Towards~Making a holding in place : Tentative Architectures/Ecologies~Wayfaring : Clay/Prebiotic World/Correspondences

Cairns-Smith suggested that the present essential elements of biology-nucleic acids and catalyzing proteins-evolved on a kind of prebiotic scaffolding. Ultimately the scaffolding disappeared, leaving behind the biochemistry that now controls the processes of all living things. The vanishing supporting structure, in the view of Cairns-Smith, could have been clay.

Life Search, Time-Life Books.

05/03/2013

Wayfaring Notes: Material Flows Between Form and Emptiness : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark.

Tim Ingold engages with Deleuze and Guattari by adopting their concepts of "assemblage" (agencement) and "lines of becoming" to emphasize a relational, process-oriented ontology. He translates their abstract philosophical ideas into a "meshwork" of walking, weaving, and storytelling, focusing on how life is lived along lines rather than between fixed points. 

Academia.edu

Key aspects of Ingold’s engagement with Deleuze and Guattari include:

Meshwork vs. Network: Ingold contrasts the "network" (connected points) with the "meshwork" (interlaced lines of growth and movement), highlighting how beings and materials constantly emerge and change through interaction.

Lines of Becoming: He interprets Deleuze and Guattari’s "becoming-animal/plant/molecular" as a process of world-making, where individuals are not static beings but are constantly in flux, "becoming with" their environments.

Wayfaring: Ingold uses the concept of "wayfaring" to represent life as a continuous movement or trajectory, aligning with the philosophical notion of navigating lines rather than occupying pre-defined positions.

Critique of Hylomorphism: He draws on their ideas to reject the traditional view that form is imposed upon passive matter (hylomorphism), arguing instead for an understanding of form-generation that emerges from the material flow. 

Ingold’s work often merges these perspectives with other thinkers like Gibson, focusing on how organisms and materials are entangled within their environments, creating a "topologically fluid" space. 

Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres.

Ceramic Building Technologies.

Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space.

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics.

Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature.

Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel.

Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay.

Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry.

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’

A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking”States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl,Paalasa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself.

This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel.

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mircea1983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things.

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino1996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10)

The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:11)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modern 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something.

The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities.

The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects.

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes?

This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)

The pagan life that St Augustine (born 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, a kind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, W.H. Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into a “fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces.

Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics are like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa“ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’.The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.

Architectural Stratification/Installation : Crafting/Painting Transformative Reconstructions/Relationscapes

Outpost 200623

Sites of building over lived lives.

Of doing and un-doing, of being~becoming un-done by theory. 

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

Painting Matter, Lime, Gesso, Charcoal, and Indian Ink on paper.

Clay.

Water.

Ceramics and Architecture.

 Architectural Stratifications, Carlo Scarpa, Intervening with History. 

The Placing of Pots.

The Hungate.

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

A Moment of Pure Presence.

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

Jane Bennett

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

Philip Fisher.

Analysing The Observed.

To abstract from the observed means to simplify the complexities of seeing.

Piet Mondrian.

Space and Form are ignored in this type of Abstraction, the Lines and their Vectors of Movement become a Map, Mapping Forces onto the Surface of the Picture.

Thinking with directional, durational markings/feelings/intuitive judgements.

Small Perceptions/Perceptions in Folding.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another, as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze, 1993.

Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaging landing sites.

Relationscapes.

Erin Manning.

'Incoherence' exists, which is why the composition 'Art' exists.

Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them. By giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they remain forever incoherent.

Andre Aciman/Edmund de Waal. 

For nearly fifty years my darkroom and studio have been the focus of my solitude.

Landing Sites.

The Expanding Field of Relations.

Organism/Person/Environment

I need silence to be able to think clearly, and an empty space where my thoughts can accumulate undisturbed.

Duration.

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid flowing time which is intertwined with an experience of being, where past, present and future merge into an experiential time of the individual being/becoming.

Steven Holl.

Darkrooms were dangerous places as well as magical ones, they are a painful metaphoric yoking of creation and destruction.

