Project Prototyping : The Modulation of Translucency

 Outpost 290422

Mattering : Forming agencies with materials.

Building Embedded Knowledge.

Cognitive Modulation.

Transitions, Circulation, Feedback Loops.

The Project is The Prototype 

Proto-Typing for Architects, Mark Burry, Jane Burry, 2016.

The Disaster Area, J. G. Ballard.

Foster Associates, Glass ramp, Crescent Wing, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, 1988-91.

The Re-Enchantment of Architecture.

In today's architecture, opacity and depth is often replaced by the enmeshing and layering of translucent, [perforated and transparent surfaces. The currently popular application of screening veils on top of glass surfaces is clearly an attempt to reintroduce mystery, ambiguity, fragmentation, and a distinct tactile eroticism to all-glass facades. Even ornament and decoration have reappeared in entirely new forms, as images imprinted or engraved on sheets of glass.

Glass is, again, transforming into the ideal material for this new layered and eroticized hapticity.

The Modulation of Translucency

Simulacrum, Andreas Horlitz, 2006.

It is the selection of medium, the combination of mirrored and engraved glass mounted in a light box, that enables the viewer to grasp the complexity of the selected theme.

St Gobain, glass research at Aubervilliers of 300 tests to obtain a new substance from clear glass.

Glass is a material of the alchemist and the magician: while being nearly invisible, it isolates, separates and unites at the same time. Glass acquires cosmic and metaphysical qualities, the multiple, subtly changing visual character of glass adds to its fascination.

Transparency transforms into a reflection, immateriality into mass, light into darkness.

The Poetics of Glass/Immateriality and Transparency, 2003.

The result was a translucent non transparent glass, that let the light through but not the view: a glass that diffused the light not by reflecting it on its surface but from its very texture. This modulation of the translucency was the natural consequence of the uneven distribution of tiny bits of glass of different sizes, and of their partly “deglazing” during fusion.

Pierre Soulages decided to do without the edges that usually delineate the shapes of the windows, thus enhancing the pure and powerful architectural lines of the windows, and this move incidentally bridged his work to the early alabaster panels that were being used  for churches before the invention of stained glass. The cartoon work was started with the contribution of Jean-Dominique Fleury and Eric Savalli. A particular process was used: the lead work was marked with black adhesive tape of the same width, stretched over a white and smooth surface of the same dimensions as the window. As it could be removed many times, the tape permitted to elicit the right line by looking from a short distance.

Jean-Dominique Fleury remembers: Soulage's eye drawing from a distance, monitoring the line, the stretched tapes outlining the spaces, and the straight lines of the cartoon, adding blackness, thickness and graphical vigor. 

Building Durable

Robust Practice

Local Interactions

Making its way towards a definite geographical location.

No question of duration.

Lost all interest in the problem of how long.

Holding someone, some thing, an architecture by the hand.

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Immateriality and Transparency

The Poetics of Glass.

Architecture is fundamentally a haptic art-form and the atmosphere of alienation in today's architecture seems to arise from its exclusive visuality. We experience our being as an embodied haptic experience not as a retinal picture.

The multiple essences of the material, its simultaneous brittleness and malleability, hardness and fragility, immateriality and solidity, heaviness and weightlessness.

A work of art or architecture is not a symbol that represents or indirectly portrays something outside itself; it is an existential image or object that places itself directly in our experience.

In the basic alchemy of architecture there are only two fundamental categories of matter: opaque matter and transparent matter. One creates separation, privacy and shadow, the other provides connectedness, view and light.

The ultimate success of architecture will always be measured by its experiential qualities and its 

psychic impact.

We animate our buildings unconsciously; we encounter buildings the way we encounter creatures of the living world.

From Form to Matter.

Whereas Modernism was primarily concerned with form, structure and space, the past three decades of artistic work have introduced a deepened interest in matter and time; the depth, opacity, weight, patina and ageing of materials have emerged in all forms of art. 

This development has been equally clear in painting, sculpture and architecture. The Arte Povera Movement, the physical works of Richard Serra and Eduardo Chillida, as well as the material poetry and expressions of Jannis Kounellis and Anselm Kiefer all exemplify this new interest in materiality.

This shift results from a change in our attitudes towards place and time, signalling a new desire for  rootedness and perhaps, paradoxically of an acceptance of our own mortality. We need to feel enrooted in our world and to experience our belonging to a specific place and time. Enrootedness, rather than the ideal of abstract and placeless generality, makes the the thought of death tolerable.

Temporary Darkroom

Loading/Unloading Pinhole Camera.

