Spatial Representations : Apparatus~Fictions~Readings~Embodying~Inhabiting~Folding

 

Making Iterations~The Interweaving of Everyday Experience in Texture~Pattern~Weave

Affective~Ecologies~Immersive Atmospheres.

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

The Anthropology of Skill.

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.

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.

Processual Makings of The Everyday : Between Silences on The Sympathy Of Things

Clay~Ceramic~Theoretical~Things~Ties

Archaeologies of making material sensitive.

A processual object that both poses an agencement~question and carries its gathering.

Sociological Bindings~Matter(s) of Concern

Felt Abstractions~Inspirational Radicalism.

Urban Gothic : An Excess Of Changefulness.

Of the creation of concepts, explored through the plane of immanence in which it can be born and the 'conceptual personae' which can activate it.

On Other Forms Of Thought.

What Is Philosophy?

Deleuze and Guattari.

Can perhaps only be posed late in life with the arrival of old age and the time for speaking concretely.

It is a question posed in a moment of quiet restlessness at midnight when there is no longer anything to ask.

Their book is a profound and careful interrogation of what it might mean to be a 'friend of wisdom'. But it is also a devastating attack on the sterility of what has become. When the only events are exhibitions and the only concepts are products which can be sold.

Philosophy they insist is not contemplation, reflection or communication, but the creation of concepts.

Essays : Critical and Clinical.

Deleuze is concerned with the delirium, the process of life that lies behind this invention as well as the loss that occurs. The silence that follows when this delirium becomes a clinical state. 

Material~Felt Abstractions : Delirium and Dissolution.

Spatial Bodies : Between Silences on The Sympathy Of Things.

A Growing Thicket of Thing~Ties

White Odyssey~Archaeologies of making material sensitive.

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

Slow Materials~Silent Transformations/Philosophy : Spaces beyond objects/The Movement~Sympathy of Ideas and Feelings.

 

Outpost 220921 

Loose Assemblages : The Movement of Ideas and Feelings.

The Sympathy of Things.

Lars Spuybroek.

‘If there is one thing we can learn from John Ruskin, it is that each age must find its own way to beauty’ writes Lars Spuybroek in The Sympathy of Things, his ground-breaking work which proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital era. Spuybroek argues that we must ‘undo’ the twentieth century and learn to understand the aesthetic insights of the nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin, from which he distils pointers for the contemporary age. Linking philosophy, design, and the digital, with art history, architecture, and craft, Spuybroek explores the romantic notion of ‘sympathy’, a core concept in Ruskin’s aesthetics, re-evaluating it as the driving force of the twenty-first century aesthetic experience. For Ruskin, beauty always comprises variation, imperfection and fragility, three concepts that wholly disappeared from our mindsets during the twentieth century, but which Spuybroek argues to be central to contemporary aesthetics and design. Revised throughout, and a new foreword by philosopher Brian Massumi, this is a new edition of a seminal work which has drawn praise from fields as diverse as digital architecture and speculative realism, and will continue to be influential as it wrests Ruskin’s ideas out of the Victorian era and reconstructs them for the modern age.

 Xenotheka

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

Existence appertains to the nature of substance.

A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.

Ethics, Part 1, Proposition VII, Proof

Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between organism and an object-to-be-known. 

The Feeling of What Happens, Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

Antonio Damasio. 1999.

Architectural Body

Organism-Person-Environment

Arakawa and Gins.

The Silent Transformations.

François Jullien.

To grow up is to grow old. With time, great love can turn into indifference. And even the most earnest revolution can imperceptibly become its own system of privilege and corruption&;just as global warming has slowly modified the climate by degrees. These are examples of the kind of quiet, unseen changes that François Jullien examines in The Silent Transformations, in which he compares Western and Eastern&;specifically Chinese&;ways of thinking about time and processes of change.