My final print is a golden square enclosing the pinkest dusk sky I had ever seen or imagined.

Filtered Light/Pot Metal Colours/Silver Stain/Filtows/Filters/Shadows.

The Light Gatherers.

Bodleian Libraries.

March 2022-October 2023.

Light Laboratory/Creation as Duration.

Glass vessels, as light filters shining the enlarger light through them and creating photograms. Garry's work oscillates with differential velocities. He works with great deliberation and then he works with abandon. I keep thinking about the tension between deliberation and abandon. You look at a painting by Agnes Martin and experience the temporal aspect of lines repeated slowly over days and weeks. A cell like structure repeats and changes, you repeat so that in return you can find the smallest oscillations of difference. An expanded field where you sense the development of different kinds of time, movements and their durations.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

Farewell to an Idea, Wallace Stevens/Edmund de Waal. 

Haecceity, thisness of things, which engenders feelings between ourselves/things/world.

I was grateful to have been able to live with so much pure colour for so long.

Space-Enfolding-Breath

Lake Of The Mind.

Ideas are already abstract.

Abstracted Transcriptions.

Drawing, Vectors and Forces of Subjectification.

Lines, mappings of forces across the surface of the picture.

Drawing on, analysis with, Dominants.

Formed by the dynamic forces derived from the outlines of objects and their surrounding spaces.

Palimpsest Collages

Psychogeographic Mappings

Architectural Models

The Process of Drawing/Building is Left Visible.

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley.

Crafting Recovery and Regeneration.

Transformative Reconstruction.

SPAB, Summer 2023.

Michal Saniewski.

Falerone, San Francesco Monestry. Italy.

It's the forefront of modernisation, something that we thought the city was. The countryside is still the place where new ideas and experimentation actually take place..

Countryside : The Future.

Guggenheim Museum, 2020.

Heritage Conservation/Preservation

How do we insert new fabric into old and respect layers of history, of which the earthquakes are an inherent part? Perhaps some of the scars and cracks should be preserved to serve as a poignant  reminder of the past, becoming a living memorial? And perhaps there is potential to develop a new language of additive, 'surgical' architecture, where the contemporary timber frames serve a protective function, supporting and bracing the damaged medieval walls,  but at the same time can be inhabited, framing new uses and reprogramming internal spaces.

The reconstruction process should be used as an opportunity to add value beyond what existed before the earthquake. 

Exploring possible new functions and uses of currently empty spaces and damaged buildings, the local community was asked to participate in the act of psychogeographic mapping and thus rediscovering and revaluating the town on different levels.

Key themes of the New European Bauhaus initiative.

Renovation of existing buildings and public spaces in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality.

Preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.

Regeneration of urban or rural spaces.

 

Could Falerone become an experimental hotbed, an example of sustainable, community-driven reconstruction of urban fabric and place identity? The new crafts school could be an opportunity to achieve just that, stimulating collaborations not just with other towns and universities, but with regional authorities and even with the EU. 

Studio Cyanotypes.

Tools/Working Drawings and the Semblances of Spatial Agencies.

Keywords.

Visual Substance, Causal Doing, Investigating, Inquiry, Process, Agency, Matter, Material, Discursive, Iterative, Creative Apparatuses, Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies That Matter, 

FORMWORK / ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS~The Minor Gesture : Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

Making~Intensified Surfaces of a Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

The 'exigencies' of the situation at hand.

Tim Ingold, MAKING. 

Clay becomes a procedural matter of concern(s).

Spatial Intelligence/Architectures

Abject (ion) Body and Matter in Process/Processual Relations.

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Indexical Drawing : Pencil, Wax and iron oxide on paper. 240x150 1008

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

IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY

ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments

Mediating the experience of LANDSCAPE

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax COLOUR AS CONDUIT / PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA / IMPROVISATION PIERCED  DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW / SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS / TECTONICS AND TEXTILES INDEXICAL / GESTALT  VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS / GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY

Without opposition nothing is revealed,

No image appears in a clear mirror If one side is not darkend.

