Elective Affinities/Formal Structures and Sensual Properties.

 

The Geography of What Happens : Environment/Perception

The Perception of The Environment, Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Tim Ingold.

Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

“ We live amongst the specta of destructive mythologies, that have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, all culminating in the condition to exalt the self by demonising the other.”

“Eliot laid bare the sterility of contemporary life, The Waste Land where people live inauthentic lives”

A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong

The Ruins, a wasteland, fragments of a spiritual integration.

The Existential Value of Design

“Design as” Tools and Apparatuses for Spatial Practices/Deeper Social Ecologies (crafting and constructing new political genres)

The responsibility of “Design” in the development of an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences, the arts and the humanities.

An Architectural Interior that through “Listening to, and working in the Landscape” can produce a creative reverie, manifested by materials and acts; and through innovation and creativity produce a deeper ecology for learning that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius.

PRACTICAL ISSUES.

The Geography of what happens, Space, Politics and Affect.

DE-Fusing URBANISM

Paths and Thinking with them

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.”

“Macfarlane has a rare physical intelligence, and his writing affords total immersion in place, elements and the passage of time” Antony Gormley

What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?

What does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

HEIDEGGER’S TOPOLOGY

BEING, PLACE, WORLD. Jeff Malpas

The Deeper Significance of The Sensory World

Beauty, Roger Scruton

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

 

Thought In The Act : Learning through making.

 

Learning is better than teaching because it is more intensive : the more we teach/examine, the less the students can learn.

Learning and practicing techniques develops insight and dexterity, but not creative energies. Inventive construction and an attentiveness that leads to discoveries are developed, at least initially through experimentation that is undisturbed, independent, and thus without preconceptions. This experimentation is initially a playful tinkering with the material for its own sake. 

That is to say, through experimentation that is amateurish (ie not burdened by training).   

The Three Ecologies Institute

An Open Laboratory for Thinking in the Making

THOUGHT IN THE ACT

Passages in the ecology of experience

Erin Manning

Brian Massumi

Art as Experience : Interactions of Color/ Art as Experience, Josef Albers

GLASS-COLOUR-LIGHT-INTERIOR-LANDSCAPE

ART AS EXPERIENCE

WHAT IS THE CAPACITY OF THE MATERIAL

Josef Albers

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

Exploratory Practices : Archive/Collage/Mapping

Displayed Books

Part of Visiting The Archive/Waveney and Blyth Arts 2011-2018

Exploratory Workshop

Pipers Places, Richard Ingrams. John Piper. 1983

The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard. 1964

The Fate of Place, A Philosophical History. Edward S. Casey. 1997

The Experience of Landscape, paintings,drawings and photographs, Arts Council. 1987

Archaeology, Mark Dion. 1999

Kate Whiteford, Land Drawings, Installations, Excavations. 2008

Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley. 2010

This Enchanted Isle, Peter Woodcock. 2000

The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald. 1998

Land, Antony Gormley, Clare Richardson, Jeanette Winterson. 2016

The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane. 2007

A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit. 2017

Contemporary Art And Anthropology, Arnd Schneider, Christopher Wright. 2006

Melancholy And The Landscape, Jacky Bowring. 2017

The Eroded Steps, Giuseppe Penone. 1989

Mapping It Out, Alternative Atlas of Contemporary Cartographies, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 2014

Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe. 2015

Ways of Curating, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 2014

Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees, Roger Deakin. 2007

One Green Field, Edward Thomas. 2009

Claxton, Mark Cocker. 2015

The Abstracted Vessel, Ceramics in studio, John Houston. 1991

A Potter's Book, Bernard Leach. 1977

An Anthropology Of Landscape, Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum. 2017

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

Collage Cinema : Tarkovsky : Andrey Rublev the painter-monk.

 Material/Media : Landscape of Sculptural Concerns

Body and Water, cyanotype process, trace drawings : Outpost 281022

Outpost 281022

Pinhole Camera

Cyanotype Postcards

Exhibition Proposal

Monoprints/Cyanotypes on Chinese paper.

Moving Diorama.

Spiritual and Corporeal Presence.

Developing installation around themes relating to the body and water.

Baptismal Fonts, sacred sites and secular spaces.

Selected Exhibitions, Hyde 900, Space for Peace, Link Galley.

