EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS : Performativity/Unbounded Outcomes

 

MATERIAL and AFFECT

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS

RUINS and SUBJECTIVITY

Encounter with place through transpositions/re-deployment of materials/technologies and design.

The rules followed by medieval cathedral builders could not and did not prescribe their practice in every detail, but instead allowed scope for action to be precisely fine-tuned in relation to the exigencies of the situation at hand. The cathedral and the laboratory, MAKING, Tim Ingold

PATHS alert us to how we are scattered as well as affirmed by the places through which we move. Edward Thomas.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF WHAT HAPPENS: SPACE, POLITICS and AFFECT.

Nigel Thrift

VISUAL FINE ART / TRANSACTIVE through Digital Technologies POETIC / EVERYDAY ABSTRACTIONS

MAKING / MANIFESTING FORMS / STRANGE TOOLS

INDEXICAL / ITERATION ( new version, repetition, closer approximation, scrutiny, observations, sequence, finding a solution/perception to a problem)

UNBOUNDED OUTCOMES / ITERATION becomes the starting point of the next iteration PROGRESSION through PERFORMATIVITY

AGAINST SPACE

Making : anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.

Tim Ingold

Immaterial architecture creation and contemplation artist and architect

The contemplation of art is primarily a form of visual awareness, of a single object by a single viewer, in which sound, smell and touch are as far as possible eradicated. Placed in a hermetic enclosure and protected against decay, the artwork is seen and not used. The viewer leaves no trace or mark because touch would undermine the artwork’s status as an idea and connect it to the material world.

To translate the drawing into the building requires an intimate knowledge of the techniques and materials of drawing and building.

ATMOSPHERES

THE EPIPHANY OF ARCHITECTURE

CIRCULATION, ENCLOSURES and their LIGHT

TOTAL ARCHITECTURE, Walter Gropius

TOTAL ART, Theo van Doesburg/DE STIJL

GESAMTKUNSTWERK, all embracing aesthetic, where art becomes architecture and architecture art. A synthesis, and revolving intersection where each medium exists at the service of formal innovation; a kind of essentialist discourse or tradition that might be buried in the past.

Brian Clarke, Nerves of Ecstasy by Robert C. Morgan, PACE 2013.

ARCHITECTURAL FORMS OF ENCOUNTER/DEBATE

HISTORIES, PHILOSOPHIES, AESTHETICS

Katsura Detached Palace. Kenzo Tange, Walter Gropius. 1960

(extended in a modular fashion and adapted to changing royal needs over the centuries)

Katsura consolidates all qualities in history but not in a creative way. Since it lacks in the strength of its unifying all members, its impression is lyricism but lacking unifying tension. KenzoTange

Ise : Prototype of Japanese Architecture. Kenzo Tange, Noboru Kawazoe. 1961

(Ise Shrine rebuilt every 20 years with new materials)

Ise Shrine manifests primate yet powerful, simple yet noble, and serene yet ecliptic qualities, which cannot help moving us. Tange

THE PRIMATIVE

JOMON POT, 2000 BCE, (Jomon period 14,000 BCE-300 BCE)

Jomon, (means Rope pattern) wildly decorated pottery, idols, and thatched pit dwellings. The style comes to stand for the savage and dynamic.

Jomon appeals to us with the flooding energy of the fundamental life of the people. It has a resilient strength and a sense of mass, which comes out of through their wild battles with nature: it also has a free and agile sensitivity. Kenzo Tange

THE ARISTOCRATIC

YAYOI EARTHENWARE, 350 AD, (Yayoi period 300 BCE-250 BCE)

In the Yayoi period, earthenware becomes more refined, and structures like granaries are raised on stilts, building developments reflect the emergence of social hierarchies.

In Yayoi, man and nature are synthesized to create a calm lyricism, acknowledging nature’s blessings. A passive attitude, submitting to the surroundings prevails. A flat equilibrium and quiet balance with no dynamism are left in a transient mood.