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principiis 1619.

Everything is interrelated and suffers when it acts, so too the purest human thought. Holderlin, 1798.

Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment Between PLACE and SITE

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity

 LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner on painting)

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practices.

RAVENINGHAM THEMES : Working Notes

New Futures for Architecture Leon van Schaik

Spatial intelligence builds our mental space. Sensing Spaces

Architecture Reimagined Oak-Framed Buildings. Rupert Newman

Heidegger for Architects

Adam Sharr 

MAKING : ANTHROPOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Tim Ingold

Touching objects, feeling materials 

The Cathedral and the Laboratory

A Hut of One's Own

Anne Cline

Solar Pavilion

Alison and Peter Smithson Architecture is not made with the brain 

The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

HERZOG & DEMEURON NATURAL HISTORY

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. Speculative Architecture

On The Aesthetics of Herzog & De Meuron 

The Thinking Hand

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa

The Architecture of Natural Light. Henry Plummer

Peter Zumthor

Hortus Conclusus Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

The Potentials of Spaces

The Theory and Practice of Scenography and Performance. Alison Oddey, Christine White

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception. Madeline Schwartzman

Collage and Architecture. Jennifer A. E. Shields

COLLAGE

Assembling Contemporary Art. Sally O'Reilly 

Construction/Abstraction Body/Identity Environments/Geographies

Indexical

Absences

Actuality Immaterial Architectural Sensing Surfaces,

Textures

Dimensions, Sprays, Trace

Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

Repetition, Empirical Experiences

Forms, Pavilion, Hut, Shelter, simple enclosure

Minimalist, tuning objects, sequences to construct/de-construct environments 

Reflexive Surfaces into architectural presence

Art as indeterminate, able to arrest perceptions into different states/becomings 

Site, undoing of place. 

Gauze/Filtered Light/Phenomena

Gesture of the work, its situation,

Meshwork. The drawing grid, making of a proposition into space.

Cyan, Sky Blue, dappled light, membrane, responding to the weather/locality

AA Pavilion Project,

Its about learning through making, being involved in the process, the installation and its reception, dislocating contextual barriers.

Ephemeral Architectures, AA Document/Project, Prizeman

Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.

Immaterial Architecture The Illegal Architect Jonathan Hill

Oak 

Tree 

Oil

Paper

Plaster

Rust 

Sgratfito 

Silence 

Sound 

Steel 

Television 

Weather

Frosted Light

Index of immaterial architectures

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL. Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body. Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson

Interactive Abstract Body (Square) The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman

Stan Allen

Indexical Characters FABRIC=MASS+ FORM

Alan Chandler

The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.

ANTI OBJECT Kengo Kuma

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. ReThinking Matereriality

The engagement of mind with the material world. Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden. Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things

Towards a Theory of Material Engagement Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency

Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency

We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts 

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things

Material Engagement and the Extended Mind. Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality. Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective Carl Knappett

People make space, and space contains people

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things. Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments

Architectures for Perception

Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts. Charles Goodwin

 

Thinking Through Making~Design Anthropology~Materiality. Tim Ingold.

Thinking through Making.

Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

31 October 2013.

Ever since Aristotle, it has been customary in the western tradition to think of making 

as a bringing together of a preconceived, ideal form, in the mind of the maker, with an 

initially formless mass of raw material. In this view, all the thinking has been done 

before the making begins. And for those who encounter the finished object, the thought 

can only be recovered by reading back from the work to an idea in the mind of the maker. 

Here I present an alternative account of making, as an inherently mindful activity in 

which the forms of things are ever-emergent from the correspondence of sensory awareness 

and material flows in a process of life. Artefacts and thoughts are the more or less 

ephemeral cast-offs of this process, strewn along the way. Rather than imposing form on 

matter, the maker -- operating within a field of forces that cut across any divisions 

between body and environment -- is caught between the anticipatory reach of the 

imagination and the frictional drag of materials.

Research Lines~Modes of Existence~Inquiry.

