-presentation.
This sense of an evolutionary on-going situation, a working site that permit’s the interventions of other activities that pass through and beyond the register of its own narrative space.
What interests me is the notions/propositions of “the rehearsal” as a non-consecutive chronological structure, which does not have to render a specific conclusion, it only has to announce that it is over/finished or ended. It can even announce/negate that their will be “no-rehearsal” thereby paradoxically marking its proposal and place but then deigning its presence in place.
Rehearsal also offers up its space/time relation for performers to re-start, stop and begin again, it allows a multiplicity of spatial relations to be configured in segmented intervals/time slots under a durational influence which is driven by the purpose and intension of a proposal to perform. Aly”s has also utilised the use of the chronicle.
The proposal of “to Chronicle” to record occurrences, a chronicle is always in the end a record of a series of consecutive events, of which there might be no final resolution, but what a chronicle sets out unequivocally and without adjusting the flow of events is to give a precise record/witness that one thing exists prior to the recording of the next.
This particularity is mirrored in some respects by the duration and entropic nature of the photographic surface, what it has in common with the nature of being able to chronicle is that of “times arrow” a precise directional flow, mediated by the amount of light,(too little, no visible traces remain, too much, and what had been recorded is over-written to the point of total obliteration through too much information) The surface literal becomes spent, used up by agencies and proportions of the light based durations. The chronicle remains readable because it keeps-up this the unfolding of events, whilst the photographic surface is rendered un-readable unless it bracketed into individual but sequential episodes.
The notion of episodes and chronicles both require a pre-determination from the outset to create their form, they in effect act by framing segments of “what is occurring” into a prescribed duration or form.
The photographic surface renders consecutive occurrences via a transposition of transparency which produces a superimposure as a direct unequivocal evidence of something having existed before something else.
This marking out, in scripting, overlaying of occurrences as factual specific/spatial realities become relational to themselves through the negative/positive aspect of their physicality.
What the photographic surface lacks is a definitive time-line a frame of reference in proximity to the information which has become abstractively distant.
The relations of a material or form that can register consecutive occurrences and still register the totality of an event as a surface, a transparency of episodes.
1 Russell Ferguson, Politics of Rehearsal, (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2008)
2 Interview with Russell Ferguson.
DID SOMEONE SAY PARTICIPATE? AN ATLAS OF SPATIAL PRACTICE. Edited by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar A few notes relating to thoughts and cr…
Source: Performative Documentation : Time as both a structure and an event
SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR
A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN
VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio
We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM
THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :
The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.
THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.
CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES
THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL
PAINTING, Robert Mangold.
TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY
BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO
ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS
GESALT,
GRISAILLE,
LEITMOTIF,
MATRIX,
FORMAL PATTERN,
SURFACE
John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, (London: Routledge, 1998)
The Virtual Embodied, “ explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge and space to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence,” these parameters are being investigated and researched in my creative practice.
Embodied knowledge and virtual space.
Physical, Psychological and Virtual Realities, Max Velmans.
List of “typical beliefs about physical, psychological and virtual realities”. PHYSICAL REALITY
Extended in space-in the world
Exists independently of the observer
Has tangible properties, e.g. Mass and solidity
Descartes s proposed our classical view of the mind/body split into res extensa ( material that extends in space) and res cogitans (thinking material). We commonly associate the physical world as having both extension and location in space.
PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY
Non-extended in space-in the mind
Existence depends on the observer
Is relatively intangible and insubstantial
Psychological realities do not have spatial dimensions, and their location is only metaphorically “ in the mind”. It is crucial to note that psychological realities are only real for a given observer. Velmans notes” these intuitions are confirmed by the fact that physical realities have tangible, substantial properties such as mass, solidity and weight. Whilst psychological properties are, by comparison, intangible and insubstantial”.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Appears to have extension in space, but has no actual extension Appears to be in the world, but is actually in the mind
Existence depends on the interaction of the observer with VR equipment
Can appear to have tangible properties ( with suitable equipment) but does not have such properties.
Virtual realities via appropriate headsets which give “feedback” from bodily movements and visual displays, conspire to give the appearance of a virtual world extended into our physical space, but they have no actual 3D physical extension. Interestingly such worlds are physical in the fact that they rely on the physical existence and placement of equipment, virtual realities seek to create apparent changes in “self location” which do not correspond with actual changes in location. New developments can now give a physical realm into the virtual by the use of body interfaces that can restrict the movement of the body to correspond to the visual perception of a virtual identity.
Fragment from material resonances project, spatial practice research, CSA.
THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION
Perception is in the “condition” of an interruption.
Rehearsal is the creative part of any performance.
Humanities : Spatial Relations
Interested in the speculative nature of work-sites that contain a narrative intervention via a device that registers and records the documentary and its rehearsal.
Work as revealed into a final sequence of superimposures on a surface created from the collective transparency of the text.
Thresholds that reveal the interspace between the Human and its condition/environment.
Photographic surface of events, a visual entropy resolved as a history of consolidated exactitudes/enactments.
The photographic surface shows that which no longer exists, it concretizes contingences on offer into an image of irreversibility.