Kenzo Tange is originally drawn to the Yayoi style, but starts to oscillate with the Jomon style in the late ‘50s’ For Tange and the future Metabolists there is no conflict in their simultaneous study of tradition and modernism. Tange insists on exploiting tradition as a means of innovation, while building prolifically in a modern mode and strategizing the high-tech avant-garde of Metabolism.

There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvised builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.

Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees. Roger Deakin.2007

PAO, a structure that you can repeatedly put up and dismantle. Because of occupant’s nomadic life, it needed to be lightweight, and be able to be built very quickly and have the ability to be taken apart and re-built many times. Even materials that have already been used can be reused so long as they are disassembled correctly and preserved properly.

To maximize the reuse of components one needs to standardize them so they can be pre-fabricated. The order of construction becomes important as it influences the disassembling of the structure; the technical features of joints, assemblages of materials and their localities can become both conceptual to the experience of the space and its architectonics and to the actual innovative building process.

In the Mesopotamia city of Ur, they bricked over houses buried in the mud and built new houses in the same spot over and over. Its been learned that they repeated this eight times. There was apparently a very strong impulse to create an eternal building.

Kiyonori Kikutake

Rem Koolhaas

SO THE MUD HOUSE BECAME THE RENAISSANCE AND THE TENT BECAME METABOLOLISM?

Kiyonori Kikutake

YES, IT BECAME A METABOLIST STRUCTURE MADE OF WOOD. AND I THINK THE NOTION OF ATTAINING ETERNITY WITH A MUD HOUSE-OR ATTEMPTING TO-IS REALLY FASCINATING.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. 

Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment. 

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures. 

Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude. Fragment as a broken shard, from notebook March 2014.

Innerness

The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

Reflections on Heidegger,

We traverse from light to dark many times as we gather in the pots (thingness) as it were unfolding in our presence (nearness).

Vessels as Spatial Metaphors around Innerness and Difference. 

The Jar

Heidegger as a pouring and gathering social metaphor. Anecdote of the Jar.

Dominion over the Unmade.

Wallace Stevens, poem cited by Edmund de Waal.

WORKING at the transitional surface/stage in the HUMANITIES as it re-boots itself into THE POSTMODERN.

A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.

The imagination and process aesthetic of the Posthuman Condition 

A Theoretical and Semantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes 

Historical Perspectives

Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger Archetypes/Symbols Jung

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon 

Feminist Geographies The Posthuman

Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.

Posthuman Subjectivity : Rosi Braidotti 

LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES

Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)

Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)

De Architectura, Vitruvius

Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and decor, and distribution.

Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image­ representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between Being and becoming.

INTERIOR DESIGN UCA FARNHAM

DESIGN AND RESEARCH PROJECT 2015 SPACE BETWEEN PEOPLE.

SITE-PLACE-DIALOGUES

THE RUINED ABBEY, stands as architectural remnants of a pastoral community now set in parkland and open to the public as a site for recreation.

The Abbey and its experiential values and feelings have been employed as both a reality of a lived experience and as a virtual diffractive site for thinking through contemporary issues in arts (relational aesthetics), and architectural design through exploratory spatial inquires with the specifics of place studies.

What this project is not

Gift Shop and Visitors Centre What this project might become

Proposal for a symposium,

Personal Structures, artists and writers talk about “Time, Space and Existence”. Setting for an exhibition that can promote the symposium.

A room containing a virtual work of design that challenges and opens up the physical architecture.

A design for a interactive (mobile) component, a structure that can act as an interlocutory apparatus in the transposition of the phenomena of place.

Building Partitioning of Space.

Architectures as atmospheres that promote the contents and support the interaction of things including humans.

Design as a tool of transposition, of layering and collaging different spatial values both cultural and experiential.

Painting Subjectivities, matter drawn and crafted from site inquiry.

LIGHT VALUES

The Transmission of Light,

Instantaneous psychological effect that stimulates the senses. The Specificity of Colour

Synergistically working with place and symbolizing abstract concepts and thoughts.

