Studio Assemblages : Spatial Instant/Relationscapes

 Ever instant has a thousand memories : Henri Bergson 

Anthropomorphic Form : Photogram with shells/text

 Landscape of Found Objects : Archaeological Photograms

Architectural Interiors : Collage and Photography

(For architecture) to become highly human it must represent not only the beautiful action of the space, but above all that of time. For this matter the most refined art, the most difficult and dangerous, is that of patina.
Luis Barragan

Red Wall/Pace Gallery London 2014
Robert Mangold

Waverley Project/Research Collage
Design based photogram
Russell Moreton


Speculative Drawings : Becoming Spatial/Figural

An Elemental Imagination Unfolding : Intuition of The Instant

Gaston Bachelard
Intuition of The Instant

A preoccupation with the discontinuous and the disruptive

"relentlessly  hauling the cumulative detritus of our past"

 Analogue Shadow Projection  (Townshend Rock)

Slowdive

Sugar for the pill

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/23826107748/in/dateposted-public/

Making Entanglements : Spatial Collage, 2010

Lead,photographic ( pinhole) and inkjet visual material from flickr stream, fixing tapes, cyanotype on tracing paper,pierced and repositioned elements on paper.

Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields

Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence. 

What are we learning about in the concrete particularity of this space?

Leon van Schaik : Spatial Intelligence

‘Architecture is the product of our spatial intelligence, of its workings in establishing the mental spaces of every individual, and of the spatial values shared by groups.’

The Retreat, Upper Lawn Pavilion. 1959

This country retreat presents itself as a glass box but is grounded by its relationship to the pre-existing masonry of a walled garden. 

Leon van Schaik comments that the little glass house retreat built by Peter and Alison Smithson around a walled garden evokes for him memories(mental spaces) of being a schoolboy working in a conservatory in a walled garden at Cliveden, such that the notion of a retreat is this ideal of being built into the walls of an existing walled garden.

You rise up into its glazed upper storey with views over the rolling hills beyond and perch atop the wall on the edge of a threshold space carved out of the woods, or remove yourself from view sink down to the ground and sit with your back to the wall.

Observatories : Boundaries/Mapping Spatial Representations

Entanglements of matter and meaning.

Karen Barad, Meeting The Universe Halfway, 2007.

Meeting the Universe Halfway is an ambitious book with far-reaching implications for numerous fields in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In this volume, Karen Barad, theoretical physicist and feminist theorist, elaborates her theory of agential realism. Offering an account of the world as a whole rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms, agential realism is at once a new epistemology, ontology, and ethics. The starting point for Barad's analysis is the philosophical framework of quantum physicist Niels Bohr. Barad extends and partially revises Bohr's philosophical views in light of current scholarship in physics, science studies, and the philosophy of science as well as feminist, poststructuralist, and other critical social theories. In the process, she significantly reworks understandings of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity, and objectivity. In an agential realist account, the world is made of entanglements of "social" and "natural" agencies, where the distinction between the two emerges out of specific intra-actions. Intra-activity is an inexhaustible dynamism that configures and reconfigures relations of space-time-matter. In explaining intra-activity, Barad reveals questions about how nature and culture interact and change over time to be fundamentally misguided. And she reframes understanding of the nature of scientific and political practices and their "interrelationship." Thus she pays particular attention to the responsible practice of science, and she emphasizes changes in the understanding of political practices, critically reworking Judith Butler's influential theory of performativity. Finally, Barad uses agential realism to produce a new interpretation of quantum physics, demonstrating that agential realism is more than a means of reflecting on science; it can be used to actually do science.

Norman Lockyer Observatory, Seaton.

Celestial Sphere : Stars and Dust Particles. 

Astronomical archive

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.

Borderlands/Parallel Texts : Artist and Archivist

Parellel Texts : Interviews and Interventions about Art.

Victor Burgin.

Working Notes

Art for me is a way of thinking.

Precisely its difference.

'a sympathetic resonance'

Sociological definition of the artist.

