Littoral Environments : Arts and Subjectivity (the making of things)

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

The making of things and discovering relationships.

Constructing site and situation based methodologies.

Playing out in the public realm, exploring through spatial engagements the "virtues" of courage, caution, confidence and risk.

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM : Kairos

 Outpost 290722

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM.

Maya Deren's 1948 film, Meditation on Violence.

Two parabolic arcs describe three types of Chinese boxing in a single continuous movement. 

The last portion of the film is printed in reverse motion.

DURATION

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid, flowing time is interwined with an experience of being where past, present and future merge. If one extreme of time is the experiential time of individual being, the other extreme is the abstract, anonymous, measured time of science.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

The Great Hall of Ascension can receive 10,000 people; its floor and ceiling are made of glass. It is intersected by the glass cages of nine elevators, each rising to its respective destination, traversing the other interiors with a discreet hiss. On the elevator shafts, electronic billboards announce different libraries. With fragments of texts, titles, names, songs descending in a continuous movement, the entire building seems supported by signs in a perpetual countdown to takeoff.

Rem Koolhaas.

Into The Frame Enters

The foreignness of the intimate or the violence and charity of perception.

R. Bruce Elder.

Kairos

The Movement and its Moment

Being Alive

Tim Ingold

Jannis Kounellis

At Castelvecchio, Sparpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition.

An Attitude to History, Carlo Scarpa.

It cannot be, it has gone!

They believe that we can do the same sort of work in the same spirit as our forefathers whereas for good or evil we are completely changed and we cannot do the work they did.

William Morris.

There is no stage at which human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre.

Autopoises and Cognition

The Realization of the Living

Humberto R. Maturana

Francisco J. Varela

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation, by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process. 

For colour and against line and drawing.

Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator's construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on film-making, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

The concept of pure colour in a monochrome.

I seek to put the spectator in front of the fact that the colour is an individual, a character, a personality. I solicit a receptivity from the observer placed before my works.

This permits him to consider everything that effectively surrounds the monochrome painting.

Thus he can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him.

Thus, perhaps, he can enter into the world of colour.

Yves Klein.

Colourspace that is not visible but within which one is impregnated.

Parallax and the free movement of the landscape through physical forms.

To resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Presenting Pure Pigment.

I did not like colours ground with oil. They seemed to be dead. 

What pleased me above all was pure pigments in powder like the ones I often saw at the wholesale colour dealers.

They had a burst of natural and extraordinarily autonomous life.

Living and tangible colour material.  

Magdalena Broska

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Fire Pictures

Rain Sculptures

Air Architecture

Cosmogonies

Although it was a room painted totally in white, the artist spoke of an extraordinarily intense experience of blue: it was a true blue, the blue of the blue depths of space.

The demonstration of nothingness, the void of a white space.

Klein wanted to demonstrate the idea of a development from blue, a visible, tangible colour, via white to immaterialised blue.

There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within, in which Bachelard's beautiful sentence resides: First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then a blue depth.

Blue blood of sensibility

Bachelard/Shelley.

A wide variety of different expressions for the process of progressive dematerialisation.

The release of colour from the binding agent.

Work with dematerialised materials such as the elements fire, water, air and dust.

The term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema's historical and cultural architectures of reception into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined.

Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema, seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices.

Film/Expanded Cinema. 

Temporal Spaces/Surfaces.

Transparency/Translucency, littoral and Phenomenal.

Mark Burry and Jane Burry

Prototyping for Architects.

Steven Holl 

Parallax.

Designing buildings as serial prototypes.

Spatial Clocks/Theoretical Objects/Entanglements.

Materials imbue the wind-permeable wall with rich textile qualities.

The whole house acted as a prototype, not only showcasing the latest developments in green technology but also exploring at full scale, the performance of the house and the way in which people interacted with it.

The artists wanted to make the same gesture that many cultures make when marking the land through which they have passed, the placing  of one stone on top of another to signal a route back.

Immaterial Architectures : Raveningham Pavilion and The Architecture of Natural Light

Christopher Wilmarth ; Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Other Architecture

Constructing Metaphysical Space

Wilmarth's art reveals his essential concern with the mystical and physical properties of light, especially the ways in which light evokes reverie and generates sensations of space and containment.