Humans use colour in their surroundings for decorative purposes or to chronicle their every day lives and other important events.

Earthy, Corporeal, Spiritual, Pastoral. Capricious.

Colour has always been used symbolically, whether pained directly on the body or worn in garments to announce the wearers’ social status, their tribe or country’ or other significant group.

The Abbey, On-Site (qualitative research with stained glass samples) Analogous Colour Fields with Monochromatic Features, utilise complementary colours or forms to focus the difference and diversity of the design installation.

Red, Flashed Ruby glass.

Brown is the ultimate earth colour associated with a “durability” of terra-cotta, clay.

Amber, Light, Medium and Dark. Yellow, Orange, Imagination/Enlightenment, Intensity, Sunlight.

Purple, Red/Blue, Spirituality, New Age, Cutting Edge Technologies. Diversity, Complexity, Artistry, Uniqueness.

THE ABBEY AND THE CISTERCIAN ORDER

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION : Caruso St John

HISTORY IS THE RAW MATERIAL OF ARCHITECTURE. Aldo Rossi

TRADITION AND MODERNISM

CONTINUITY-LEGACY-TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION

Today the nuances of language that make up these architectures only exist as an intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more general culture of their construction.

Adam Caruso on the medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.

Towards an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing. 2002

Thinking with Walking/Paths/Huts

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.

The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot. Robert Macfarlene

ON REFLECTION

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?

For Edward 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

HEIDEGGER’S HUT

A TOPOLOGY OF BEING, PLACE, WORLD. Jeff Malpas

METHODOLOGIES OF DESIGN

GESALT, GRISAILLE, LEITMOTIF, MATRIX, FORMAL PATTERN, SURFACE

VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio

MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM

THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR

A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :

The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.

THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.

CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES

THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL

PAINTING, Robert Mangold.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY

BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO

ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS

WORKING NOTES 20 August 2018

Fragments/Thoughts CONSTELLATIONS NIGHT DRAWINGS

OUTPOST URBAN FROTTAGES/ Drawing Strategies

SCULPTURE TRAIL/ Minimalist, Post Modem, elements, assemblage, collage REFLEXIVITITY / AGENCY / POST STUDIO

Mobius Strip, experiential feedback into REAL LIFE / NOWNESS SEARCHING for creative anthropologies from the landscape.

ACTIVE and creative engagements. PERFORMATIVITY LANDSCAPES

SENSORY WALKS

USING the topology close to hand, the unique geographies of the rivers from source to sea.

Reclamations/Ruins on the photographic surface : Volatile Inscriptions around the Body

The Photographic Image/Volatile Bodies/Architectural Ruins

Helena Eflerova

Interior Spaces, Waverley Abbey.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. 

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1980:145)