Double Occupancy , Dwelling with the critique and its realization of an uncovering event, criticism collides with and into the work. Deleuze, Baroque house (65).
Presenting both a virtual walk through “text” ,using the transparency of “text” both as a literal transparency and its phenomenal “physicality” as applied to surface and structures within the site. Using the body of the visitor to enable
enactments/sensitivities to be derived from the site encounter. Enactments triggered by the singularity of an individuals engagement with walking amongst the working site. The final experience/superimpose remains uniquely a product of the visitor. This site driven explorative experience undertaken by both a passitivity and a curiosity on the part of “the guest” creates a self /space/time/ place relation, a localised intimacy that promotes an encapsulated sense of enchantment/wisdom.
The entirety of the “text” is stored latent in the interlocutor as they investigate the physicality of material relationships and spatial significations. In this respect the interlocutor defines his/her “traits” through a recognition and curiosity with their own body as it weaves a narrative of navigation through the experience of “site”. This theorizing by the body of its encounters, material and spatial, alone or within the proximities of others interests me as a “trace” of the encountering space through the human agent. This working notion and its site begin to posit the idea of an
“interspace” between the human and its environment. This theoretical and abstracted site could be utilized to research interventions and their effects, to attempt to register the spatial relations/traits of contemporary society. How might this material and its spatial census (human/ site temporalities) be gathered, registered and finally presented.
10 days, Observational material from site, They sense this articulating moment, their consolation becomes recursively and inexplicably consolidated with others unfamiliar undistinguishable, they are rendered into the resultant homogeneity of a surface relation bonded by specifics of space and time.
10 Days, Observational/Reflection, Journal notes Their erasure by the transits of change and chance of others over-writing themselves to reveal the transparency of temporalities as registered by the photographic duration of capture.
What remains is an exactitude of “what occurred” in a form/manner unknowable to those present, by dwelling in this visual interface of the photographic surface, things become inexplicably and irreversibly compounded with a time stretched and stilled.
Photography has the unusual attributes to be able to act as a particle accelerator on the human subject, it can present material assessed from numerous durational encounters with time. It can render a seduction and conversely an invisibility.
Spatial Practice is in effect a laboratory (of the self and worlds) from which I define and register and relate material tested under those conditions. This makes me part of the process and part of the results, part also of the problem of the investigation.
Reflections on the use of “the Negative” expedient use of material creates this inherent property, interesting analogy with human process of vision, in as much as the after-image rendered by the eye is always in the negative. This final image of what was is in effect being erased by the negative/negated. The perspective of the negative reveals more informative relations about the spatial/displacement of the environment in which the “objectivity” is being both immersed and conversely displaced. Like the displacement of a solid form by a liquid of the same displacement, the negative reveals the object displacing/relating in spatial terms. The negative gives proof to our mutual dependency and our forgetting of air as both surface and support.
In Drawing and Mapping it is tensions between the negative and the positive objectivity of things that helps to define a limit, a definition of form that is both simultaneously relational and indexical. The “Trace” also maintains these properties but interestingly it contains a transparency, a dimensionality that makes it both reflective and confrontational, it remains registered to the present but unable to escape its signification of the past.
Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts. Giuliana Bruno.
Series of “essays” on the relations between Architecture and The Arts. Bruno notes the critical role in which architecture constitutes and supports a “public intimacy” initiated through both historical references and Contemporary Art. This spatiality of a public constructed space that grants the reception of an intimacy is seen by Bruno as being a “new moving space- a screen of vital cultural memory”. She proposes a view that Architecture is mobilized as a screen/vessel in which to define a frame of memory. Architecture in this sense becomes not just “a matter of space but an art of time.” Interestingly it is in the work of Rebecca Horn that she notes the combination of both the scientific and the artistic. This combination has a resonance with the architectural model and intended purpose of the anatomical theatre. Rebecca Hom and a growing number of contemporary practitioners are actively engaged in creating “works” which use architectonics and situation to create personal and profound experiences, intimacies evolved from public spaces. This new conceptualization of “body space” and its relationship to the production of space is ultimately being absorbed back into Architectural practice, the work of Nigel Coates “Guide to Ecstacity” and Rem Koolhaas use of materials and interventions that challenge our sensory and cultural aesthetics about architecture illustrate issues around the spatialisation of the body and its intimate consumption in the public realm of the senses.
To Live is to pass from one space to another. Georges Perec.
Bruno Taut, The New Dwelling, Women as Creator, (Leipzig : Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1924).
Taut asserts that it is a woman’s way of inhabiting space that creates and modifies architecture, see also Mark Wigley, White walls, Designer dresses: The fashioning of Modern Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT press , 1995)
I would say that my fiction is set in the visionary present. J G Ballard.
Underlining the Hostility of the external world, The Autopsy Room/Theatre.
Victims surrender all that is left of their unique identities, what is left after the basic components are separated, nothing much to claim not even a faint presence of existence. We feel pity and the oblivion patiently waiting for us. J G Ballard on CSI
Frozen frames of a perverse geometry, flickering into a narrative of their own volition. The work is accompanied by a critical voyeurism that has the ability to reveal a prognosis.