Art can be politically dangerous and subversive.

'artists' who play the kind of roles that make them attractive to the media – their work takes the form of similarly media-friendly 'provocations'.

Suspicious of the definitions of the artist, and of political art.

Encountering the world, to bring 'things' into representations (failed attempts that become the impetus for the next work).

That kind of pandering to money and Sunday-supplement sensibilities has almost entirely sucked the meaning out of art displayed in museums, where all art is now expected to provide a crowd-pulling spectacle.

Contemporary manifestations (zeitgeist/biennial), cultural formations of late money-market capitalism.

'Fashioning' conceptual art : The 'idea' is the alibi for the high price.

The confluence of the art world with the worlds of fashion and popular music: worlds of money, youth, beauty, celebrity, a 'zeitgeist' that changes as the wind blows.

The creative use of a neurosis.

Introducing semiotic concepts as analytical tools so that we could talk about the meaning of the work outside of a purely aesthetic framework.

Wild Analysis/Deflecting Transference

Object Relations Theory

Whatever makes one depressed also makes one work.

17 : 2005

From Sarah Thornton, 'Zeitgeitst and Transmission; Interview with Victor Burgin' (26 April 2005)

previously unpublished.

What is an artist?

One can answer that question in an essentialist or a materialist way.

I prefer a materialist answer : an artist is somebody who is recognized as such in the society in which he or she lives. 'Art' is their occupation. It may not be their only occupation, bit it is the occupation which is taken as defining them. They produce certain kinds of objects - written , performed, painted, sculpted, film or photographic - within recognized 'art' institutions. These can be literally 'concrete' institutions - such as museums, galleries and art schools – but more fundamentally they are discursive institutions: art criticism, art history, art theory and so on.

And what is the essentialist definition of the artist?

It is someone of a particular heightened sensibility, who sees the world with a clarity – or in terms of a vision – that is denied to lesser mortals, and generously gives the benefit of their vision to others, generally in exchange for money.

It seems to me important not to take oneself for an 'artist', as this invites alienation in an image given from outside, and can lead to the worst kinds of compliant bad faith.

What kind of artist are you?

I'm a 'realist', but not in the nineteenth-century sense. I'm more a 'phenomenological' realist. There is some 'thing' in my encounter with the world, something that seems to have no place in the field of representations. I try to bring that 'thing' into representation. The history of my work is a series of failed attempts, with each failure the impetus for the next work.

Art for me is a way of thinking – a way of thinking about one's experience, a way of thinking about the world – and therefore unavoidably discursive.

But the other kinds of art you mention – the soundbite, market-friendly, not-too-far-from-popular-culture-that-you-have-to-make-a-great-effort-to-understand-it . . that kind of work – is no less embedded in language; it is dependent on the language of art criticism, publicity and promotion, salerooms and auction houses. It is embedded in those variously interdependent discursive formations, but it doesn't critically engage with them. It surfs on those discourses.

What is the opposite of surfing?

Boat-building?

Should art be part of the entertainment industry?

What do you expect of art that makes it different from entertainment?

Precisely its difference. The art I value is often judged 'difficult'. But the supposed difficulty of the work comes merely from the fact that it cannot be understood in terms of the established categories and conventions on which entertainment relies.

With, art there is more work to do, it takes time, but you are prepared to give the time because there is something that touches you in some way – a sympathetic resonance between yourself and the work.

Most of my generation of 'conceptual' artists rejected the material object commodity form of art. So the fact that this object, having returned with a vengeance, now wears a sash printed with the word 'conceptual' is poignantly ironic. A concept is not something in a wrapper, like a cheese on a supermarket shelf; it is part of an intellectual system. Ideas belong to contexts of ideas, to processes of thinking. What we have now are gestures masquerading as ideas, and ideas for stunts.

Do you think that your success as a writer and critical thinker has, in anyway, undermined your success as an artist?

My writing is a reflection upon issues arising in my work, an articulation of those issues otherwise. I suppose most artists find that they work in a coming and going between intuition and critical reflection. All I'm doing is making that process explicit. One of the main reasons for doing this is that I long ago decided, on political grounds, that teaching was an integral part of my practice. I wanted to produce texts that would be useful to my students. So I wrote essays that arise out of interests I have in my visual work, but which reflect on issues that are sufficiently general to apply not only to my own work but to be of use to other people.

I think there is increasing intolerance of role transgression, and a higher expectation that you should observe your role. The idea of a Renaissance man, the fact you could be an artist/writer/photographer/theorist/teacher, is not credible for many people.

I am in the art world but not of the art world. An increased distance from the art world has not made me feel more distant from my work as an artist; on the contrary, I feel closer.

I agree with Theodore Reich, who said: 'Every artist should be analyzed, but not too much.' I also agree with Winnicott's notion of the 'creative use of a neurosis'. He did not see the problem as being one of 'curing' a neurosis, but rather one of making it positively productive.

I was concerned to get students to think about their class position as artists, and about the place of their art activity within a broader socio-political setting. For example, I would ask them if they knew who cleaned the room they were sitting in, and when, and how much the cleaner was paid. Then when we came to the work itself, I insisted on what might then be called a 'scientific' criticism – that's to say, a way of discussing work that doesn't rely upon individual response and personal opinion, but rather draws on a shared and testable interpretive language.

In a pluri-discursive and multi-subcultural context the 'one to one' is probably the only way of engaging with an individual student's particular preoccupations.

Why are value judgements inappropriate?

Because they say less about the artwork than they say about my personal sensibilities or taste. I have to allow for the fact that I may be completely blind to the merits of the work. My job is to try to enlarge the scope of their critical thinking about the work – whatever my opinion of its merits.

Spatial Research : The Kiln/Garden/Observatory

Working Ideas
Assemblage of Spatial Concerns
The Yard, Winchester. 2012

Spatial Representation/Practice : Discursive photography and documentation

 Blind Process

A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.

Jacques Monod

The Poetics of Space : The house, from cellar to garret. The significance of the hut.

 

"He will revive the primitivity and the specificity of the fears. In our civilization, which has the same light everywhere, and puts electricity in its cellars, we no longer go to the cellar carrying a candle. But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar."

 

Gaston Bachelard.

 

"All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency."

 

Jacques Monod,

The Human/Straw Dogs, John Gray.

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

Jana Sterbak

Remote Control 1989

<a href="http://art-history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/sterbak.html" rel="noreferrer nofollow">art-history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/sterbak.html</a>

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, 

Sensorium : A Partial Taxonomy, Caroline A. Jones.

Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.
Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006

Immersive
the "cave" paradigm, the virtual helmet, the black-box video, the earphone set

Alienated
taking technology and "making it strange," exaggerating attributes to provoke shock, using technologies to switch senses or induce disorientation

Interrogative
work that repurposes  or remakes devices to enhance their insidious or wondrous properties; available data translated into sensible systems

Residual
work that holds on to an earlier technology, repurposes or even fetishizes an abandoned one

Resistant
work that refuses to use marketed technologies for their stated purpose; work that pushes viewers to reject technologies or subvert them

Adaptive
work that takes up technologies and extends or applies them for creative purposes, producing new subjects for the technologies in question

David Bowie - Five Years (live 1976 - Nassau Coliseum)

Ruins

David Sylvian & Robert Fripp - Earthbound [Starblind] (original full len...

David Sylvian & Robert Fripp - Blinding Light Of Heaven

Objects and Traces : Visual Archaeology/Morn Hill Abstractions/Winchester.

Objects and Traces : Visual Archaeology, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

Spatial Gathering/Murmuration : The Fleeting Cathedral/Vast Forgetting

We live our lives sunk in vast forgetting

 Milan Kundera, IGNORANCE.

Cyanotype from a site drawing, Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral 2011.

Human mapping of social groups wthin the duration of the event.

Mono Print : Cyanotype process on paper, 52x42cm.