The Language Of Women

Volatile Bodies/Sexed Bodies : Elizabeth Grosz

1  have  attempted  to  read  the  male  discourses  dealt  with  here  as  discourses for  and  about  men,  discourses  which  have  ignored  or  misunderstood  the  radical implications  of  insisting  on  a  recognition  of  sexual  specificity,  discourses  which have  presented  their  claims—radical  as  these  might  be—without  any  understand­ ing of their relevance to or usefulness for women’s self-representations. I have not attempted  to  give  an  alternative  account,  one  which  provides  materials  directly useful  for  women’s  self-representation.  To  do  so  would  involve  knowing  in  ad­vance,  preempting,  the  developments  in  women’s  self-understandings  which  are now  in  the  process  of  being  formulated  regarding  what  the  best  terms  are  for representing  women  as  intellectual,  social,  moral,  and  sexual  agents.  It  would involve  producing  new  discourses  and  knowledges,  new  modes  of  art  and  new forms  of  representational  practice  outside  of  the  patriarchal  frameworks  which have  thus  far  ensured  the  impossibility  of  women’s  autonomous  self-representa­tions,  thus  being  temporally  outside  or  beyond  itself.  No  one  yet  knows  what  the conditions are for developing knowledges, representations, models, programs, which provide women   with  nonpatriarchal  terms  for  representing  themselves  and the world from women’s interests and points of view. This book has been a pre­liminary  exploration  of  some  of  the  (patriarchal)  texts  which  feminists  may  find useful  in  extricating  the  body  from  the  mire  of  biologism  in  which  it  has  been entrenched.  But  the  terms  by  which  feminists  can  move  on  from  there,  can  su­persede  their  patriarchal  forebears,  are  not  dear  to  me.  But  perhaps  the  frame­ work  I  have  been  trying  to  use  in  this  book—a  framework  which  acknowledges both  the  psychical  or  interior  dimensions  of  subjectivity  and  the  surface  corporeal exposures of the subject to social inscription and training; a model which resists, as much  as possible,  both  dualism and  monism; a model which  insists on  (at least) two surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously  blend  with  and  support each  other; a model where the join,  the interaction of the two surfaces, is always a question of power; a model that may 

be represented  by  the geometrical form of the Mobius strip’s two-dimensional torsion in three-dimensional space—will nevertheless be of some use if feminists wish to avoid the impasses of traditional theorizing about the body.

Patti Smith

Cartwheels

Come my one, look at the world Bird beast butterfly
Girls sing notes of heaven Birds lift them up to the sky

Spring is departing Spring is departing

Her thoughts are darting like a rabbit Like a rabbit 'cross the moon
Shines of light over your hair As boys croon

Pretty in pink It makes me wonder
What could ever bring you down I see tears falling
From those eyes of brown

Hearing a voice, you turn your head You vanish into the mist
Of your thoughts And I
Want to grasp What brings you down
Open up those eyes of brown

The world is changing Your heart is growing

Hearing a voice you turn your head Girls turn by ones, by twos
Notes pour bad and tender Eradicate your blues

The good world The good world
Come my one, look around you Bird, beast, butterfly
Girls sing…

Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)

 The Solar Pavilion, Upper Lawn, Wiltshire. SP3 6SJ

‘A building intervenes between subject and space.’(Kengo Kuma)

‘Things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time.’(Alison and Peter Smithson)

‘The Charged Void- contains references to the architects’ concern that their buildings should command a wider territory. The Solar Pavilion is perhaps their most compelling exploration of this theme.’ (Sergison,2005:100)

The Upper Lawn Pavilion that Alison and Peter Smithson realised is actually nothing more than a primitive hut. Much of its appeal is that of its uncompromising simplicity a ‘light touch’ promoting a way of life like camping (or bathing) in the landscape; it has the kind of enchantment of a small building with big ideas, a building in the tradition of a garden pavilion or folly. The Solar Pavilion like the earlier Patio and Pavilion of 1956 is intended to be read as a symbolic habitat that could be seen as an attempt to self-consciously to embrace an intimate connection to nature; to tum back from the city and technology. For the Smithson’s the Solar Pavilion exemplifies a place for basic human needs, a piece of ground, a view of the sky, privacy and the presence of nature. It stands as a spiritual and physical counterpoint to urbanism and city life.

‘The Solar Pavilion, is both a lookout over the distant landscape on the north facade, sitting on top of the existing cottage wall, and a garden pavilion mediating between two types of controlled landscape. It aims to provide a minimal enclosure that allows as immediate a relationship between interior and exterior as possible.’

(Sergison,2005:97)

‘Architect’s homes provide rare occasions where the two issues of architectural theory and practice can both find a natural symbiosis; not only did the Smithsons’ build their ideas as concretely as possible, they also built themselves a private place for retreat and reflection.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)

Hybrid Construction; containing Mies’ tectonics and Le Corbusier’s pilotis and free facade.

Interventions made and consisting of existing elements (garden wall, chimney and windows from an existing building).