The Re-Constituted Reality : Tacita Dean/Hamburger/Sebald

The Re-Constituted Reality of Photography
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

WATERLOG
After SEBALD : Essays and Illuminations

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dean-michael-hamburger-t12880

The film Michael Hamburger was created as a result of a commission for an exhibition entitled Waterlog, held at the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery and the nearby Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in early 2007, before it travelled to The Collection in Lincoln in autumn of the same year. Tacita Dean was one of seven British artists invited to respond to ‘the wider landscape of the east of England, with the idea of the literary journey as one its overarching themes’ (curator Steven Bode in Waterlog, p.6). This literary journey is embodied in the book The Rings of Saturn (Frankfurt am Main, 1995) by the German writer WG Sebald (1944–2001), who settled permanently in England in 1970, making Norwich his home. Part memoir, part fiction and part poetic and philosophical meditation, Sebald’s book describes a meandering circular walk that begins and ends in Norwich. Dean chose to make a portrait of the poet and translator Michael Hamburger (1924–2007), whom Sebald visits in the seventh chapter of the book. She has explained:
I had a personal connection to [Michael Hamburger] and I was told he had an orchard. When I filmed him I filmed quite a lot and I talked to him about Sebald and all sorts of other things but in the end I made my film just about apples. It was in cutting the film that I realized it was the most important thing and through apples he talked about everything else as a metaphor ... My work has become about traces and capturing things before they disappear. It’s all about the recording of an atmosphere and usually it’s transient in a sort of way.


Dean’s anamorphic film is a series of almost exclusively static shots filmed in the Suffolk garden and house of her subject. Utilising natural light and unusual points-of-view – often filming either against the light or looking through windows – the looped 28 minutes of widescreen imagery constitutes a portrait whose subject is barely visible, evoking an intensely private personality. Hamburger features in semi-darkness, as a silhouette, as a pair of hands, handling apples, or seated with his back turned to the audience; in one shot only slivers of him are visible intermittently through a chink in a curtain drawn across an internal glass-paned door. This subtle visual representation is echoed in the words he speaks – a discourse exclusively focused on his apples – the different types, their origins and characteristics. Between shots of him, the camera focuses on apples on trees in the garden, rows of apples on a wooden surface in the house, and many rows and piles of books. One shot lingers on a copy, in English, of poetry by the German writer Günter Grass (born 1927). The climax of the film is a reading of one of his own poems by Hamburger, written on the occasion of the death of his friend, the poet Ted Hughes (1930–98). For Hamburger, the link of their friendship is expressed through an apple – the Devonshire Quarenden apple growing in Hughes’s garden – from pips of one of which donated by Hughes, Hamburger grew two trees. He explains that he did this, partly because he was attracted to it by its dark colour, but also because Hughes ‘was a very good friend and it was a kind of link between us if I could have this apple in a Suffolk garden where it didn’t really belong’. His poem lingers on the apple as remembrance and the notion of the fruit’s continuity in contrast with human mortality, ending with the words: ‘hardened, mellowed the fruit to outlast our days’. Dean extends the theme of mortal transience by following Hamburger’s reading with a shot of him smoking in semi-darkness, succeeded by views of a rainbow in the sky above his house. This climax is rendered more poignant by the fact that Hamburger died in June 2007, only a few months after Dean completed her film.

Michael Hamburger is the most recent in a series of film portraits Dean has made that include Mario Merz 2003 (a portrait of the artist by chance also made shortly before his death), The Uncles 2004 (footage of two of the artist’s uncles talking about the family’s relation to Ealing Film Studios, set up by Basil Dean, her grandfather) and Presentation Sisters 2005 (featuring a group of five nuns living in Cork, Ireland). All share with Michael Hamburger an elliptical approach to portraiture which functions as a kind of poetical allegory. Dean’s work is based on networks of coincidental linkages that originate – usually invisibly – with the artist, and more visibly with a person, thing or event in the world, extending outwards into the larger macrocosm of time and space. She shares this preoccupation with Sebald; her essay on him, first printed as an artist’s book as part of a seven volume publication in 2003 (Göttingen and Paris) and reprinted in Waterlog (pp.92–109), describes her personal connection to him through a series of historical coincidences. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald describes Hamburger’s emigration from Germany with his family to the United Kingdom in 1933, the fears and loss of emigration, his memories of his native Berlin and the ways in which they inform his dreams. He meditates on the question of why his identification with Hamburger, as a fellow German who has made his home in England, should run deeper than a question of national identity, writing, ‘how is that one perceives oneself in another human being or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor? ... why it was that on my first visit to Michael’s house I instantly felt as if I lived or had once lived there, in every respect precisely as he does, I cannot explain.’ (The Rings of Saturn, London 2002, pp.182–3.)

In common with all Dean’s films created since 2001, Michael Hamburger contains no titles, credit sequences or additional sound, other than what is present during filming. It is projected from a booth onto a screen on the opposite wall in a darkened room, showing on a continuous loop. It was produced in an edition of four, of which Tate’s copy is the first.

Further reading:
Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, 2007, pp.40–7, reproduced 42–4.

Elizabeth Manchester
July 2009


Art as Spatial Practice.
10 Days in the Laundry, Winchester.

Photograph (13) Illuminated Cathedral
Photograph (350) Anthropocene

Spliced Interior : Waverley Abbey
Pinhole Camera, exposure and movements within the ruined interior.
Russell Moreton

Blue and Gray Paintings/Drawings on Glass : CELL COURT DOMAIN FIELDS

Pattern and Chaos/Liminality/Tectonics
Architectural surface for a Library,  raw materials, light, silence and solitude. 


