Drawing Projects/Architecture is a verb : Blueprints for thinking and making.

 Outpost 111023

What we have to remember is that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our means of questioning it.

Werner Heisenberg.

Fields of Care.

The metaphor of the container and the contained that has guided Western thought with its vocabulary of inert matter, fragmentation, and frozen and petrified movement has crippled the architectural imagination for over two millennia.

Architecture Is A Verb, Sarah Robinson. 2021

Drawing Projects.

An exploration of the language of drawing.

Mike Maslen, Jack Southern. 2011

The Eye That Feels.

We must learn to think with our feelings and feel with our thoughts.

Towards A Feeling Response.

Human beings are lumps of perceptions in a state of flux, and ‘being’ is a constantly changing state of infinite variety. Drawings are made by human beings and like their makers, they can be complex, somewhat vulnerable, unresolved, and imperfect. Equally, they can be confident, measured, controlled, well understood and decisive.

A drawing is a lexis of marks that represent and describe what our eyes see, and to some extent what our minds/bodies know and feel. It is made by the co-ordination of the eye/brain/hand/medium, and arranged in an organised and cohesive way to form a visual description/illusion. It is a trail of contained energy, incorporating the history of its own making, and recorded through a passage of time. It is an approximate attempt at depicting a perceived truth, and will have been made in either a confident, cautious, well seen, well understood, generalised, decisive, indecisive, ‘right’, or ‘wrong’way.  

We live in an age when computer generated reprographic processes provide us with a world of ‘technological perfection’ and ‘high definition’.Three-dimensional imagery offers limited, but enhanced and often ‘super-real’,virtual reality. It is a time in which the large flat TV screen is providing our children with replacement substitutes for what might to a previous generation have been exposed to, and an active involvement with, an experience of rich sensory pre-verbal childhood play. It is more important than ever that, in this world of ‘perfect reproduction’, our children do not literally get ‘out of touch’ with their senses, and that a drawing retains its value as a unique, hand-made object, which contains and expresses qualities that are as individual and special  as its creator.

The Body/Corporeality of Drawing.

Seeing/Becoming/Situatedness

The process of making is a magical act, organic and physiological.

The drive to create a cosmos originated in the magic structure of consciousness.

All basic physical and mechanical laws, such as leverage, traction, bearing, adhesion, all constructions such as the labyrinth, the vault, all such technical achievements or discoveries are pre-given to us. Every invention is primarily a rediscovery and an imitative construction of the organic and physiological.

The Ever Present Origin, Jean Gebser. 1984

All arts we must remember, are phases of the social mind. We are in the habit of thinking of them in terms of art products that we forget that the arts themselves are groups of ideas and acquisitions of skill, that exist in the minds, muscles and nerves of living human beings.

Franklin Henry Giddings. 1914

The earliest buildings are grown, they are woven structures. Borne of gathering around a fire and weaving walls.

Understanding Building as Weaving.

Gottfried Semper.

Architecture is a verb outlines an approach that shifts the fundamental premises of architectural design and practice. 

It acknowledges the centrality of the human organism as an active participant interdependent in its environment.

It understands human actions in terms of radical embodiment, grounding the range of human activities traditionally attributed to mind and cognition, imagining, thinking, remembering, in the body. 

It asks what a building does, that is it extends the performative functional interpretation of design to interrogate how buildings move and in turn move us, and how they shape thought and action. 

It is committed to articulating concrete situations by developing a taxonomy of human building interactions.

Sarah Robinson. 2021

Homo Faber.

Architecture shapes ideas, ideas are born through the act of forming.

Thinking and making have traditionally been relegated to two different domains and like architecture and building the former is privileged over the latter. 

Seldom do we consider the act of making as a method of knowing. For Tim Ingold, both the maker and the theorist are engaged in processes of knowledge, with the important difference that the craftsman thinks through making, while the theorist imposes thought on matter. 

The temple at once embodied the interdependent arising of craft and community, and replaced the caves and sacred  groves of earlier divine appearances, to become a place apart. 

A crafted place where divinity was revealed. The world appeared for the first time through something people made. Through building the temple, cosmos was discovered through making.

The top-down abstract knowing of the theorist verses the bottom-up embodied knowing of the craftsman has come to define our hierarchy on the valuation of knowledge.

The Origins of Architecture in Weaving.

They Wove Their Walls.

Vitruvius.