‘The construction of the box on the wall consists of a wooden frame clad with zinc. On all sides its posts function as a casing for fitted window frames. The frame’s wooden beams are put into the existing outer wall and are supported on the inside by a concrete beam poured in-situ and anchored in the existing chimney wall, and supported on both ends by square columns placed at a 45 degree angle. This construction results in non-supporting ground level facades, allowing the creation of the teak sliding doors along the full length of the garden facade.’ (Dirk van den Heuvel 2004)

Tony Fretton, working notes.

STRATEGIC INTELLIGENCE is the most enduring/valuable quality of an architectural project.

TEACHING informs my practice as an architect profoundly. It demands that I think, write and manage people, and places me in contact with great colleagues with theoretical and practical knowledge.

We have developed a methodology that channels my activities very precisely into design direction, presentations to the office and clients, and collective decision­ making on the management of the practice.

The Scheme It’s Style Their Form

Even an interesting delicacy in the detailing of the work.

MAKING architecture that is more prepositional, that reveals meaning and values in everyday objects and events.

ARCHITECTURE is a cultural artefact and a social art.

ARCHITECTS design buildings using knowledge of buildings that already exist, and the meaning of buildings is shaped by public attitudes.

FORMAL and IDEOLOGICAL INNOVATION is also necessary.

By WORKING TRANSPARENTLY with the relation between the present and past, it gives me access to richer cultural social and architectural territory.

I have understood that you can accept your social duties of being instrumental to society, while remaining productively critical.

I want to use the platform of contemporary architecture on one hand to make it more communicative and on the other more artistically enquiring about issues of the times.

BUILDINGS can explore issues such as national presence and identity in a foreign place. Political imagery in the ambiguity of the present times, the nature of place in which groups of people come together to work and its relation to the surrounding world and the relation between representation, physical security in relation to sustainable construction.

CRAFTS STUDY CENTRE Working Notes 2 July 2014-07-02

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012 

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ Peter Smithson, 2001 

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction ( Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’

Schregenberger, 2005

The spatial practices of exhibition and education.

The humanities and architecture, Heidegger/Bachelard/Ingold/Herzog and De Meuron/Zumthor.

The politics of things/sociology and everyday life/dwelling and making. Natural History learning/thinking through things/situations and vocations. Contents/Contexts/Collection and Presentation.

Taxonomies and Subjectivity/Spatial Narratives of Layered Space (Spatiality) Mark Dion, Archaeology, Thames Dig.(Allegories of a pseudo-archaeology) Herzog and De Meuron, Archaeology of the Mind/Natural History.

Peter Greenaway, The Physical Self/Architecture and Allegory.

Visual/Spatial Vocabularies and Narratives (Livelihoods and Social Interactions)

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

The Projects Evolution.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of a vital serenity, a poetics of dwelling and its angle of repose hovering somewhere between the transcendental and the real.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Working Analysis.

CSC Object Analysis : Hans Coper/Innemess in the Ceramic Vessel and Architecture. Making (act/sacred bond of both an individual and a civilisation) from the inside out, from the interior, from the first movement or impulse, from the everyday condition/situation the as found nature of things. The innemess of the vessel of a room remains the property of our shared humanity, of our social being/becoming.

Why did this opportunity produce a wealth of transformative insights (conduits and territories) that are now active agents working across all facets of my practice?

Properties: Pastoral Setting.

Built within and amongst a monastery.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Winchester College, Winchester. Exhibition with talk on creative practice, display of large body drawings, cyanotypes, astronomical charts and architectural notebooks. Workshop conducted in the making and experimentation of using the cyanotype process (historical,light based,printing process 1843).

Link Gallery Winchester University, Winchester. Art and Archaeology around the Keatsian notion ‘Negative Capability’ photograms of anthropomorphic leper graves with excavated oyster shells found at the site (Mom Hill, Winchester).

Hyde Abbey Gatehouse and St Bart’s Church Winchester. Leylines exhibition of artist book photographs, drawings, maps and collages. Installation of archaeologist drawing frame with annotated lead labels, plumb bob, orientated to align with the speculative leyline phenomena.

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.

bricolaged notes from STUDIO UNBOUND : Lane Relyea

Institutional Critique : Studio/Post Studio Activity

The Function of the Studio
Daniel Buren

The Studio is no longer as seen as belonging to a system.
No longer a retreat but it now INTEGRATES

It is all exterior.
The Network places the artist as a 'like item' within an integrative inventory or database.

Networks are both integrative and decentralizing in that they privilege casual or weak ties over formal commitments.

Being part of a network that privileges itinerancy and circulation over fixity, that diminishes hierarchies and boundaries in favour of mobility and flexibility across a more open extensive environment. 


'The Studio made into a showroom display'
Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. 2004
Claire Bishop

The Individual and The Social
A place where meanings, properties and behaviors fluctuate radically.
Bennett Simpson. Can you work as fast as you like to think. 2003

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

The hosting/re-created artist's workspaces, like a threshold between private and public actuality and potentiality.

Spaces of Fluid Interchange Between Objects, Activities, People.

Today studio and museum are superseded by more temporal, transient events.

The Notion of the Evolutionary Exhibition.
Placing greater emphasis on INFORMATION, DISCUSSION and GATHERINGS

Establishing NETWORKS, fluctuating between highly specialized work by scientists, artists, dancers and writers
Obrist/Vanderlinden, Laboratorium, Antwerp. 1999

MODULATION, Deleuze

Immaterial Social Acquaintances/Information

Along with the rise of Networks comes a new Ideology, one that Advertises Agency, Practice and Everyday Life.

The Dividual (The New Mobile Creator) Deleuze
Someone who is 'UNDULATORY In ORBIT, in a CONTINUOUS NETWORK



Colour Nexus : Promiscuous Mobility

Material Flows 2007/2017 Towards Disentanglement

Social behaviour is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.
Franco "bifo" Berardi

OBSCURED MATERIAL
The Modulation of the Image

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.

Performative Documentation : Time as both a structure and an event

DID SOMEONE SAY PARTICIPATE? AN ATLAS OF SPATIAL PRACTICE.

Edited by Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar

A few notes relating to thoughts and critical theory around which I am beginning to formulate about my practice and its application as a site from which to “stage a performative discourse of exchange”. My Spatial Practice becoming more like a curatorial trans-disciplinary producer of  “on-site” exchanges and relations.

PREFACE

PARTICIPATION LASTS FOREVER Hans Ulrich Obrist

The Museum as oscillating between object and process; the “ elastic museum ” as being flexible  allowing  displays  to  be  placed  within  an  adaptable  building.  Alexander  Dorner, 

Ways Beyond Art.

Hans Ulrich Obrist notes Dorners critical remark ’’the museum as a bridge built between artists and a variety of scientific disciplines”. This observation has been taken-up by contemporary curatorial practice with the inclusion of architects, philosophers, political thinkers/theorists and visual artists into the production of exhibitions and events. The contemporary exhibition can be viewed as part of an on-going and indeed a “complex dynamic learning system” quotes Obrist.

One should renounce the closed, paralysing homogeneity of the traditional exhibition master plan. Artworks would be allowed to extend tentacles to other works- and other fields of knowledge. The curator must not stand in the way of such growth. Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Working Spaces, Sites of Inquiry and Dialogue, Spatial Practices, Canterbury 2009 

OPEN TEXTS. 

Allow readers to have multiple interpretations, they allow for the possibility of  “determinations”.

Relationality 

Gaps between connecting and disconnecting. 

Notion that categories hide and weaken our perceptions of reality. 

Fluctuating networks of existential events.

Emergent state of contingences that create materials for relationality.

For me this curatorial setting could be an interesting set of relations that might be rehearsed and re-presented within a “site” ( an intervention and interruption into our notion of place and placed relations).The notion that one could become an active agent and on-site translator amongst this “ trans- disciplinarily” would be worth investigating . The opportunity to be in the position to have dialogue with other practitioners and to negotiate and expand that dialogue between the different realities and fields made apparent by “site“ could produce new relational meanings.