Subjectivity and The Instant
The Numinous

In the last decades of the twentieth Century, philosophy witnessed a marked preoccupation with the discontinuous and the disruptive.
Translator's Preface, Eileen Rizo-Patron.
Intuition of the Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

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

The phenomenal nature of the idea : Architectural Intertwining/Environs, object scripted inquiry

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Working Notes/Holding in Place

Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research

Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements

Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive 

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry

Spatial Collage 2010

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

Idea is, 

the invisible of this world, which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible

Merleau Ponty

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for the materialization of the idea force

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy

Camouflage

Neil Leach

For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.

Mimesis, 19.

New Concepts of Architecture

Existence, Space and Architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson

Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains.

Heraclitus

Rethinking Architecture

Neil Leach

Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343

Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360

Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition, annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.

Tracing Eisaenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences

Robert Mangold

Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.

Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.

Space Between People

Degrees of virtualization

Mario Gerosa

Adaptive Architectural Design

Device-Apparatus

Place

Function

Adaptation

The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 69

Building The Drawing

The Illegal Architect

Immaterial Architecture

Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures

Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.

The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity.

The Relational Perspective : The Archive, correlated and entangled.

 Outpost 201022

The Archive.

The Relational Perspective.

Correlated and Entangled.

The archive governs the said and the unsaid, the recorded and the omitted, and the aim of the knowledge archaeologist is to learn about the past via its material remainders, retrieving and reconstructing the archive to show how it can shape the construction of a historical meaning.

Foucault.

Despite a gaze that is seemingly looking back, the archive is always dominated by a sense of the future, a desire for eternity that reaches beyond death.

Derrida.

Text.

The Discursive Material.

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification. Comparative rates of flow on these lines produce phenomena of relative slowness and viscosity, or on the contrary, of acceleration and rupture.

The beauty  of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organisation, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.

Assemblage.

Deleuze and Guattari.

Surprising and meticulous the archive provides an understanding of the key stages in the artist's development. The sketches, workbooks, models and photographs speak of a creative moment in the past, but form a bridge to a potential future action, underlying the intellectual and stylistic consistency that distinguishes the artist's works in the visual arts, theatre, architecture and graphic design.

The archive here is neither an accumulation nor a scientific and objective rendering of materials, but a theatre of the memory where several characters pursue one another and interweave on stage, revealing their identities past and present.

Alfredo Pirri : RWD-FWD 2016

Curated by IIaria Gianni, RWD-FWD is the first appointment of the project I pesci non portano fucili (Fish cannot carry guns), whose title is a quote devoted to Philip K. Dick's work The Devine Invasion (1981), in which the author imagines an unarmed and fluid society, comparable to the open sea.

The RWD and FWD (rewind and forward) buttons will always be remembered with nostalgia by the generation that lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Re-listening to or re-seeing what has already passed and then, at the mere press of a button, projecting oneself into the future has enabled us to feel powerful ahead of our time. By elevating this simple action to a metaphor for the unique sense of omnipotence, light-heartedness and modernity that distinguished the 1980s.

Not only does the material conserved by the artist take our thoughts back in time, it also allows us to veer towards a time yet to come, opening up a past that always hints at a potential future.

An Attitude To History.

Castelvecchio.

Carlo Scarpa

Jannis Kounellis.

Kairos, the movement and its moment.

Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

SPAB.

Society for preservation of ancient buildings.

The First Markings/Demarcations and Localities.

Leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space.

Lefebvre.

The exhibition takes the form of an open and participatory narrative script, conducting spectators through an archaeology that records and presents personal moments, movements and stories inscribed within a more universal cosmology.

Iiaria Gianni. 2017

Each step of this extensive shared project, conceived as a journey inside Alfredo Pirri's work, thought process and research, will be independent, yet, at the same time in dialogue with others.

The choice to use the artist's studio as an exhibition space comes out of the desire to give the audience the possibility to discover the venue in which he usually meditates, collects his source materials, his documents and creates his works. For this occasion a selection of material (traces of research) produced and preserved by the artist, both physical and conceptual witnesses his thinking process.

Studio as an immersive space, a place of meditation, inhabited by forms sometime evocative of vegetable ones, and linking up to the work of the botanist Anna Atkins, a pioneer in the study of flora using cyanotype and author of Photographs of British Algae : Cyanotype Impressions.

The Archive/Exhibition.

References what remains and what is moving forward, outlining a past and prefiguring a future.

The large-format cyanotype prints record the phases of a work process and what it leaves behind.

The archive provided by Alfredo Pirri declares itself as an attempt to collect, as fully as possible, and to conserve a past, albeit in an idiosyncratic order with unexpected and fragmentary material which is an inevitable part of a life and a creative process.