Ballard, Every paragraph of this “fiction is frightening obscure and an obtuse puzzle. Surreal geometries, with a pervasive atmosphere of doom and imminent cataclysm that “exposes” the sordidly within us all.
Ballard, Obsessions- Dystopias/Sexuality/Technology and their discontinuities’ Ballard, Abstractions-Science/Psychiatry/Mathematics.
Questions the “concrete delinearations of morality, ethics and sanity”.
Notion that Aesthetics/Landscapes can harbour relations, The Gaze, male/female.
THE RESEARCH POSTER, a document outlining a field of inquiry, placing ones pitch into the public domain.
Life is Data
Progress is Optional
Understanding is a product of good marketing.
Attempting to keep the moment from being realized. Robert Rauschenberg
On Photography, Rauschenberg.
My photography is supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. Rauschenberg uses his camera as a social shied, he has “a need to be where it will always never be the same again.” He comments that “photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts”.His concern is to move at a speed within which to act in the “archaeology” of what light or its darkness touches.
The object itself is dictating your possibilities.
Validity, cannot exist without standards. How long are standards fresh? Every minute everything is different everywhere. Where is the basis for criticism. Criticism collides into the work ,it attempts to arrest it, it deliberately attempts to affect a stop.
Oren Lieberman, The “Plastic Wallet thing/Spatial Practice interview Canterbury” They promote attention, They are seductive in their surface, they “house” temporalities into a permanent/recognisable system or archive. They are deterministic in the sense of belonging to an instantly recognisable protective and presentational system of storing information. The indexical “holes” themselves promote the notion of a terminology on the material within them, sort of ironic when they contain thoughts and issues about methodologies. Perhaps these useful wallets have just become another material victim of contemporary homogeneities. Corrupt their inherent homogeneity by removal or adaptation of their indexical register (the punched holes) thereby making them unique or of a non purpose, or for a purpose not yet disclosed/realised.
The marked agency and its absence of the artist leaves the site live and open. Oxford MOMA 2006 Jannis Kounallis left his coat hanging by a window adjacent and in the same room as his installation.
RUSSELL MORETON. MA SPATIAL PRACTICES.
Artist Statement used to accompany promotional powerpoint display at UCA Canterbury, 2009.
Spatial Practice provides an interesting set of methodologies in which to explore our own “relationality”1. This is particularly relevant in respect to my understanding and subsequent proposal for the role of the interlocutor within my work. Becoming increasingly interested in the concept of “ open text ”2 to explore the nature of space and its relational properties that create place, or rather a self placed. At present using Photography (large pinhole chambers) embedded in working environments to further explore properties of latency, transparency and the peripheral dwelling of spatial material.
The Practice.
Currently exploring the dynamics and dwellings of spatial relations. The use of a large oil drum as a “pin hole camera” creates a tool that records/witnesses a specific duration (dwelling) in place. This duration of approximately 45 minutes renders visual data that underpins our temporality as we constantly re-form spatial relations with each other and that of the architectural environment. The internal architectonics of the chamber gives a sense of both the proximity of peripheral space and the distance/dislocation of a filmic surface concretized by time. These imaged surfaces render a sense of place, an aura and a psychosis/pathology around images and their representation.
1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality ( London: Sage Publishing, 2005)
2 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between ( London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)
METHODOLOGIES/PROJECT PROPOSAL
TIME
RELATIONALITY
CONTINGENT
SURFACE
CONSOLATIONS
The Trace becoming a material witness to an event/situation
Use of “information” gathered from site being re-invested with another sense of time and ambient light.
Transparent/Translucent materials “surfaced” by contemporary digital technologies, corporate media presentational light boxes, large format 24 square metres.
Use of “interventions” liquids between visual and haptic membranes, utilization of direct drawing within and amongst the “media technologies”.
Direct more of “working practice” into larger scale painting investigations with drawing and photography as inclusions. Suggest notion of temporary space situated in fine art.
Explore relationships of “objects” as the custodian of place. Analysis of the Reception and relations generated by this “first objectivity”.
Relation of “what was ”to what is left being a “spatial involvement” placed back into the continuum of ongoing spatial relations.
Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).
Drawing a relationality through others in site.
Drawn inscriptions that leave traces for others to respond
Documents of a theoretical investigation over the surface from both beneath (the place) and from above (the event).
A performative membrane/drawing/diagram/script that gains its authenticity/performativity from being there and allowing what might occur to be witnessed.
Drawing as a “open text” that allows a perspectival immersion/situatedness, because it is still active, un-resolved needing to be taken further under the authorship of viewer.
These fragments of precise interventions/enactments engender a dynamic of relational possibilities.
SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio We have art so that we …
Source: Humanities : Spatial Relations/The Laboratory of Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture
Cyanotype Project/Poetry Reading : Winchester College
Shroud
Richard Stillman
Yard and Metre Event, Winchester
As the marks resonated, did they sound true?
Could we tolerate margins of error or latitude?
Is there strength in that built by blue ink?
It is hard to see without certainty.
Why have they flown, gathered, shrouded?
Is the date significant? A memorial?
Or is it white noise reverberating,
striking parallels, refusing focus, insisting?