Jullien argues that our failure to notice the effects of cumulative changes over time is due to Western thought&;s foundations in classical Greek philosophies of being, which encourage thinking in terms of determined forms and neglect the indeterminable nature of the transition taking place. In contrast, Chinese thought, having a greater sense of the fluidity of life, offers a more flexible way of understanding everyday transformations and provides insightful perspectives from which to consider our relation to history and nature. In particular, a Chinese approach, argues Jullien, allows us to discover that there may be occasions when it is more efficacious to yield to situations than to confront them head-on.

In The Silent Transformations, Jullien resituates Western philosophy by examining it in the light of traditions of thought that have developed from fundamentally different concepts and contexts. Jullien here opens a space for a new way of thinking, and this refreshing book will stimulate the interest of scholars in both Western and Eastern philosophy.

Xenotheka

Drawing is a  form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

The Human Body through drawing and philosophy

Berger/Spinoza 141

Matters of a discursive consciousness are explicit and explainable, and the line between discursive and practical consciousness is fluctuating and permeable, both drawing on the other in the act of agency/making social.

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

Generative energies, entanglements, sensorial diversions from an open studio window overlooking Anglia Square

Improvisations/choreographed with the music/ambient noise are exploratory encounters  between flesh and sound

A hut of ones own (within and bounded by others), crafted and organized around simple processes and interactions within a fallow site given over to creative ecology of energies and enterprise

Vibrant yet curiously passive form of  urbanism

Affectivity as a mimesis of lively transfers between things, humans and non-humans

Human subjectivity : Mimetic Encounters/Explorations

Art works by gathering up forms and materials for affective experimentations in subjectivity

Corporeal unconscious animated by sensitivities/sympathies, a putative affinity (haptic) between certain things including bodies and organs which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another. 

Intentionality/Sympathy/Sentiment/Difference

Inducing a particular set of ethical/political/social responses in actor/social audience 

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Calling a sympathy/subjectivity between coloured cloth/wallpaper/display cabinet and human flesh

Francesca Woodman

Mimesis and suggestion in the social, enacted through layers of mediation surrounding humans, objects and non-humans.

Camouflage. Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming 

Site~Emergent~Ecologies~Landscapes : Drawing translations within/between the photographic document.

Site~Making~Fieldworks.

Borderlands.

Alternative Photography.

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects~Enchantments

Topologies, mappings and their correspondences (thinking~feeling) between here, there, and elsewhere.

Playing with 'phronesis' a poetics of a spatial encounter and its enclosure forming an immediate immersive environment.

Developing inquiry through a process of familiarization and not-knowing, being undone by theory where things emerge, are accumulated, and are nurtured into being through relations (Continuous~weather-world sites) with human bodies and spatial bodies.  

Archiving materials, sites and events, resulting in an incidental aesthetic gathering.

Outpost Studio 030222

Immersed in Matter(s) of an Emergent and Continuous Weather World.

Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape.

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.

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Drawing is a philosophical trigger/Roni Horn : Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities

Brian Massumi refers to all arts as 'occurrent' because any and every perception, artefactual or natural is just an experiential event.

It is an event both in the sense that it is happening, and in the sense that when it happens something new transpires

Semblance and Event, Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts.

Brian Massumi 2011.

Drawing is a philosophical trigger.

Roni Horn.

Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities.

Outpost Studio 14/03/2022

Occurrent Assemblages : Knowledge Objects

Choreographing

Events and Demolition

Trace and Encounter

Data Captured/Visualizations

Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body~Bioscleave

Outpost 041024

Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.

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

A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.

Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.

The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.

A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).

The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.

You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.

I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.

The Burning Library.

It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.

Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.

Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.

Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.

Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.

Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.

Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.

Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.

Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.

I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.

But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.

The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Outpost Studio~Theoretical Spaces : Undone Gatherings of Experience.

Lost Inquiry : Dispersed Spaces~Relations of Space, Time, and Social Bodies.

Outpost 200125

Expanding The Files.

Undone

A theorist is one who has been undone by theory.

Rather than the accumulation of theoretical tools and materials, models of analysis, perspectives and positions, the work of theory is to unravel the very ground on which it stands. To introduce questions and uncertainties in those places where formerly there was some seeming consensus about what one did and how one went about it.

Irit Rogoff : What is a Theorist? 2006

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience