Space Folds/Melts : All that is solid melts into air : Metaphors of Memory : We exist constantly reciprocating between perceptions and relations

 

All that is solid melts into air

Armature :  Memory/Personal Biographies 

The Everyday complexity of things

Saturnian Form : Lead and Library Dates

Spatiality : Space over Time

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

All that is solid melts into air

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

“What metaphor, of all those that have been discussed, best describes the memory of psychology itself’

The author Draaisma Douwe poses this question at the end of an extensive study on the nature of what might be used to give form to ideas about metaphors of memory. The use in my practice of traces, inscriptions, photographic surfaces and materials used as indexical and material memories, call me to give some sense of critical analysis to the issue of metaphor and how it might be “formed” and “utilized” in the situation of work.

The attraction of metaphors is that they bridge or “hold court” within the visual and the textual, in the physical as perhaps a object association to a situation, and in the sensibility of the poetic.

Their inherent ability to be an intermediary between a number of things , gives them a lightness, a brevity and a concise comment on a situation, they auger well as a “what remains” of an experience.

An intriguing quality of metaphors is that they are a union/relation of oppositional associations, which are realized as “go-betweens” active presentations of a specific relation or thought “placed” by the association of concrete and abstract

relations/relativities. They function by their ability to reference their “betweeness” as held open by their associative registers." There is a reference to a set of concrete relations in one situation, in order to facilitate the recognition of an analogues set of relations in another situation.”1 Metaphors are structured and formulated around abstract relations around a concrete factualness of image associations.

G. F. Beck notes that “the metaphor is an intermediary between the agencies of the sensory and the perceptual and those of the verbal and the semantic thought; it belongs neither completely to one nor the other it mediates between analogous and semantic forms of thought

In a metaphor two constituents work to create its meaning, its place of register, the topic term and the vehicle term. This topic and vehicle terminology is used by Martin and Harre' when they write “ that the topic term and the vehicle term are each the centre of a semantic field and that the interaction between these two fields enables us to produce and understand new insights.”2 This research has been further investigated and subsequently the terms structured and functional have now been applied to inform the existing relations of topic and vehicle.

These further defining terms have arisen through metaphors becoming ideally suited to “explaining and teaching theories due to their combination of image and language, and of the graphic and the abstract.”3

This ability of “metaphor” could be directed at making it site-specific to a particular set of relations, an informative teaching device, that might engender interest through its perspectival analysis.

The metaphor is in effect a vehicle of projection in as much as it can project associations of one term over that of another , granting an intermediary state given by a superimposed form over its forming relations. This transparency and its associate projection creates new forms of thought. This value/trait has been intimated by research based around “ interaction theory” presented by contemporary theorists Martin and Harre' although the fundamental theory had already been presented by I. A. Richards in 1936. Richards stated “when we use metaphor we have two thoughts active together and supported by a single word, or phrase, whose meaning is a resultant of their interaction.”4

The “essence” of metaphor is that it has the ability ( or rather one appropriates this ability) to use something with a “concrete” image in which to form relations and new forms abstracted from this originating situation. This trait creates and is resolved by a “response", giving comment and a registering of relations. The response of metaphor to a situation could be used to underline a psychological feeling or comment about place.

Another interesting feature regarding metaphor is that metaphors can display a subjectivity, they can be said to become subject to “wear and tear.”

Like all human creations metaphors are subject to wear and tear and the process of interaction between the two domains which is set in motion by a metaphor may become fainter and finally disappear.5

This interaction between “domains” that can slide and eventually fail, and in so doing become obscured , announces the arrival of the phenomenon of the “dead metaphor.” The realisation of the “dead metaphor” is that of a metaphor gradually becoming a literal expression. The metaphor and its prose becomes as it were ossified out of usage, out of the living present. On the subject of dead metaphors Draaisma remarks “ that they have lost their graphic vitality as description of human actions.” Interestingly metaphors have already as it were “been done to death” through literal representation by conceptual artists. My interest is to appropriate their ability to encapsulate differences into a relation that mediates those differences, to aid a sort of summing-up that is “placed between” and is strangely pervasive and fluid , being just held between relations that could suddenly slide or shift. Giving and creating a metaphorical attitude to accompany the experience of place.