The shape of the cross is still distinct
but opening out, refusing definition,
never quite caught as an intention,
pinned on dimensions it wants to refuse.
Cyanotype from a site drawing, Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral 2011.
When objects or atmospheres collide energy is transferred, a new force may be created. And, as forensic scientists can attest, when objects touch they exchange traces, each leaves something of itself with the other.
This is why artists enjoy collaborating. Working with another artist can give a jolt of inspiration, a spark of creative thinking, a surge of new skill, the stimulus for a new work. And the experience will leave its mark in some way on each individual’s practice.
The specific ‘collision’ may also result in a work which has its own integrity, which does not belong’ to either party and where their particular contributions merge indistinguishably – in effect fusion takes place.
This is the thinking behind 10 days | Creative Collisions and for The Yard artists and Hyde Writers it was the ideal excuse to come together, to let the shockwaves flow and see what new possibilities emerged. As with all the best creative practice, in science or in art, this has been an experiment, it involved risk, trust and open minds. Whether or not the outcomes are fully resolved they will be filled with potential – and with potency.
Stephen Boyce
The Hyde Writers
The writers revelled in a close engagement with artists and their work. Rather than respond to emailed images, the writers could immerse themselves in the artist’s world. Writers could examine the artist’s studio space, watch the artist working and feel with their own hands the materials in use. They could smell the turpentine, feel clay under their nails and trail their fingers over the rippling textures of paintings. Some writers took artists’ work home, so that they could live with the work. Naturally some artists provided a response to the writer’s work and the non-verbal feedback was unusual and exciting.
Writers faced a dilemma over which aspect of an artist to focus on. Some writers found inspiration in the personality of an artist and others were entranced by a part of the artist’s process. The art itself, of course provided a rich source of creativity. Writers found that the artists’ studios and individual objects within them were inspiring. A fractured shell of a first world war helmet might suggest several stories. Writers could see familiar techniques, such as collage being used by the artists, but they could also understand the strange dictatorship imposed by physical materials. The materials are often tricky things that impose their own rules and can bring uncontrollability into a process.
It was an experience that changed the writers. For ever afterwards a small part of us will be noticing the world from a different viewpoint, such as that of a painter or a sculptor.
Hugh Greasley
The Hyde Writers are a group of poets, novelists, script and short story writers who meet every first and third Monday in the Hyde Tavern, Winchester.
Founded in 2007, the group aims to produce high quality, challenging writing across a diverse range of genres.
The group acts as a workshop to facilitate the development of an individual writer’s works through rigorous yet supportive critical comment
Our members include prize winning novelists and short story writers, published poets and broadcasters, as well as young writers developing their craft.
The Yard Artists
When the studio management group discussed how to represent The Yard in 10 days Creative Collisions, we could not have possibly envisaged the quality and ambition of the project. Several months later, following a successful proposal, speed dating event and BBQ, two thriving creative communities in Winchester have collaborated, partnering artist with writer, and produced twenty six ‘creative collisions’ of new and innovative work. These projects have been prepared for an evening of projection, performance and poetry at Winchester College.
As a collective, Yard and Metre fuses traditional with contemporary, the analytical with the intuitive, the tangible with the abstract, in a collision of observation and enquiry. The breadth of subject and concept, as well as the standard of work produced, is testament to the dedication and enthusiasm of those participating in the project.
Thanks to Beatrix Kovacs, this beautifully designed publication documents the collaboration between The Yard artists and Hyde Writers and pays tribute to the significance of the event.
Jane Price
The Yard is a working studio environment in Wharf Hill, Winchester, established in 2007 by a group of local artists with the assistance of Winchester City Council. It provides affordable studio space within a vibrant, supportive community for up to twenty five artists and aims to promote contemporary fine art in the Winchester district
Cyanotype from a site drawing, Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral 2011.
Cyanotype Project/Poetry Reading : Winchester College Shroud Richard Stillman Yard and Metre Event, Winchester As the marks resonated, did …
Source: Intermedia : Articulating Sensory Thought. Yard and Metre Event
Winchester – Hyde Abbey Laundry
The site of approximately 1,500 sq. metres comprises redundant industrial buildings and a yard at the edge of the city centre and close to the Winchester School of Art. The site is considered to be important in townscape terms and being vacant is an underused resource. The Laundry ceased trading in 2007 and has been empty since. It is a short walk from the city centre, near car parks, leisure centre, Winchester School of Art, the Colour Factory artists’ co-operative, but in an otherwise residential neighbourhood. The site consists of a large industrial space with high ceilings, a series of different sized workshops around this main zone, and on its upper floors, office accommodation, staff canteen and a workshop. The private owner and his developer wish to demolish the old buildings and develop the site for housing; however, WCC planning officers wish to see the site or part of the site, retained as offering employment within the city.
Urban Fallow could encourage the owner to consider live-work units and studios for artists to be constructed on the site and demonstrate that there is demand for this type of activity. The Council’s Estates, Arts Development and Economic Development staff have for some years, been looking for potential sites and business models to establish affordable studios in Winchester. While demand is known, the value of assisting in the establishment of such a scheme is unproven. Urban Fallow has the potential to provide further evidence and advocacy for a permanent studio facility on this site. Winchester City Council would want to work with Winchester School of Art (arts faculty of Southampton University) and the University of Winchester, and the Hampshire Economic Partnership as partners in this scheme.