Robert Macfarlane

Landmarks

To a three – or four-year-old, “landscape” is not backdrop or wallpaper, it is a medium, teeming with opportunity and volatile in its textures. Time if fluid and loopy, not made of increment or interval. Time can flow slow enough that a mess of green moss on the leg of a tree can be explored for an age, and fast enough that to run over leaves is to take off and fly.

What we bloodlessly call “place” is to young children a wild compound of dream, spell and substance: place is somewhere they are always in, never on.

Anna Shepherd's belief in bodily thinking gives The Living Mountain a contemporary relevance. We are increasingly separated from contact with nature. We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb.

The Living Mountain/Phenomenology of Perception.

For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had cleaved out a false divide between the body and the mind. Throughout his career he argued for the foundational role that sensory perception plays in our understanding of the world as well as in our reception of it. He argued that knowledge is “felt”: that our bodies think and know in ways that precede cognition. Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined. The body “incarnates” our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, “embedded” in the “flesh” of the world. He described this embodied experience as “knowledge in the hands”; our body “grips” the world for us and is “ our general medium for having a world”. And the material world itself is therefore not the unchanging object presented by the natural sciences, but instead endlessly relational.

We are co-natural with the world and it with us – but we only ever see it partially.

Architectures For Perception : Ceramic/Glass/Wood/Paper

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

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments
Architectures for Perception
Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts
Charles Goodwin

Leach Pottery, Studio and Museum
A Potter's Book
Bernard Leach

Adventures of the Fire, Vessels Through Time
Ceramic Pavilion
People make space, and space contains people
Ceramic space and life

Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape
David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they  need to be experienced.
Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from  the message they convey.

MATERIAL MATTERS
ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE
Katie Lloyd Thomas

Organising Structures : Socially Shared/Culturally Shaped

Organising Structures : Artist Notebook, Body/Landscape

Architectural Surface : Constructional Forms in Glass













https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24505820206/in/dateposted-public/

Experimental Vision : Alchemy and the experimental fields of photography

https://russellmoreton.tumblr.com/post/189388625662/experimental-vision-research-collage-1-by

Film Abstracts : The Ruins of Cinema

Heuristic Material : Collage

1. Encouraging a person to learn, discover, understand, or solve problems on his or her own, as by experimenting, evaluating possible answers or solutions, or by trial and error: a heuristic teaching method.

2. Serving to indicate or point out; stimulating interest as a means of furthering investigation.

http://offscreen.com/view/personal_memory

Landscape of Found Objects : Archaeological Photogram

Simplicity and Complexity : Artist/Archivist (playing/thinking with material practices)

Archive Research Material
Developing non-linearity/entanglements throughout creative practice

Curiously, we live in a conflicted time of both accelerated change and business-as-usual, a time of both transformation and stagnation. For the first time in history we have a global network that is in constant and instant communication with itself-everywhere. We have the much examined problems of ecological stress, urban alienation, and spiritual confusion.
The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe, Charles Jencks.

Emergence/Self Organisation
Maternal Body : Clay Impression and Fragmented Form

Pastoral Space: Material, Inquiry and Craft.

Material Agency : Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris
Visualising Environmental Agency

"Agents are defined as persons or things, which have the ability and intention to "cause" something "in the vicinity" or "in the mileau" to happen ( Gell 1998)"
"These latter artefacts are described with the term "index", to remove the appellation "art" and to imply that they are indexes of agency."
Some Stimulating Solutions, Andrew Cochrane.

1000 "pots" performative site 2011. The Yard, Winchester.


Auguries into the maternal body. Un-fired clay and silica sand.

Constructed in-situ at the Yard, Winchester.
A life-size record and memory of a human presence as a site for mutual introspection.

Inspired in part from the novel  " The  Children of Men "  by P D James.

CLAY : Speculative City : From Pilgrim to Tourist
From Pilgrim To Tourist (or a short history of identity). Zygmunt Bauman.

Clay drawing/situation/collage based on a performative script/reading.

Human trace drawing with unfired clay bodyscape

Artist Statement/Chapel Arts Residency

Practitioner using the creative receptiveness of material together with the inclusion of drawing to harbour transits and passages of human presence, vulnerabilities centred around the human condition. My work adopts strategies which articulate a sense of absence and anonymity within the abandonment of the work to its location. I feel drawn to this registering of passage, encounter together with its farewell. The choice of materials gathered together implies a personal geography, with both an emotional and aesthetic sense of locality and place. The performative recording by physical means which renders itself as a trace of human presence, now becomes a vacant territory open for the consideration of others.
My work continues to investigate this sense of material response with the performative trace of a human absences. The place-ment of these acts attempts to promote thresholds from which to reflect upon spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.
Currently working in clay, low fired to produce and promote a fragile vessel. This vessel is installed to act as a dwelling presence reverberating in a resting place. from which work is drawn into the human form to register a surface of absences resulting from past gestures and solitudes.