1  G. F. Beck, The Metaphor as a mediator between Semantic and Analogic modes of thought. ( Current Anthropology 19 1978)

2  J. Martin and R. Harre', Metaphor in Science in Metaphor, Problems and Perspectives. ( Sussex 1982) 

3  Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 15.

4  1. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric. ( Oxford. OUP, 1936) page 93.

5  Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) page 13.

MA Project Development, Reflective Journal: Notes/Analysis/Comment drawn from previous journal entries.

29 November 2009

Photography a process/operating system that holds “Loss” to Dwell in its Detail. Place and its Ruin.

Representation.

The Photograph proposes a “site of Loss” within the continuum of place.

Re-Visit Methodologies and Project Proposal, what might be still relevant and valid, what has occurred to shift the field of perspectives. What has had a limiting effect on the practice in respect to the projects original sphere of operations. Was the project ever thought of in the terms of being “representational” of the practice or was it a device to engage and formulate spatial practices. Recent personal research and events with other proposals for 2010 firmly speculate the need to greatly enlarge the structure of the practice so as to house its diversities, the project is now seen as merely a trace of my activities but it must in some way be representational in its formulation to the practice. 

This bringing together of the various fine-art and visual-art processes present in my practice can only be accomplished through a multi-disciplinary curatorial based spatial relation for the encounter of others. By the nature of a proposal “ a working site” could be seen as an intervention into place from which material sensibilities from fine art practices are interwoven in a situation and experience of spatial relations. Into this field of material and spatial relations a performative element of the practitioner being present and theorising/working could help to create a praxis of informative encounters, which might directly and immediately be implemented into the situation of site. With all this activity and its resultant research derived from site this dialogue , a methodology of sublimation could be engaged that could render down the experience. Maybe in the form of a token of participation, a site driven metaphor, an image that re-constituents the experience and findings of the situation .Added to this gesture it might be possible to engender some sense of hospitality, a feeling that the “visitor” has become an active “interlocutor” for themselves and others, and finally that they have become placed as it were, a “guest” hosted by their own singularities.

Working in and with Theoretical Methodologies in The Visual Arts

Gathering Exploratory Notations : Performative/Speculative Spatial Inquiry

 

Time as a Structure,

I

M                                          a tool acts as a intervention, a memory into material

E

A                                           an apparatus can register directional occurrences into visual information to      form from their abstraction, their objectivity, new sensibilities within our subjectivity.

    Rose Graphs (directional analysis of occurrences) used to plot the occurrences and frequencies of           childhood cancers in and around power stations.

S

A  Working Sites as spaces of experiencing practical intimacies written into the poetic.

N 

     forming relations by registering phenomena’s that collide with the everyday

E 

     time has a duality, a fluidity, a, between, and, the rehearsal has ended, and with it the misreading or        chance is rendered corrected.

V

E  memory as scared time (Chris Marker) or Memory as the intersection of event and its structure, its        dimension of spatial possibilities.

    Information, a superimposed system of transparent relations. Actor-networks, 

    Thinking Sociologically.

N

    Time as an event

Fire-Space, “objects maintain “their” condition”. Law.

Praesentia-the Phenomena of something presented in the light of its time.

Diagrammatic re-enactments drawn as reflections/introspections of a situation. 

A Cosmology of sensibilities illustrated and staged through a predilection for materials and processes, a sort of material allotropy centred around theoretical and physical phenomena.

Cyanotypes, a photographic process that uses a transparency to render a permanent opposite when exposed to sun-light and fixed by washing in water.

Self reflectivity, the ability to cope (gain wisdom) from a new set of co-ordinates and possibilities.

We exist constantly reciprocating between perceptions and relations.

Field notebooks/journals allow and support poetic observation amidst theoretical and practical workings out.

Stillness and an open stage conceived by a lyrical exactitude between trace and material. 

A place between words and worlds.

Intimacy of the practical written up into the poetic

The writers ability “Milton” to hold a number of themes fluid at the same time.