My particular interest is with the production of ephemeral values and situations, free spaces and sites created from the interruption of place. Photography and installation have been used as an intervention into place. The artists Jane and Louise Wilson have successfully used it to present work around the psychology of architectural spaces. This value of psychology tied up with our psychological reality created by the motion of our own emotions as we project ourselves into space, could be presented by some analogy (working device) to theories, or rather theorising with the camera obscura.

Photographic Laboratory, roving camera and apparatuses during the arts event 10 Days in The Laundry, Winchester.

Performative work using the simple enchantment of the pinhole camera to question and explore the extrusive nature of time, performativity and site.

Proposed Title, Molecular Sieve/Photographic Apparatus/Theorising Object

Currently using a spatial practice to investigate issues around architectural influences on the placed self. Utilising the mobility and awkwardness of an appropriated object as an apparatus to both theorise and register spatial relations/phenomena. interested in using the values and traits of transparency and superimposures to describe the dimensionality of dwelling in place, how might these “on-site” recordings become registered into the possibility of a surface membrane of material metaphors of memory?

A performative documentation that makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it accumulates and is deposited on a photographic surface.

This performative investigation utilises a large pinhole chamber which is allowed mobility through the attachment of castors to its base and the use of a sack-barrow for undulating terrain. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into the “space” a theoretical device centred around and relational to spatial values and influences. My aim is to utilise this device as a means of registering “worksite” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-per formative state. The mobility of this research device could be used to investigate, register and illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall surfaces or even a “sandwich-board” could render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities could be arranged on-site to complement this work as a “working site” functioning within the orbits of both the other works and their prospective guests.

Contextual Issues. Urban Fallow-Sites.

Brief description about methodologies and goals. Urban Fallow, 

Solentcentre for architecture and design.

Urban Fallow aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.

Urban Fallow is interested in using vacant urban land and spaces. The project is about reanimating these sites through the use of artists, architects, performers and other professionals, all of which have an interest in engaging with the public. This could be undertaken by the use of temporary events and per formative interventions, this would also have an effect on reducing urban blight and help to reinvigorate interest in these sites for potential investment.

Other longer term legacies might include the provision of longer term public access and cultural use even the possibility of a permanent change of use for a chosen site. To help to deliver an “improved perception and identity of the space for the public together with current user groups and prospective developers.”

Winchester, Hyde Abbey Laundry.

A site of approximately 1500 square metres made up of redundant industrial buildings together with a yard. The property is close to Winchester School of Art and the town centre. The Laundry closed in 2007 and has been vacant ever since then. The building in its current state of dis-repair is unsuitable for most purposes. However it is being viewed by creative practitioners from a broad range of practices as potential studio spaces.

Other Documents,

List re, Participating artists, actors, writers, musicians and chef.

Artist Statement/Work Statement as public handouts, made available (resting on apparatus) for visitors. 10 Days at the Laundry, on flickr site with installation images.

The Apparatus/Device/Research Collage

Time as both a structure and an event, photographic image from a moving apparatus

Brief comment around my use of “apparatuses” researched and questioned through the text “The Apparatus” Vilian Flusser.

Definitions, An Apparatus would be a thing that lies in wait or in readiness for something, and a preparatus would be a thing that waits patiently for something. 

The photographic apparatus (a camera) lies in wait for photography. A camera is a tool whose intention is to produce photographs. Tools inform the materials, they “work” them.

This fact/interpretation that tools inform materials has interesting consequences. Flusser states, ’’The object( the thing the tool acts on) acquires an unnatural and improvable form, it becomes cultural. The issue is to keep the definition of “apparatus” open and refrain from referring it as a “tool in the service of photography.”

