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.

Diffractive Surfaces/Visitors : Imaginative Cartographies/Spatialities/Fictions/Epistemologies

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices

Outpost Studio : 03082021

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold

Visual Diffractions~Water~Abbey : Orthoclase, or orthoclase feldspar.

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice.

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Google Lens.

The image displays a large black-and-white photograph of what appears to be an abstract or textured surface, potentially a wall or rock formation, mounted on a sheet of paper with various textual annotations and clippings. 

Textual elements in the background include references to the film "VISITORS" directed by Godfrey Reggio, and a quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: "We have art that we may not perish by the truth".

Other text fragments mention architecture and specific locations like Suchumi.

The primary image itself is a high-contrast, grainy depiction of a rough, dark surface with lighter, irregular patches.

The overall composition suggests an artistic or documentary presentation, possibly an exhibition piece or a study of texture and decay.

Discursive Reading (against linearity)/New Modalities of Inquiry

New Generative Boundaries/Situatedness

Wayfinding and Heuristic/Everyday Practices

Reading is also thinking through the body

Viscous Porosity/Flesh of the world

Enfleshed Materialism/Membranes that affect interactions

Words Become Material

Troubleyn Laboratorium/Jan Fabre

In this moment the words become a performative agent writing and acting on the body

Installing ourselves in the event, that emerges in our reading

Reading diffractively means that we try to fold these texts into one anther in a move that flattens out our relationship to the material. In so doing we install ourselves into its/our becoming

Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research/Barad Thinking with intra-action

Alecia Y. Jackson, Lisa A. Mazzei

Paintings/Art Works are boundary making apparatusses

The Diffractive Apparatus/Analysis of Intra-ventions/actively/entanglements

Phenomena and Thresholds from which to create new analytical questions/forms

An entangled state of agencies, that which exceed the traditional notion of how we conceive of agency, subjectivity, and the individual.

Agency is an enactment, not something that someone has. Such entanglements require an analysis that enables us to theorize the social and the natural together.

Barad

Diffraction

Two major authors write about the metaphor of diffraction, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.
They explain how diffraction is a method for reading and writing based upon the physical phenomena. Diffraction is a way of coping with epistemological problems of representation (invisible knowledge maker as a false sense of objectivity, self-vision of reflexivity as totalizing and undermining knowledge claims).

To paraphrase Haraway, from "Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" diffraction is an attempt to make differences while recording interactions, interference, and reinforcement. It does not have an origin and has a heterogeneous history. In addition, the practice of diffractive reading and writing never sediments the relationship between signifier and signified. Van der Tuin explains, "Diffraction is meant to disrupt linear and fixed causalities, and to work toward ‘‘more promising interference patterns’’ (26). She also explains that this can be practiced by reading texts through one another, and rewriting.This disrupts the temporality of a piece of writing, transverses boundaries such as discipline, and can change meanings in different contexts opening up meaning.

https://newmaterialistscartographies.wikispaces.com/Diffraction

Diffracting Photography/Painting/Collage Works

Heuristic reconfigurations through making/understanding/encounters with material









Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?
— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005


Collage Works, A Hut of Ones Own

Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.


A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline


Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines,

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

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

Clay~Ceramic~Theoretical~Things~Ties

Clay Based Practices : Ecologies~Things Emerging in Relation.

Archaeologies of making material sensitive.

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

Sites of building over lived lives.

This item is a sculptural ceramic artwork by artist Russell Moreton, specifically developed from his interest in architectural spaces and material construction.     Artist: Russell Moreton, a visual fine artist based in Harleston, Norfolk. Material: Slab-built clay and ceramic bodies. Theme: Explores themes of 'Making', interior spaces, and metaphysical immersive nature. Style: Involves intense textures and architectural, almost meditative forms.

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/