Tim Ingold comments that just as baskets are woven, so buildings are grown, not built. Their form, and its usefulness emerges from the process of growth rather than from the mandates of a preconceived design on formless raw material.

Materials are not understood in terms of their component parts, but in terms of what they do.

Making is not a matter of imposition, but of intervening in the fields of force and flows of material.

Cyanotype processing of architectural drawings.

Blackboard/Whiteboard Fragments.

Organism/Person/Environment.

DSC_2068 Structured Modalities : Rules/Individual Resources

Braking down research.

Radical pedagogy transduces rather than transmits.

Re-combinent poetics/praxis.

The Architectural Scriptorium

The Photographic Darkroom.

Posted by Russell Moreton at Wednesday, October 11, 2023

Labels: architecture, blueprints, drawing, Franklin Henry Giddings, Gottfried Semper, Homo Faber, Jack Southern, Jean Gebser, Mike Maslen, Sarah Robinson, Tim Ingold, Werner Heisenberg

Architecture that forces us to confront our own spatial intelligence by moving us so much that we 

recall the eidetic origination of our own mental space. (Schaik,2008:80)

‘The phenomenology of space – the matter of how we experience it.’

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space (space and reverie), The Psychoanalysis of Fire.

Clay Jug

Inside this clay jug there are canyons, and pine mountains, and the maker of canyons and pine mountains. All seven oceans are inside and hundred of millions of stars.

Words, Kabir, Jackie Leven. The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel

The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.

The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from the message they convey.

Atemwende : A breathturn.

Edmund de Waal.

The Great Glass Case of Beautiful Things:

About the Art Of Edmund de Waal

Adam Gopnik. 2013.

The Sensuality of the Clay Body.

‘You have to work quickly and with definition, and your ideas have to come into focus with enormous rapidity.’ Edmund de Waal, on working with the different presence demanded on ones mind and hand whilst throwing with porcelain. The practice of porcelain forced a change in colour and finish in his work. New glazes, shimmering celadon and shiny black, arrived to catch the light and send it back. (Gopnik,2014:9)

The throwing of pots still remains central to his practice. ‘The material goes down, gets wet, is pulled open by the hand, spins- and then produces, as if by magic, the most transcendently human of all made things; volume, inner space, an interior, the carved out air that connects the morning teacup with the domes and spandrels of San Marco. There’s nothing there but clay and air, then there’s defined air. (Gopnik,2014:6)

Edmund de Waal is a maker of objects with imagined histories. (Gopnik,2014:11)

The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being. 

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl. 

Hawking understood black holes because he could stare at them. Black holes mean oblivion. Mean death. And Hawking has been staring at death all his adult life. Hawking could see.

Martin Amis, Night Train, 1997.

For Baudrilland the actual photographs are beside the point. It is what precedes them that counts in his eyes- the mental event of taking a picture.

Sylvere Lotringer, The Piracy of Art, 2008.

Inner Worlds : Photographic Visions 

Beuys – Klein – Rothko

Transformation and Prophecy

Anne Seymour

The Inner Eye

Art Beyond the Visible

Marina Warner

Thinkers and Vessel Makers.

Ceramic space and life Gordon Baldwin

Objects For A Landscape David Whiting

Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they need to be experienced. Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)

MATERIAL MATTERS ARCHITECTURE

AND MATERIAL PRACTICE Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER. GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY Peg Rawes

ARCHITECTURE

IN THE AGE OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION 

The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production. Dalibor Vesely

The Nature of Communicative Space Creativity in the Shadow of Modem Technology

The Rehabilitation of Fragment

Towards a Poetics of Architecture The Projective Cast

Architecture and its Three Geometries 

Robin Evans

Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it 

Analysing ARCHITECTURE

Simon Unwin

Geometries of Being Architecture as Making Frames Space and Structure

Poetics as an evolving and discursive system of dialogues that acknowledges environmental changes, of other spatial narratives and histories, and things that are not just about place and space.

‘Speculations about the first shelters, the relationship between our home and the universe, about spaces that we first use as surrogate houses as we form our spatial histories and our mental space. It is about the contemplative effects of the miniature, about the paradoxical way in which the scale of many of our most cherished monuments can switch in our minds from large to minute- the quality of intimate immensity. It is also about propositions around the complex relationships between inside and outside and the surface between, about the phenomenology of roundness’ (Schaik,2008:86-87)

‘We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called-Architecture, Gardens, Technology- is not important.’

Kengo Kuma.