The building in its present state, although unsuitable for most purposes, is viewed by creative practitioners from a range of practice, as having great potential as studio space (in great demand in Winchester where suitable premises are hard to find – and afford). In the current market conditions, the site is likely to remain ‘fallow’ for some time to come until these issues are resolved, and the market conditions improve.
Urban Fallow will bring into sharp focus areas of vacant urban land resulting from the slowdown in construction and the halting of some major redevelopment and housing projects. It is important that these spaces, many of which are significant in both scale and location are not allowed to deteriorate and damage the public perception of a place. The project will reanimate these areas of land by offering them for use by artists, architects, performers and other professionals with an interest in engaging with the public to develop temporary events and interventions. As well as transforming the spaces and reducing urban blight, this project could also have the effect of reinvigorating interest and potential investment in the spaces, encouraging developers and local authorities to look at them again with renewed creativity and optimism.
Urban Fallow/Solentcentre for architecture and design aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.
CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES
between the concrete and the spatial
THE WORKING PRACTICE IS FUNDAMENTALLY SUPPORTED BY ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS
CAPTURED BY APPARATUSES
Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.
Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.
Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.
NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge.
My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.
Overabundance of events.
Spatial overabundance.
The individualization of references.
A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.
My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.
Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1
Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. My practice has now entered into a process that proposes a site for research driven by condition of acculturation. This site of inquiry will attempt to set up an anthropological place of localised relations amidst the condition of Supermodemity.
This proposed temporal demarcation, a marking out of a territory which will become adaptive, reflexive and spatial. Sets out to engender the inquiry of the ethnologist, to attempt of rather to reflect on how the place is organised. This site marks a private acculturation of material sourced from the world, from a hermetic and esoteric realm of private geographies, now processed and made available, accessible to the social.
The observer in the role of the ethnologist with others is invited to formulate their own invention of place through their own curiosity of encounter. This demarcation of space into the social, anticipates an intervention which creates a common adventure for a group in movement.
An interesting comment about gendered space in classical literature examines the relationship between what might theoretically and spatially link the interior with its exterior boundary is to found Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs written by Jean-Pierre Vemant. In this account Vemant describes the spatial and social arrangements of the Hestia/Hermes couple. Marc Auge acknowledges this relation as
“Hestia symbolizes the circular hearth placed in the centre of the house, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself (and thus in a sense of its relations with itself);
while Hermes, god of the threshold and the door, but also of crossroads and town gates, represents movement and relations with others.”2
Auge makes the critical point that in anthropology studied by both classic literature and history it is identity and relations that form spatial arrangements which are also inscribed in time. It is this time that materially renders the temporal dimension of these spaces and with it our reading of anthropology.
My earlier usage of long durational photographic devices (large pinhole cameras) was an attempt to realise the identity and relation of a place (its spatial activity and fixity) is totally contingent to its method of register and the particularities of fixed and temporal details. In fact these surfaces rendered from these devices are evidences of historical spaces of hidden social itineraries.
1 Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.
2 Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page58.
Fragment, research/Mechanisms of Seeing/The Architecture of Image
Architectural Apparatuses of Affect : Daniel Libeskind/Small Voids/Cameras
light; the darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement.
Daniel Libeskind’s building will, when finished, offer a path for the visitor, the path of history that crosses the void of commemoration. This void is the body of an absence—that of the Berlin Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The void makes us meet this absence, but we meet it by passing through it. When an absence, in the form of a void, meets the surface of daily reality, memory marks that surface. The Holocaust has created such a void, which, in projects such as the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, is brought to the surface and given a place and a house. The void intersects the surface of time and creates a place of passage, of commemoration, of ritual in our daily life. The void is linear sign: lest we forget. But the incisions in the walls of the main exhibition spaces, spaces which house the historical material about the city of Berlin, create voids through which light is let in. These calligraphic empty spaces create a near biblical writing on the wall.
Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.
Russell Moreton, 10 Days in the Laundry
MOLECULAR SIEVE, is a performative analysis of “this place” utilising the simple properties of the pinhole camera. This appropriated apparatus makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it is deposited on the photographic surface. The extended durations required to register “place” impart a sense of dwelling as recorded by the apparatuses passive gaze. These surfaces record and register a relation constructed by the architecture of the chamber and what is beyond it. Movements when visible appear as simple abbreviated enactments caught like inclusions within this consolidated and timely consolation of place.
Time as it accumulates on a photographic surface.
This performative investigation utilizes a large pinhole chamber which is given mobility via a sack-barrow. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into spaces a “spatial practitioner” in its own right. My aim is to utilize this device as a means of registering “worksites” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-performative state. The mobility of this research could be used to illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall spaces or even a
“sandwich board” would render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities or conversely off-site arrangements would be organised.
Artist Statement 2009/10 Days
SITE is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.1
This “undoing of place” might instigate a threshold and a situation/room from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Practitioner with earlier experience in ceramics and glass, recently completed visual arts course at Winchester, now at Canterbury studying spatial practices. Interested in drawing, photography and interventions that can explore our sense and experience of place. My work seems to harbour a need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences. The use of materials from the locality (field chalk) imply a personal geography drawn from the direct relationship to an inherited Earth. There is the suggestion that the absence recorded by the trace is an inclusion, a legacy set into a field of materiality, but it might also suggest a metaphysical field of thought. This act of drawing becomes its own experimental field of exploration, a sort of “in between reality”( Merleau-Ponty) an enmeshed experience. Perhaps all that remains is some sense of a material memory encountering the realm of the insubstantial.
Interested in collaborative projects and ventures that might facilitate issues of “site” as being the very undoing of place. Site for me is part of the rehearsal for the construction of place, site holds relations and intimacies/geographies that will be over-written by methodologies destined to be terminated to create place.
Winchester – Hyde Abbey Laundry The site of approximately 1,500 sq. metres comprises redundant industrial buildings and a yard at the edge o…
Corpus : Photographic drawings from human outlines
Borderlines : Cley 19, speculative submission for exhibition
ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS.
CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES, between the concrete and the spatial.
Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies.
Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.
Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.
Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.
NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge. My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.
Overabundance of events.
Spatial overabundance.
The individualization of references. A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.
My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.
Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1
Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation.
1 Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.
Submission Guidelines
All proposals must be for new work that addresses the brief, artists are encouraged to experiment, be playful and push the boundaries of their practice.
BORDERLINES
Artists translate cultural moments and offer responses to their environment, whether geographical, political or spiritual. Inviting artist’s to respond to the theme Borderlines as it requires an inquisitive approach to the site that surrounds them and to the climate in which we live.
Geographical Environmental Landscape
Terrain
Migration (Wildlife/Humans) Transmigration
Socio Political Departure
Borderlands
Borderlines
Borders
Lines
Spiritual Embodied Walking
Wandering
Wanderlust
Movement
Borderlines, simultaneously both boundary and threshold.
Visible, Existential, Imaginative, Porous, Contingent, Reflexive, Nowness, Un-Knowing, Awkwardness, Liminality, Territory, Subjectivity,
Concrete Collage : Raku fragment, clay form/photograph, drawing, handwriting and painted surfaces.
Ancient Lights : Abstract Painting and Constructional Drawing for Architectural Glass.
Anthropological Landscape : Drawing from archaeological dig, liquid light, field chalk, charcoal.
Cley, St Margaret’s South Entrance : Collage, Sketchbook, working ideas for small glass panels.
Cell, Court, Domain, Field : Layered paper, paint, and absent objects.
Architectural Concerns : Collage ,drawing, installation, blue prints, historical building plans. Scriptorium : Architectural model for a reading space within a pastoral landscape or community.
Working Notes/Extracts and Fragments from site visit. St Margaret’s Church
Silence and stillness, social/historical shelter from/within the landscape
A place acting through our sensate/spiritual world, a space crafted by the specificity of its making/usage.
An interior sensing space of a protected and defended/fortified silence, affirming beliefs and community.
Subtle and muted, stillness, embodiment from the patina of use. Bleached woodwork, lightness, dryness and the humidity of absences.
Empty and eroded stone mullion windows/ancient lights, architecture framing its un-making worn, broken and repaired flooring surfaces, ceramic and stone.
What does Borderlines mean to you? Boundary and Threshold
Visible, existential, imaginative, porous, contingent, reflexive, nowness, un-knowing, awkwardness, liminal, territory,
Material Process/Inquiry, Praxis, Content, Context
Form, Existential Qualities/Values AGENCY
Mindfullness of the brief to discover things through the inquiry and engagement with the site.
Develop Inquiry
Documentation, Artist Book, and other media mixed media painting
Small series of glass panels ceramic tiles/facades
Photographic material/photograms, drawings/hangings on Chinese paper
Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands
Film Collages, hybrid processes and temporal states Liminality: Literature/Philosophy/Visual Art
Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819) Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea
Ballard : Vermilion Sands : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)
The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.
Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.
Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus’s magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.
‘Camus represents a particularly modem type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition’
Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times
Walking into Emergent Landscapes
Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,
Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane
“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:
Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”
“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”
Corpus : Photographic drawings from human outlines Borderlines : Cley 19, speculative submission for exhibition ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROU…
Source: Corpus/Borderlands : A Society in Excess, Marc Auge.
Spatial Practice could be a program and a site for a critical approach to social engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Praxis could be the energy produced between combining research and creative embodiment as speculative strategies/assemblages.
‘Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries’
The Social Condenser in Operation.
Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space; a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.
Robin Evans,
Figures, Doors and Passages
Photographic Collage with text fragments and disparate images
In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts ma…
Source: Speculative Reading/Making : Life outside the circle of architecture
Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields
Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence.
What are we learning about in the concrete particularity of this space?
Leon van Schaik : Spatial Intelligence
‘Architecture is the product of our spatial intelligence, of its workings in establishing the mental spaces of every individual, and of the spatial values shared by groups.’
The Retreat, Upper Lawn Pavilion. 1959
This country retreat presents itself as a glass box but is grounded by its relationship to the pre-existing masonry of a walled garden.
Leon van Schaik comments that the little glass house retreat built by Peter and Alison Smithson around a walled garden evokes for him memories(mental spaces) of being a schoolboy working in a conservatory in a walled garden at Cliveden, such that the notion of a retreat is this ideal of being built into the walls of an existing walled garden.
You rise up into its glazed upper storey with views over the rolling hills beyond and perch atop the wall on the edge of a threshold space carved out of the woods, or remove yourself from view sink down to the ground and sit with your back to the wall.
Kenneth Frampton subscribes to a general theory of architecture independent of any local articulation beyond adaptations to meet the needs of local climatic conditions.
Dalibor Vesely, an architectural theorist who spent his teaching life demonstrating that in the modern era the unity of time, place and culture that is essential to architectural reality has been fractured. Leon van Schaik comments as a consequence in architecture today our spatial knowledge is either buried deep within our unconscious, or it is surfaced in a highly simplified (adolescent) form.
Architecture as ‘a purveyor of esoteric spatial luxuries to domestic elites’ (Schaik, 2008:84)
It follows that this fractured reality is deeply problematical to architecture, to the increasing number of architectural practices that have no ready connection to the daily expectations of citizens, resulting in a brutal instrumental policing of space (and our mental spaces) via the architecture that underpins the politics of our corporate or governmental interests.
Mediators for spatial experiences.
Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry
The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop my practice. The Abbey, its buildings, and its grounds have provided a valuable source of the material evidence for thinking about hapticity and time in a pastoral setting.
The Scriptorium presents the “performativity of research” through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects, together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex interior design, a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research that have been developed through engaging with the site.
The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive experiences.
Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.
Colour Texture Surface Enclosures Voids
Sample Materials: Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details.
Erasure in drawing and architectural planning (space voids) as a methodology to superimpose multiplicities.
Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma.
Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.
Learning Spaces as a performative spatial practice through a process of tuning and minimizing. Noh stage in the forest, Kego Kuma.
PLANNING DOCUMENT use GRAPHIC DESIGN, theories and applications to visualize, design and map out the nature/interior spaces and experiences of this proposal.
Natural Connections: Retreat and Awareness through Architecture (Architectural Experience).
Experiencing The Phenomenology of Place at Waverley Abbey
INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.
Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.
APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS
THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD
Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory (part built/part still under development) (monuments as instruments, Japor). The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.
MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.
The Body in Space: merging/mediating/climbing over architecture and its territory in the landscape.
Keywords,
Place Studies : Spatiality : Phenomenology of Place : Spatial Intelligence :
Relational Aesthetics:
Retreat, Sensing Spaces, Experiential, Pastoral, Architectural Fabric, Ruined Buildings, Historical Community/Order, Neo Romantic, Camera Obscura, Mortality, Consumption, Palimpsest, Remote Sensing, Architectural Interventions, Material, Massing, Body, Objects and Things, Craft, The Physical Body (Historical/Postmodern), Contemporary Art Practices, Tim Ingold
‘Making’ and the inter relationships of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.
Assets of Site
Listed Historical Site, Tranquil (of road site in parkland), Otherness (ruination and romance), Water, Archaeology (building), anthropology (significant settlement Cistercian Abbey)
CREATING FORMS AND MESSAGES
The Way Things Are Connected (or the stickiness of dependence between things and humans)
Kengo Kuma. Anti-Object
Not Networks, but rather Entanglements or Meshworks/Mesh (implying infinite connections and infinitesimal differences) or Mess (resists neat compartmentalization and order).
Mark Dion. Archaeology
The Work, its Shelter, the Collection and its Process and Furniture (Agency)
The Wunderkammer as a structural feature (De Waal, V&A )
The Mapping/Charting Table (conduit, meeting/passing place)
Tim Ingold. Making
Ian Hodder. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things.
Peter Greenaway. The Physical Self.
The Self in a Spatial/Social/Corporeal Situation The Tactility/Closeness of Learning (Craft)
DESIGN CREATIVELY/COLLABORATIVELY AND STRATEGICALLY THINKING IN THE RUINS
THINKING IN THE FICTION OF RUINS
THE ABBEY AS A REMNANT OF ITS WORLD, IN WHICH WE HAVE COME TO LATE,
TO A WORLD THAT HAS SEEN TOO MUCH.
POLITICS OF PLACE, English Heritage/Listed Building, has been used as a filming locating in contemporary cinema ranging in genres from the historical to the dystopian. Recently use of the site as a film location allowed the building of a temporary tower structure situated in close proximity to the existing ruinous fabric of the site.
POETICS OF SPACE/Bachelard AETHETICS OF DECAY/Trigg
THE WAR OF DREAMS/Marc Auge
The Theatre of Operations.
Ruins, as a notion and a phenomena are slowly disappearing from our western cities, out of a lack of time (faute de temps) Marc Auge further comments that we are condemned to produce waste, not remnants of the past.
LOCATION, Streetfinder O/S. GPS Locality and access options/experiences.
World placing with solar and astronomical positioning. Scale and proximity
HISTORY, site, occupations, ruination, dereliction, reclamation into a garden feature. SITE SPECIFIC to GLOBAL CONCERNS
LOCALITIES and HISTORIES
HUMAN EXPERIENCE, Qualitative and Quantitative
DWELLING, LEARNING, RUINS, AND MEMORY> WHAT REMAINS?