Ceramic Passages~Circulations~Volumes : Proposals for experience.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold challenges the traditional model of creation, proposing that genuine creativity arises from improvising with materials rather than imposing pre-existing ideas. 

This approach advocates for understanding knowledge as something that grows from within our active, sensory engagement with the world.

The act of making has increasingly been reframed within contemporary discourse not as a secondary stage of production, but as a primary mode of thinking and knowing. 

This shift recognizes "making" as an epistemological process—a way of creating knowledge, rather than just materializing a pre-existing idea. It moves from a model where thought precedes production to one where knowledge emerges through engagement with materials and tools. 

This paradigm, often referred to as "[Thinking Through Making]" or an "[Epistemology of Making]," is prevalent in design, architecture, and anthropology. 

Key Aspects of Making as Knowing

Embodied Cognition: Knowledge is generated through the body's interaction with materials, often described as "thinking with your hands" or "ping-ponging" between mind and material.

Emergent Process: Forms and knowledge emerge "from the inside" of the process rather than being imposed on materials.

Epistemic Objects: The objects created are not just final products, but active participants in the learning process, allowing makers to see, tinker with, and understand problems differently.

Materiality and Resistance: The constraints and friction encountered during making (e.g., in crafting, digital fabrication) force critical thinking and adaptation, which are essential to developing expertise. 

Context in Contemporary Discourse

Design Research & Pedagogy: Architectural pedagogy is shifting toward a process-oriented approach, where empirical making and experimentation are central to critical thinking.

Design Anthropology: "Making" is used to understand the world by actively participating in its creation, treating design as "world-making" rather than just problem-solving.

Social Constructionism: This perspective implies that knowledge is not static but created through ongoing social and material interactions. 

This reframing moves the maker from an "artisan" filling an intellectual blueprint to an "active thinker" whose understanding grows through engagement with the world. 

Making Iterations/Procedures Crafted with Care ~The Interweaving of Everyday Experience in Texture~Pattern~Weave

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Affective~Ecologies~Immersive Atmospheres.

Matterings~Un-doing theory into the making of the everyday.

The Anthropology of Skill.

Architecting with experience.

On the distinction between Art and Technology.

Yet speech is no ordinary skill. Weaving  together in narrative, the multiple strands of action and perception specific to diverse task and situations, it serves, if you will, as the 'Skill of skills'. And if one were to ask where culture lies, the answer would not be in some shadowy domain of symbolic meaning, hovering aloof from the 'hands on' business of practical life, but in the very texture and pattern of the weave itself.

Tim Ingold. Beyond Art And Technology.

Circulation Diagram~Lines of Flow amongst Clay.

2025 Diary Content.

May 26 - June 1

Readings and their speculations of theory into the realm of everyday practices.

Interior Spaces.

Infra~Bodies of Immediacy 

Becoming Volatile, matter(s) entering into movement, creating in~with bodies.

The permanency of ceramic objects both reflect and indexically link clay with its very nature of uncertainty and change through the very extreme and  volatile processes of firing. 

Clay is about the primacy of the corporeal human body as it attempts to express~abject itself through bodily metaphors or nesting, dwelling, nurturing and enduring.  

The Inner Life of Pots~Ceramics

Tunings~Innerness~Thresholds~Change

Sounding Voids/Muted Light

Brian Clarke

Concordia

Film, analysis, organisation of human access, wonderous, the best of myself.

Elements of flight, collage, and sensate fictions.

Hannsjorg Voth

Working with intensity(building structures)

Architectural Reflexive Spaces

Inhabitation's into the continuous weather world.

Landscapes~Making~Building~Ecologies

Innovative Objects~For Critical~Philosophical Thinking~Living.

Cognitive nature~potentiality of matter(s) of making worlds. 

Tectonics materials, matter(s) of wood, light, clay and water.

Outposts, observatories, places of inquiry, dwelling, self builds.

Independent researcher, artist in residence, works manager, project development. 

Constituting Consistencies.

Bodily/Corporeal Metaphors, Analogies and Poetics. 

Calvino, exactitude, lightness, quickness, visibility, multiplicity.