On Anti-Object : An extended essay that is not so much history or theory as a volume of self-assessment that gives an opportunity for the author to contextualise his own body of work through considered self-reflection.

‘My purpose in writing this book is to criticise architecture that is self-centred and coercive.’ Kengo Kuma.

‘Like McTiernan or the theorist PaulVirilio, Kuma sees new digital and information technologies as leading us to an aesthetics of disappearance, rather than image or form.(Steele,2008:3)

‘My ultimate aim is to erase architecture’ (Kuma,2008:3)

How then, can architecture be made to disappear?

‘To be precise, an object is a form of material existence distinct from its immediate environment. I do not deny that all buildings, as points of singularity created by humankind in the environment, are to some extent objects. However, buildings that are deliberately made distinct from their environment are very different from those that attempt to mitigate this isolation, and the difference is perceptible to everyone who experiences them.’ (Kuma,2008:Preface)

Ceramics and Architecture.

Exhibition Spaces of the Enlightenment

The Porcelain Rooms

The pot, ancient as it is, is the first instance of pure innerness, of something made from the inside out. Building objects upwards is, in its way, an obvious and brutal thing; it derives from piles, and makes pyramids. Turning objects inward, on the wheel, is a subtler one, and derives from our need to have a place to put things in. (Gopnik,2014:7)

Together these new porcelain vessels collectively produced for De Waal an experience of possessed space.

These collections of vessels in their Modernist vitrines seem to be both an expression of the architecture of a collection and simultaneously an affirmation of an interior space that can hold the singularity of a breath within a small pot.

The ceramic module that he uses, the small pot, is deliberately made as non-functional as possible. (Gopnik,2014:9)

‘Even if we insist on seeing them impersonally, the sheer force of their numbers creates the poetic sense inherent, as Homer knew, in all inventories. They gang up on us.’ (Gopnik,2014:9) These groupings of objects placed together produce their own narratives, their own relations, and lines of inquiry. In so doing their ordering of the space around them brings meaning to those spaces. This is reinforced through the poetry and metaphor of the effect of ceramic vessels on space, as cited by De Waal himself through Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar” 1919.

‘The Jar, the elemental made thing, takes dominion over the unmade world. The air around it suddenly looks “slovenly,” insufficiently jar-like. Made things remake the unmade world. (Gopnik,2014:10)

Gopnik comments that we can’t look at hollow things without sensing their hollowness, as he notes we perceive haptically as aptly as optically. This allows us to read these vessels through both our sense of sight and our sense of space. The result is that we feel these objects; we can sense the heft of them made from their weight, shape and size. We become aware that we can feel objects as much as we can see them.

De Waal’s work brings about a sensuality and an empathy manifested between the strict ordering of his presentation through his vitrines and cabinets and the fragility and grouping of his porcelain vessels. This empathy promotes our interest with the interior parts of his groupings, with the interior emptiness and mystery of things we can only sense. His control and command of the geometric spatial relations found in his installations is juxtaposed by the multitude of diminutive interiors and negative spaces.

The relations of the architectural and those of the vessel are in constant flux, held in some sort of spatial narrative that seems to meditate stillness, like the museum these vessels are protected and intact, yet strangely they are held hostage by their surroundings.

The empathy we feel for their emptiness is perhaps choreographed, staged and ultimately forced, these are not just pots as De Waal admits but pots that have been by design rendered as non-functional as possible although they still bare the marks of his franchising. This neutering of his thrown clay forms into the realm of perhaps a purely sculptural object that is itself now a mere component in his Minimalist cabinets. What remains is a hollowness, but a contrived hollowness that speaks of spaces designed not made; unlike his Signs and Wonders intervention for the V&A, these works feel orphaned and cut adrift by their surroundings.

Does? ‘His art takes a familiar grammer of display and turns it into a poetry of memory. Inside a room, a great case filled with rows of porcelain pots. Along each row, a story. Inside each pot, a breath. (Gopnik,2014:11)

Craft and Art, Skill and Anxiety.

Craft is logic, and art defies it. The defiance is what makes art. The serenity of the artisan lies in her knowledge that it can all be done again. The anxiety of the artist; lies in knowing that if it is done again, she has become an artisan. (Gopnik,2014:7)

DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

History is the raw material of architecture. Aldo Rossi

The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002

The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.

Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear facade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the facade.

Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.

For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.

Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.

INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.

QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.

INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY

 CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS 

Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.

The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.

New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John

The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the comers, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight. 

The Brick House, London, Caruso St John 

ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.

CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)

Hortus Conclusus

Often translated as meaning “a serious place”. Enclosed all round and open to the sky.

STOA, building and social structure for dialogues

A garden/a mindfulness in an architectural setting.

What happened to the garden that was entrusted to you? Antonio Machado, Jackie Leven.

“Sheltered places of great intimacy where I want to stay for a long time.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

Every plant name listed here evokes a distinct image; with each of them I associate specific lighting, smalls and sounds, many kinds of rest, and a deep awareness of the earth and its flora.

A garden is the most intimate landscape ensemble I know of. In it we cultivate the plants we need. A garden requires care and protection. And so we encircle it, we defend it and fend for it. We give it shelter. The garden turns into a place.

There is something else that strikes me in this image of a garden fenced off within the larger landscape around it: something small has found sanctuary within something big.(Zumthor 2011: 15)

Illustration of “Orchard”, from Bible of Wenceslaus IV, Vienna, Austrian National Library

Depicts in the manner of an illuminated manuscript, the husbandry and community of the medieval workforce in the secure and sheltered space of a walled garden. This pastoral craft/gathering is evocative of Zumthor’s Hortus Concluses.

Working with ones hands, with the earth in sheltered spaces of a pastoral community. Zumthor underscores this pastoral setting when he places a pavilion at the centre of the garden; he talks of future meeting there, of looking forward “to the natural energy and beauty of the tableau vivant of grasses, flowers and shrubs. I am looking forward to the colours and shapes, the smell of the soil, the movement of the leaves.” (Zumthor 2011: 15)

The Vintner’s Luck , Elizabeth Knox.

Tasting the soil in the wine, the soil and the wine are of the same substance, from the same locality; they are bonded together by the landscape.

The Potter, clay, agency, making, Ingold. 

The Pot, object, nearness, pastoral, Heidegger.

Posted by Russell Moreton at Friday, June 02, 2023 No comments:  

Labels: Adam Gopnik, alternative photography, Caruso St John, Clay, Edmund de Waal, Gaston Bachelard, Jackie Leven, Kengo Kuma, Leon van Schaik, Marina Warner, Peter Zumthor, phenomenology of space, russell moreton

Confronting The Human Body : A Body Of Relations

 Outpost 270423

Temporal Demarcations.

Figural Workshop.

Confronting The Human Body.

The Psychology of Nakedness.

Looking/Showing/The Eye/The Gaze.

In the scopic field, the gaze is outside; I am looked at, that is to say, I am a  picture.

The spectacle of the world, in this sense, appears to us as all-seeing, this all-seeing aspect is to be found in the satisfaction of a woman who knows that she is being looked at, on condition that one does not show her that one knows that she knows.

Jacques Lacan.

What is a Picture.

The Split between The Eye and the Gaze.

A Body of Relations.

Reconfiguring The Life Class.

In the article What is a Picture? Jaques Lacan relates the space between the gaze and the eye to the ‘screen’. The ‘screen’ allows the simultaneous perception and projection of the image. In the life class, Lacan’s gaze is significant for the life model and the artist as it formulates the intentions of the psychological engagement and reveals the fundamental pursuit of desire in the methodology of life drawing practice. The subject needs to become an object of its own ‘scopic drives’ and therefore possessed by the perception of others. Lacan’s gaze is somewhat estranged from the body, as it never allows for subjectivity to be fully complete.

Yuen Fong Ling. 2016

Palimpsest/Involuntary Surfaces.

Drawing/Corporeal Intertwinings of body/space.

Bodyscapes/Movements/Materials.

Haptic/Visual Abstractions.

 

Life Class/Drawing.

The contested space/subject of the nude as a form of art.

The Impossible Nude.

Transfer/Temporal/Media.

Dyeline Sheet/Rolled Inked Surface.

Charcoal/Burnt Umber/Pencil

Shading Colour/Glass Pigments/Fired Glass.

spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,

Source: Confronting The Human Body : A Body Of Relations

Raveningham/Trails and Wayfaring/ Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one’s feet. J. G. Bennett.

Existing between the subjectivity between things.

You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.

Clouds and Clocks.

The project arises between a dialectic between the poetic and the systematic.

Between Science and Art.

The Embodiment of Minimal Gesture.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking.

Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Everyday Aesthetics : Ordinary Lives

What shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.

Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one’s feet.