MAPPING/REMOTE SENSING using the palimpsest of this landscape/of its human occupation, of its demise to re-instate and re-imagine the cultural and anthropological shifts that have affected humanity.
RE-INSTATING a gathering with intellectual concerns in the humanities.
SPEAKERS/REASEARCH POSTERS/EXHIBITIONS and ART WORKS/SCREENINGS.
Oren Lieberman, Immediate Architectural Interventions/Intraventions.
Mark Dion, Thames Dig, tents, taxonomies, teeth and texts.
Kate Whiteford, Land Drawings, installations and excavations
Colin Renfrew , Remote Sensing, aerial photography of sites (WW2) being used to re image specific archaeological notions of place.
Tim Ingold, MAKING, on the entanglements of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.
METHODOLOGIES
Temporary structures, blue screens, stage flats, projection, surfaces and skins, envelopes and membranes, optics and materials, programmes and debate, exhibition and research, global networking and virtual presentations, workshops around the phenomenology of place and its interrelationships with critical spatial practice. Presentations and Symposium, Curriculum and Practices, Site Specific Work and Performance.
Public Intimacy in Social Spaces. Architecture and The Contemporary Arts.
Learning through Making, (The Parallel of Life and Art) Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.
Visitor’s Centre, with interpretive exhibition (Stonehenge/Denton Corker Marshall) or an immersive intervention (Winchester Cathedral,Anima-Animus/Elferova and Wilson). A place where the interior space evokes a sense of place/a becoming (Existential, Historical, Social, Cultural) see ‘The Physical Self exhibition curated by Peter Greenaway. The Fate of Place/Human Sociology.
A contemplative space or spiritual/secular retreat featuring a series of interventions (Follies/Pavilions/Huts/Heidegger/Tschumi) that focuses the gaze on a particular view or detail, framing a distant reference (landmark or natural phenomenon, research into Lutyen’s ‘Thunder House’ for Gertrude Jekyll).
Museum of Wisdom. Kengo Kuma.
Noh Stage In The Forest. Kengo Kuma.
Hortus Conclusus. Peter Zumthor.
The Solar Pavilion. Alison and Peter Smithson.
The Secular Retreat, Living Architecture. Peter Zumthor.
Heidegger’s Hut, Bachelard’s Poetics, Ingold’s making.
Spatial Apparatuses, Buildings and Social Devices/Agendas
Events as Interventions producing Intraventions from Sociology, Architecture and the Humanities/Contemporary Arts.
USING the existing site to host concerns and education through a light footprint of temporary structures and intermediary arts based events.
THEMATIC SPACES in literature and the arts locate themselves within the ruins; become new creative points of departure, new narratives that add to the spatiality of the events experience.
CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICES (Architecture/Fine Art and Performance) as a methodology for engaging with the transformative processes now emerging is of vital scholarly concern for design practices and professionals.
Inclusions of observation and practice.
Experiential experiences from a place by the river, under the canopy of dappled sunlight; a secluded proximity of the monks dormitory through the pleasing decay that is aging beautifully.
Variegated and mutable veiling of transparencies through sunlight and a gentle breeze.
Shadow (voids) and Forms (layered movements) Permeable membrane (time passes through here)
The River (Jackie Leven/Kenneth Patchen, The Skaters) a corporeal presence on loss, memory/absence, subjectivity and flow.
Kengo Kuma. Complete Works, Kenneth Frampton.
‘Our aim is to create architecture that confronts and fuses with the earth’
‘Architecture should not be cut off from the ground like a building designed and transported to the site’
Kema’s ‘anti-objective’ architecture is anti-perspectival in that it is categorically anti thetical to the subject/object split of the occidental tradition.
‘The asymmetrical projection of the Water/Glass volume, derived from the diagonal platform of the Noh stage, makes it explicit that there is no single ideal point from which this waterborne scene may be experienced.’ (Frampton, 2012:12)
Katsura Aesthetic.
Non Corporeal Architecture ( 2001 A Space Odyssey, the final room with its dematerialised phantom character of absence and voyeurism)
Japanesse Vernacular, Void/Ma space, Translucency, Sequence of Spaces,
Siddig El’Nigoumi’s pots hold an interior space that cannot itself be transposed only broken ; they are in effect testimonial silences to his humility and his agency working with clay. In my mental space on these inner spaces of Nigoumi’s ceramics I can reach a correspondence, a pitch with its distinctive mutual timbre that is still active. The existential trait left in the innerness of these vessels is irreducible to my own subjectivity.
Site drawings, archaeology of found objects, anthropological observations, time based media, architectural plans.
Interior Spaces/Making and the adaptation of existing.
Photographic drawings, collage, montage, interventions through designed walls/pathways/interactions.
“Hut” Sensing Spaces/Building.
Materials, aesthetics, volumes, dwelling, social, light and dark, place.
Localities of experience and research.
Negative Capability Exhibition (art works in response to archaeological sites),Winchester University.
Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence. What…
Source: Localities of experience and research : Making Entangled
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