The Architecture of Natural Light : Henry Plummer

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time

Intensity and integrity of Wilmarth's practice/vision.

PROCESSION

Choreography of light/moving eye

VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light/diaphanous film

Wilmarth made possibly his strongest, most beautiful works on paper, exploring a new level of expression while retaining continuity with past work.

ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light/through a porous screen

These drawings also contain allusions to the human presence. Their haunting, foreboding quality is prefigured in the grave, austere tones of some of the glass and steel structures.

CANALIZATION

Channelling of light/through a hollow mass

The duality of light and shadow and contrasts between abstraction and representation continue to be central concerns in his final drawings.

ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood

Wilmarth's sculptures from the early 1980's are influenced by the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.To affirm Mallarme's emphasis on the spiritual, the artist used a simple ovoid form, evoking a multitude of symbols, including the human head. These ovoids were made of blown glass, which Wilmarth viewed as "frozen breath". The artist pursued this figurative impulse into the mid 1980s, combining the anthropomorphic ovoid shapes with the larger abstract forms of his earlier sculpture.

LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

Wilmarth composed with planes of delicate colour and light, placing plates of blackened steel behind translucent sheets of etched glass imbued with a luminous, greenish cast.

"He employed a painterly technique that emphasized the tactility and fichness of his materials, which like an alchemist he persistently sought to transform. He continually examined the concept of duality: contrasts between light and shadow, transparency and opacity, heaviness and weightlessness, materiality  and ethereality, form and spirit are repeatedly presented; the synthesis of geometric with organic forms, the range between abstraction and representation are constantly explored."

Laura Rosenstock, catalogue essay.

Paintings, spatial field grounds, layered paint and paper with photographic inclusions.

 Outpost 080722

Paintings, spatial field grounds, layered paint and paper with photographic inclusions.

Output of Artists' Studios

Vital space for production, presentation, connection and exchange.

The cyanotype  process in contemporary art practice.

Cyanotype Collages, Karl Blossfeldt

Cyanotype canvas, yellow ochre, sun mappings, spatial space/time forms, apparatuses and diagrams.

Harleston drawing/research, access to archive material.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Enmeshed Experience

A complex interlocking of time, light, material, and detail creates the cinematic whole wherein we can no longer distinguish individual elements.

Filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky speaks of cinematic enmeshing in his description of a scene from Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai. A medieval Japanese village. A fight is going on between some horsemen and the samurai who are on foot. It is pouring rain; there is mud everywhere. The samurai wears an ancient Japanese garment, which leaves more of the leg bare, and their arms are plastered in mud. And, when one samurai falls down dead, we see the rain washing away the mud and his leg becoming white, as white as marble. 

Enric Ruiz-Geli. Cloud 9 Architects.

Building As Prototype.

In the case of a practice like Cloud 9, driven as it is by inventing, making and testing via the evolving prototype, its buildings are never just a pavilion, a case study, a prototype or even a 'really nice sculpture': they are all of them.

Formwork/Prefabricated Coffers/Interior Surface/Exterior Substrate.

An architectural practice driven by the the act of making in which the prototype has a fundamental role in testing performance and performativity for the user.

On-site prototypes, not modelling or mock-ups that just represent design issues, but prototypes that develop with fabricators and builders to become the 'final prototype' the completed building.

Case Study House/Pavilion 3

Research Invention/Patenting.

A prototype is something between a patent and the user.

Realizing The Physical Prototype

Prototyping Performance

Prototyping Through Subtraction

Virtual Prototyping

Distinguishing between models and prototypes by attributing to each of them different communication tasks.

Models are a means of visually communicating concepts among the design team, whereas prototypes are for communicating performance as well as helping to envisage and test new ideas.

Mock-ups keep the designer from having a meaningful dialogue with the process of designing-through-making.

Architectural students are beginning to think of new ways of working, including much greater integration between off-site fabrication and on-site assembly.

DSC_6111 Spatial Drawing/Speculative Site

 BOUNDARIES AND JUNCTION POINTS

Lefebvre, The Production of Space.