Other issues regard the “recording of something” as an image and the “registering of information” about a specific duration or experiment. Further issues of “intension” and “reading for what destination/purpose” will need to be clarified to continue. At this point I began to view the perspective of the “apparatus” as a sort of carrier and container, a sensor for some type of “isotope.” I imagined that the apparatus was just some sort of “litmus paper” something that functioned as a sort of barometer in the proximity of “site relations” the architectural. The sociological and the encountering and relational element of human curiosity. This rather spatialised concept envisaged human subjectivity as a mapping around scientific and sociological phenomena, a geography brought about by the performativity of place, time as both a structure and an event.

Francis Aly's, POLITICS OF REHEARSAL

“While everything Aly's creates has a simplicity that makes it instantly accessible, his work also offers a complexity that continues to resonate long after it has been seen”. Anne Philbin Directors Forward, Politics of Rehearsal;

Francis Aly's work has up to this point emphasized issues of place (Mexico City in particular becoming his adopted home).Aly's originally trained as an Architect and was practicing as such in Belgium. When he moved to Mexico City in the early 1990s where he began to experiment with art which reflected his own inclination to avoid definite conclusions.

In this sense he was already formulating the notion of a “rehearsal for a presentation that may or not be completed".1 The use of interventional tactics and strategies as a result of a “reaction” to Mexico City and also a way of positioning himself. It is interesting that Aly's continues to make fresh interventions into apparently completed works.

Aly's describes his work in these terms ”a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America”.2

The Politics of Rehearsal deals with issues around the concepts of rehearsal and repetition, with its “open ended” process which allows specific details to be retained whilst also allow the possibility of others to be reviewed/worked over and possibly changed. This creates an “open site” prescribed around “key” or interlocutory relations that can then be literally presented as being a “presentation” of a process rehearsing for its re-presentation.

This sense of an evolutionary on-going situation, a working site that permit’s the interventions of other activities that pass through and beyond the register of its own narrative space.

What interests me is the notions/propositions of “the rehearsal” as a non-consecutive chronological structure, which does not have to render a specific conclusion, it only has to announce that it is over/finished or ended. It can even announce/negate that their will be “no-rehearsal” thereby paradoxically marking its proposal and place but then deigning its presence in place.

Rehearsal also offers up its space/time relation for performers to re-start, stop and begin again, it allows a multiplicity of spatial relations to be configured in segmented intervals/time slots under a durational influence which is driven by the purpose and intension of a proposal to perform. Aly"s has also utilised the use of the chronicle. 

The proposal of “to Chronicle” to record occurrences, a chronicle is always in the end a record of a series of consecutive events, of which there might be no final resolution, but what a chronicle sets out unequivocally and without adjusting the flow of events is to give a precise record/witness that one thing exists prior to the recording of the next.

This particularity is mirrored in some respects by the duration and entropic nature of the photographic surface, what it has in common with the nature of being able to chronicle is that of “times arrow” a precise directional flow, mediated by the amount of light,(too little, no visible traces remain, too much, and what had been recorded is over-written to the point of total obliteration through too much information) The surface literal becomes spent, used up by agencies and proportions of the light based durations. The chronicle remains readable because it keeps-up this the unfolding of events, whilst the photographic surface is rendered un-readable unless it bracketed into individual but sequential episodes.

The notion of episodes and chronicles both require a pre-determination from the outset to create their form, they in effect act by framing segments of “what is occurring” into a prescribed duration or form.

The photographic surface renders consecutive occurrences via a transposition of transparency which produces a superimposure as a direct unequivocal evidence of something having existed before something else.

This marking out, in scripting, overlaying of occurrences as factual specific/spatial realities become relational to themselves through the negative/positive aspect of their physicality.

What the photographic surface lacks is a definitive time-line a frame of reference in proximity to the information which has become abstractively distant.

The relations of a material or form that can register consecutive occurrences and still register the totality of an event as a surface, a transparency of episodes.

1 Russell Ferguson, Politics of Rehearsal, (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2008) 

2 Interview with Russell Ferguson.