Russell Moreton a visual artist uses simple gestures of drawn Human traces gathered and presented amongst natural materials. Exploring themes around the Human condition, vulnerability and abandonment. Materials are employed to further underpin our sense of place and time. The act and gesture of drawing adds a ephemeral mark amongst the materiality and locality of place. Currently using clay to register these themes, installing work Augury Vessel into Chapel Arts as part of their research residency programme.

Reflective Journal/Spatial Practices
Spatial/Visual Coordinates

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/russellmoreton/

Exploring the individual constituent parts of painting : Cyanotype substance on paper.

Outpost 010422

Delicate Cutting

Symbolic of the 'connective tissue' which the photograph itself embodies, the pressure of the cold glass against warm skin glorifies the terms of the medium's indexicality, whilst also pointing out a fundamental disparity.

Notes On The Index, Krauss.

IMMATERIALITY AND TRANSPARENCY : Juhani Pallasmaa.

Technique and Expression in Glass Architecture, 2003.

The Poetics Of Glass

Glass And Modernity

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

The Technological Imperative

Between Polarities

Technique And Poetry

Return To Animistic Thought

Illusions And Reflections

From Form To Matter

The Secret Life Of Buildings

Mirrors And Symbols

Perfection And Imperfection

The Re-Enchantment Of Architecture

Introduction To Modernity

Henri Lefebvre

SPAB

Leaded Glass, repair, restoration, contemporary use of glass, architectural models in ceramic/glass.

In its framed state, Rothko's painting was constricted and not able to exist, as it should, on its; in other words, to be what it was intended to be.

Robert Ryman : The Dallas Installation.

Exploring the individual constituent parts of painting.

Untitled 1980-2003

Oil on steel plate with four fasteners, 48.3 x 48.3cm.

Page 1998

Oil and graphite on stretched linen, 38.4 x 38.4cm.

A series of visual experiences (interpretations on the art of painting), bracing,sensual, austere and luxuriant forms, calibrated to register from one work of art to the next.

The remarkable thing about Robert Ryman is that he has been working within his own matrix of questions, problems, and definitions for the past fifty years, and is still finding ways to make his art evolve from what has gone before.

Going beyond its appearance, to answer the question of what Ryman's art might mean is, of course, the challenge of abstraction itself, a challenge that has proven to be central to the art of the past century up to the present moment and that can arguably be seen still to define many of the issues of the art of our time.

Robert Ryman has investigated a basic set of closely related questions: how are paintings made, what are they made of, how are they installed in gallery and museum spaces, and hoe are these works experienced by those who come amidst them?

Ryman has concentrated on this specific line of inquiry by exploiting a highly select range of painting's parts: surface, support, medium, placement before the viewer, and importantly colour.

Ryman's art is about, and is itself, the paint on the surface of a material that is affixed to or hung on a lighted wall in a gallery or a museum.

It is a square made from any number of materials, and it shows exactly how it was made, what type of brushes or other instrument the artist used in applying liquid pigment, what its surface is, how its paint is affected by underpainting (the placing of one pigment over another to render a visual sensation), how its colours behave, what its material support is, and how it is placed before the eyes (scale has much to do with this), whether on a flat wall or somehow otherwise installed in relation to that wall.

Ryman describes the existence of something mysterious in Rothko with which Ryman was intrigued, so much so that he remembered its effect decades later. What stayed with Ryman, it appears, were Rothko's “form, structure, surface, and light,”

By the extreme boiling down of a painting's constituent parts, Rothko presented the viewer with an experience unlike any other to be found in contemporary life: that of a work of art defining itself and then acting strictly within this definition according to its own set of rules.

What was radical about Rothko, was that there was no reference to any representational influence. There was colour, there was form,  there was structure, the surface, the light, the nakedness of it, just there. 

What Rothko was after, the invocation of universal themes of human existence voiced through a vocabulary of numinous light-filled forms, was clearly not something Ryman pursued in his own art. Over and over, Ryman makes openly visible the way he paints and what he paints with: the meaning of the work seems to radiate insistently from these facts. 

Charles Wylie, 2005.