Lefebvre in his chapter on Spatial Architectonics makes reference to the relationships established by boundaries and the relationship between boundaries and named places. These relationships promote significant and specific conditions or features to a space. This in turn results in various kinds of space. Lefebvre states that “every social space, then, once duly demarcated and oriented, implies a superimposition of certain relations upon networks of named places.”1

It is this superimposition of space that can within it demarcate other thresholds of experiences, within an existing demarcated space that interests me.

The act of “blocking in “ the dimensions of another space onto the floor of another create a temporal junction between a host space and a site within this host, a guest. This sets-up the notion of a temporal double occupancy held by the demarcation of a boundary and a site of proposal. This basic and temporal site marking could be said to have affinity towards some sort of anthropological marking, a territory. (Lefebvre defines anthropological marking as being at the stage when demarcation and orientation begin to create place and its social reality in archaic cultures)2. This activity also has associations with nomadic and agricultural-pastoral societies as they use paths and routes as spatio- temporal markers or determinants.

Lefebvre acknowledges that geographical space created through the body, through routes which were inscribed by means of simple linear markings. These first markings, paths and tracks drawn into the landscape would become the pores through “which without colliding would produce the establishment of places (localities made special for one reason or another).”3Within my practice drawing is used to form sites which contain visual information, evidence of temporal activities and traces of actual objects. These territories within other territories create fields from with boundaries form material relations, differences. My drawings are inside the temporality of site I have instigated and yet they propose a territory and a surface of light years which could accommodate the temporality of terrestrial space.

Interestingly Lefebvre comments “there is no stage at which ’’man” does not demarcate, beacon or sign his space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.”4

1 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (London: Blackwell, 1991) page 193.

2 Ibid.,page 192.

3 Ibid.,page 192.

4 Ibid.,page 192.

Intertwined Media/Modalities/Architectures : Idea, Space, Materials

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

Merleau Ponty

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

Responds to every project by re-evaluating the physical, cultural, historical references of the site-time or program, through which he achieves a 'limited concept' that establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limited principle for each architectural design process 

As the body-subject is perceptually situated into the world by inhabiting space and time, a building is rooted into a specific site and situated by inhabiting, 'the visible and invisible of the site and situation'

By locating the body, 'at the very essence of our being and our spatial perception' Holl redefines architectural space as perceived space with reference to the perceiving-body-subject

Steven Holl uses 'parallax' as an experiential tool as well as a design tool in which architectural space is redefined with reference to the moving body's constantly changing spatial perceptions

Merleau Ponty's main thesis that phenomenology has potential to put the essences back into existence by re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world through the realm of perceptual experiences drives Steven Holl to search for vitalizing these essences through the experiences of architectural forms, spaces, materials, light and colour

Intellectual and Phenomenal

Philosophical Inquiry

Interplays in his thinking on and making of architecture

Utility/Interpretation

Bachelard's Poetics of Space, explores the essence of being as it resides in the perceptual situadedness of the body-subject into the world

Perception fundamentally 'acts' enabling human beings to inhabit space and time

When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes, what we perceive

Architecture

That which begins as an interaction with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site

Creating the experiential power of architecture

Intertwining, idea-space-material

Anchoring, physics and metaphysics of site

A path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. An architectural journey in which the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site force interact with each other

DSC_7317 Reading : Slow Philosophy/Ecology of Material Thinking

Orange School Graph Books 

Harleston 2020-2021

A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

The social life of making

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve 

Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically 

Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010

Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010

New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay

The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object 

Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012

From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

 

Materials-Centered Perspective

Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them

Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008

Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers

Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate

Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability

The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution

Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice

Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy

Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline

The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)

The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary 

So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002

Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006

The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions

A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour  

New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative

Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's

New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006

Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries

Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011

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

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing 

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact

The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement

Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions 

A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside

The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017

Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice

'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey

Ceramics In The Environment 

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility 

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world

Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

 

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

5

Procedural Architecture

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

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

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.

Speculative architecture

On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron

Without opposition nothing is revealed,

no image appears in a clear mirror

if one side is not darkened

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619)

Reflections on a photographic medium

Memorial to the Unknown Photographer

Thomas Ruff's Newspaper Photos

Valeria Liebermann

Working Collages

Karl Blossfeldt

Anti Object

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. 

Kengo Kuma

Experimental Photography

 

Intermedia : Articulating Sensory Thought. Yard and Metre Event

 Cyanotype Project/Poetry Reading : Winchester College

Shroud

Richard Stillman

Yard and Metre Event, Winchester

As the marks resonated, did they sound true? 

Could we tolerate margins of error or latitude? 

Is there strength in that built by blue ink?

It is hard to see without certainty.

Why have they flown, gathered, shrouded? 

Is the date significant? A memorial?

Or is it white noise reverberating, 

striking parallels, refusing focus, insisting?

The shape of the cross is still distinct

but opening out, refusing definition,

never quite caught as an intention, 

pinned on dimensions it wants to refuse.

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

When objects or atmospheres collide energy is transferred, a new force may be created. And, as forensic scientists can attest, when objects touch they exchange traces, each leaves something of itself with the other.

This is why artists enjoy collaborating. Working with another artist can give a jolt of inspiration, a spark of creative thinking, a surge of new skill, the stimulus for a new work. And the experience will leave its mark in some way on each individual’s practice.

The specific ‘collision’ may also result in a work which has its own integrity, which does not belong’ to either party and where their particular contributions merge indistinguishably - in effect fusion takes place.

This is the thinking behind 10 days | Creative Collisions and for The Yard artists  and Hyde Writers it was the ideal excuse to come together, to let the shockwaves flow and see what new possibilities emerged. As with all the best creative practice, in science or in art, this has been an experiment, it involved risk, trust and open minds. Whether or not the outcomes are fully resolved they will be filled with potential - and with potency.

Stephen Boyce

The Hyde Writers

The writers  revelled in a close engagement with artists  and their work. Rather than respond to emailed images, the writers could immerse themselves in the artist’s world. Writers  could examine the artist’s  studio space, watch the artist working and feel with their own hands  the materials  in use. They  could smell the turpentine, feel clay under their nails  and trail their fingers  over the rippling textures of paintings. Some writers took artists’ work home, so that they could live with the work. Naturally some artists provided a response to the writer’s work and the non-verbal feedback was unusual and exciting.

Writers  faced a dilemma over which aspect of an artist to focus  on. Some writers  found inspiration in the personality of an artist and others were entranced by a part of the artist’s  process. The art itself, of course provided a rich source of creativity. Writers  found that the artists’ studios  and individual objects  within them were inspiring. A fractured shell of a first world war helmet might suggest several stories. Writers  could see familiar techniques, such as  collage being used by  the artists, but they  could also understand the strange dictatorship imposed by  physical materials. The materials  are often tricky  things  that impose their own rules  and can bring uncontrollability  into a process.

It was  an experience that changed the writers. For ever afterwards a small part of us will be noticing the world from a different viewpoint, such as  that of a painter or a sculptor.

Hugh Greasley

The Hyde Writers are a group of poets, novelists, script and short story writers  who meet every  first and third Monday  in the Hyde Tavern, Winchester.

Founded in 2007, the group aims to produce high quality, challenging writing across a diverse range of genres.

The group acts as a workshop to facilitate the development of an individual writer’s works through rigorous yet supportive critical comment

Our members  include prize winning novelists  and short story  writers, published poets and broadcasters, as well as young writers developing their craft.

The Yard Artists

When the studio management group discussed how to represent The Yard in 10 days Creative Collisions, we could not have possibly  envisaged the quality  and ambition of the project. Several months  later, following a successful proposal, speed dating event and BBQ, two thriving creative communities  in Winchester have collaborated, partnering artist with writer, and produced twenty  six  ‘creative collisions’ of new and innovative work. These projects  have been prepared for an evening of projection, performance and poetry  at Winchester College.

As  a collective, Yard and Metre fuses  traditional with contemporary, the analytical with the intuitive, the tangible with the abstract, in a collision of observation and enquiry. The breadth of subject and concept, as well as  the standard of work  produced, is  testament to the dedication and enthusiasm of those participating in the project.

Thanks  to  Beatrix  Kovacs,  this  beautifully  designed  publication  documents  the  collaboration  between The Yard artists and Hyde Writers and pays tribute to the significance of the event.

Jane Price

The Yard is a working studio environment in Wharf Hill, Winchester, established in 2007 by a group of local artists with the assistance of Winchester City Council. It provides affordable studio space within a vibrant, supportive community for up to twenty five artists and aims to promote contemporary fine art in the Winchester district

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