J. G. Bennett.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or ‘dwelling’, rather than cognitive representation.

Curriculum Making : The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : ‘everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else’

Tim Ingold

Raveningham/Scripted Places

Garden/Ground/Circulation Diagrams.

Doing Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things/Walking/Listening to the wind

Boundaries/in the making between the personal and the commonly shared.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : ‘everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else’

Tim Ingold 2011

The Autonomy of The Natural Environment.

Sculpture/Playing with the existence of things.

Field Studies : Pathways around the Sun.

Drawing : Assemblage of Lightness and Weight.

Enmeshed Space : Working Drawing with Handwritten Notes.

Lawn Deliberations/Mappings of Human Agency/Space/Time.

Space projected from the body is biased towards the front and right.

The future is ahead and ‘up.’

The past is behind and ‘below.’

Time as a structure/place to observe things in constant motion/relation.

Drawing Site/Spiral Windings/Diagram/Spherical Markers

Terracotta, lime wash/lamp black/blackboard paint/chalk/ink

Ground Pegs/Labels/Text Markings/Archival Information

Points becoming lines, Tim Ingold.

Reading Matter/Rooms.

The Lake of The Mind.

Stochastic Thinking.

Steven Holl.

Raveningham : Site-specific project place

The Garden of Ongoing Differences.

Diffraction/Energy/Analysis/Attunement

Site Cyanotypes/Drawings/Intermediaries

Spatial Collages Reconfigured

Walking/Thinking with Ideas/Observations.

Site Drawings and Observational Mappings.

Cultivation Field.

The circle and square together embody what I think of as human nature.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume’s version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.

Ben Highmore

Rich Lyrical Motifs.

Brilliant Trees.

Within each lesson lies the price to learn.

David Sylvian.

Artist’s Development.

Planting Research

Vital Nourishment.

Raveningham Garden Project.

Circle/Linear Time/Centred on objects.

Spiral/Deep Time/Awareness between things.

Architectural Ceramics.

Inseminations/Sketchbooks

Cell/Seeds/Dispersal/Cloud

Organism-Person-Environment

Working Ideas/Proposals into Matter/Making

Contents/Description/Instructions/Diagram/Drawing

Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

Art is contemplation and must act upon our consciousness.

Objects/Things are part of the artist’s immediate existence.

Contemplative experiences become truly meaningful when they occur in everyday life and when nirvana or the state of superior awareness blurs into samsara or ordered time.

For Tapies, repetition is above all else a perpetual questioning or a perpetual becoming.

A working process that is additive, which incorporates changes and accidents and as such his methods are hardly erasing anything that is already present on the canvas.

A Summer’s Work, Antoni Tapies.

The Garden/Material of/for Forking Paths.

The Diagram/The Program/The Inquiry

Marking Durations.

Ground Mappings.

Solar/Daylight Observed/Shadows Recorded

A Garden Observatory/Philosophy of Silence/Solitude.

Raveningham Sculpture Trail.

Site Visit 160423

Sculptural Spacings and Sensual Engagements.

Showing Points/Lines/Vectors of Change/Movement.

Dwelling Demarcations/markers of temporality and disappearance.

A poetics derived/driven from both the systematic and the small wonders of the everyday.

Circular Breathing/Cyclical Lines.

The Peripheral Movement/Moment

The Space/Time between things.

The Concept of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

The Array, a phonographic inquiry recording transits of the suns pathways across the sky.

Wanderings, caught up in the wanderlust of stillness and slowtime.

Paths of movement, paths of observation, paths of existential abstractions following daylight.

The artist’s creative act of a self amongst others.

A sculptural deliberation that engages with the experiences of working a site in the landscape.

Curatorial.

Spatial Practice.

Practice/Display/Audience.

Of the mason’s who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.

Tim Ingold ‘Making’

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Camouflage offers  a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.

Camouflage may  therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging – the family, church and so on – has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.

Aesthetic  production should maintain the capacity  to operate as  a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully  controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively  mapping an individual within the environment.

Design becomes  a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.

In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.

The thing contained is not the thing contained.

Manifesto for explorations of ‘IN’

Steven Holl.

spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,

Source: Raveningham/Trails and Wayfaring/ Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one’s feet. J. G. Bennett.

spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,

Source: The Light Gatherers, a lecture by Garry Fabian Miller

Blue Planet : Bioscleave/Blue Particle Cloud/Diagram.

 

 

ARCHITECTURAL Body

An ORGANISM that PERSONS

Gins and Arakawa 2002

Although the human condition is a crisis condition if ever there was one, few individuals and societies act with the dispatch a state of emergency requires. The fact that the human condition is a crises condition gets routinely covered up, with culture invariably functioning to obscure how dire the condition is and to float it as bearable

If organisms form themselves as persons by uptaking the environment, then they involve not only bodies but domains, spheres of activity and influence

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture’s holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave

Procedural Architure/Architectural Body

Gins and Arakawa

The role of architecture as a tool for researching the body-environment towards the implementation of these considerations is paramount

The goal of an experimental teaching and learning space based on architectural procedures would be that the process of design and construction would allow students/staff to rethink, re-imagine and enact the curriculum

An Arakawa and Gins Experimental Teaching Space/A Feasibility Study 2013

Jondi Keane

An Architecture of Viability

To help to sustain one throughout life/ to stay tentative

Bioscleave House as an inter-active laboratory of everyday life

Wayfinding (unpacking discourse/meaning) through Landing Sites and Architectural Bodies

What is the metachallenge that bioscleave demands of us? Is it, I propose, wayfinding, a wayfinding defined at many scales from finding one’s way as a person to finding one’s way in a strange physical or social environment

Exploring the Roles of Trajectoriness, Affectivatoriness, and Imaging Along 2013

Reuben M. Baron

Figure/Ground : Double Occupations of Discourses and Events (relationships/co-existances)

So as a diagram (performative agent), the figure/ground does not function to represent even something real. But rather constructs a real that is yet to come (theoretical object/apparatus) as a new type of reality

Situated Field/Constructed Site of People, Institutions, Apparatuses, Events, Discourses

We see intraventions as heuristic devices, as apparatuses that are imbued with a will to transform.

The intravention is not autonomous but contingent and relational and dependent on many other things

The intravention is made as it happens, and it makes us at the same time

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects

Oren Lieberman, Alberto Altes

AEffect initiating Heuristic Life

Procedural architecture, developed in both their written and buillt discourse, providing a process by which to connect theory to practice, disciplinary inquiry to knowledge and art to life

Research should be conducted , not in a library or laboratory but where living happens, enabling the complexity of relationships to be studied within and across the organism-person-environment

Jondi Keane

Carnal Knowledge

Towards a New Materialism through the Arts

Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt

To provide observational heuristic devices so that persons may devise transformational and reconfigurative opportunities

Heuristic tools whether built hypothesis or discursive sequences, are of no use if they do not provide a way forward, a way of learning

This house is a tool, a procedural one

A functional tool, whether it be a hammer, a telephone, or a telescope, extends the senses, but a procedural tool examines and reorders the sensorium

Interlude : Cornering a Beginning

An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling

Relationscapes : Movement, Art, Philosopy

Erin Manning

Born into a new territory, and that territory is myself as organism. There is no place to go but here. Each organism that persons finds the new territory that is itself, and having found it, adjusts it

Ellipsis,(gaps in everyday narratives)

The Construction of Representation of Identity

Using their bodies and immediate surroundings and environment as both subject and context

An Organism-Person-Environment

You cannot see me from where I look at myself

Francesca Woodman

An organism-person-environment has given birth to an organism-person-environment

Bioscleave

Chaos, Territory, Art

Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Elizabeth Grosz

Body, Personal Relations, Spatial Values

Upright Human Body : Space and Time

Yi Fu Tuan

Figuring It Out

The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists

Colin Renfrew

The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency. Relating is viewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuating network of existential events

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

Relationality 2005

Robert Cooper

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,

Source: Blue Planet : Bioscleave/Blue Particle Cloud/Diagram.

Molecular Sieve/Performative Apparatuses : CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES/10 DAYS WINCHESTER

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.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/

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

Heuristic Practices : The trace/space of the anthropological
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. 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.

What is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben

by the term “apparatus” I mean a kind of a forma­tion, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The appa­ratus therefore has a dominant strategic function.

I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.

I wish to propose to you nothing less than a gen­ eral and massive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured. On one side, then, to return to the terminology of the theologians, lies the ontology of creatures, and on the other side, the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide them toward the good.

spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,

Source: Molecular Sieve/Performative Apparatuses : CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES/10 DAYS WINCHESTER

Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands

spatial practice, alternative photography, fine art, ceramics,making,Russell Moreton,

Source: Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands