correspondences and mediums /Drawing/Speculative Learning Environments

Outpost 300823

Mediums To Correspond With.

The Situatedness of Sinuous Form/Animacy Dancing.

Living/Learning with intensity/shelters and camps, AA Field Projects.

Garden Constellation.

Raveningham Transductive Mapping/Diagram.

Cyanotype Spatial Drawing.

Transducers convert the 'ductus' the kinetic quality of the gesture and its flow or movement from one register of bodily kineasthesia to another of material flow. 

Brockwood Teaching Academy. 2011.

Speculative Learning Environments.

Brockwood Park Grounds.

A walk in the landscape whilst moving-making with clay.

Developing a mindfulness that is immanent in the attentiveness to ones surroundings through the playfulness of material and others.

Brockwood Park Library.

Hidden Curriculum.

Assemblage in the library for the re-imagining of architectural thinking and spaces for learning.

Architecture without architects.

Throwing Sticks.

The energies of the work,come from the gathering of materials and the gesture that animates them. For Goldsworthy the strength of the work lies precisely in the energies emanating from materials in their movement, growth and decay, and in the fleeting moments when they come together as one. Throwing as Goldsworthy shows us is not so much the outward effect of an embodied agency as the propulsion of animate being as it pulls, spills out into the world, it is the propulsion of life itself. 

Ingold/Goldsworthy

Relationscapes/Erin Manning

Making.

The Propulsion Of Animate Being.

Tim Ingold.

The Clay-The Potter-The Wheel.

The potter's feeling flows in and out in a correspondence with the clay.

You do not need clay to 'interact' with the wheel, but you do need a wheel to 'correspond' with the clay. In pottery the mindful or attentive bodily movement of the practitioner, on the one hand and the flows and resistances of the material on the other, respond/correspond to one another in counterpoint of affective resonances, sentient awareness, and the  flows/currents of animate life.

The distinction between interaction and correspondence if that, interaction is the dance of agency between definable points and objects, whilst correspondence can be seen as the dance of animacy weaving between all things and their phenomenal flux in the world.

In the dance of animacy bodily kinaesthesia interweaves contrapuntally with the flux of materials within an encompassing morphogenetic field of forces.

The flow of air, the wind, the breath of life are all the very antithesis of embodied agency.

For Ingold the very idea of agency and agents is the corollary of a logic for a closed system of embodiment, a system of closing things up in themselves.  

Making/Intuition In Action.

Beyond mere human embodiment and objects and into a world full of correspondences/animacies that propel things and phenomena into the world. 

World Without Objects, Tim Ingold.

The choreographic diagram/proposition generates less the stability of a complex of form, than the foregrounding of a field of resonance that defines a certain quality of activity. It speaks/seeks to create a drawing/diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the very qualities of movements and their expressibility such that their force of form can be felt.

Erin Manning.

Drawing, seeing made visible, through the pencil as transducer, not a vector of projection or a bridge between the architects imagining mind and the image on the paper.

The mark on paper leads as much as it is led.

Tim Ingold advocates a way of thinking through making in which sentient practitioners and active materials continually answer to, or correspond with one another in the generation of form.

Individuation's Dance, pushing your consciousness deep into every atom and cell.

Atom and Cell, Nine Horses, David Sylvian.

Correspondences.

The Material of Life.

Drawing into the animacy of things and feelings.

The drawing that tells is a correspondence of kinaesthetic awareness and the line of flight, it is a correspondence that is alternatively sewing the line into the mind and the mind into the line in a suturing action that grows tighter as the drawing proceeds.

The Stage of Drawing, A Walk for Walks Sake, Bryson.

Instead of dictating a thought, the thinking process turns into an act of waiting-listening-collaborating-dialogue in which one gradually learns the skill of co-operating with one's own work. This thinking, this imagining goes on as much in the hands and fingers as in the head, it is strung out in the lines of practice.

Pallasmaa/Ingold.

Thinking Through Drawing.

Barry Phipps.

Drawing is a gathering and a co-operating with one,s own work, a pulling together closer of the lines of inquiry. 

Drawing The Line.

Making/Transduction and Perdurance.

Tim Ingold suggests colour saturates consciousness, line leads it. Thus if the line traces a process of thought then colour is its temperament. Both line and colour are modalities of feeling, but where line is haptic, colour is atmospheric. 

All Buildings are Drawings.

Simon Unwin.

Only in the eyes of the architect is the trowel a bridge between the initial design and the final construction. For the builder it allows him to navigate the treacherous waters that flow beneath.

Tim Ingold.

When one is young and narrow minded, one wants the text and the drawing to concretise a preconceived idea, to give the idea an instant and precise shape.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Researching Bodies/Discursive Collages : Theoretical Objects/Desiring Machines/Diversions/Anomalies/Contradictions

 

OUTPOST STUDIO 3.16

Sensations in Space and Time (the experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea)

Agency/Foraging/Making/Gathering

Subjectivity is relational (always in process)

A Species of Making Spaces

Tentativeness, attentive to situatedness

A diffractive methodology enables a critical rethinking of science and the social in their relationality, moving beyond separate entities, separate sets of concern.

Karen Barad

Organism

Person

Environment

For Merleau-Ponty, Experience can only be understood between the mind and the body or across them in their lived conjunction.

The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

Elizabeth Grosz.

Richard Serra : Verb List Compilation

Actions to Relate to Oneself, 1967-1967

Drawing in its frameworks and dimensions/presence and absence/its here and elsewhere

Exploring the fragility of a painting in the landscape

Canvas as sheltering construction, Raveningham Sculpture Trail

Diagram-Map-Chart, is a symbolic depiction emphasizing (mapping) relationships

Diagrams For The Imagination : Arakawa

Semper Femina : Laura Marling

Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

Litany Of Echoes : James Blackshaw

New Music, for old instruments : Paul Metzger, Jozef Van Wissem

Brilliant Trees : David Sylvian

Body As Cultural Product

Both psychic and social dimensions must find their place in reconceptualizing the body, not in opposition to each other, but as necessarily interactive.

Volatile Bodies/Chaos-Territory-Art : Elizabeth Grosz

Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze, Möbius Strip, Pattening,

Actuality : Robert Mangold

Paintings around the particles/flows of things/boundaries/intervals of presence and absence

Induction/Capacitance/Encapsulated Layers

Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

Materials bound by contact/canvas

Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

A philosophy of Reading/Matter/Rooms,

The Lake of The Mind

Stochastic Thinking, Steven Holl

Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

Capacitance, relationships between intensities and movements

Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

Flesh, elementary pre-communicative, subject and object develop.

Making as Growth : Tim Ingold

Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects/Interfaces/Screens

Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

Paintings/Enactments : Canvas as a spatial verb

Espace-Milieu, painting as environment/entanglements and situations

Ceramic/Process and its theoretical objects

As a series of practices, making reality by bringing things together or separating them into their singularities, or making machines/desiring machines

Desire can be seen as an Actualization

Gathering Notations : Bernard Tschumi

Both presence and absence are coupled in this framework

Deleuze/Guattari

Glass/GLAS : Resistivity/Inclusions, A Field in England.

Translucent aesthetics, beyond the opacities of the sensible the rational.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporariness of the phenomena ( joining a diffused/invisible flow of energy, a breadth that wends its way ceaselessly through the world). Animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment, Departing from happiness, Francois Jullian.

What is a body capable of -

Spinoza

Building/Making, into the theoretical performative object (that does theory)

Albers/Clarke : Interactions, Counterpoints, Intervals between colour/forms,

Membrane, Discursive, Diffractive, Sensory, Layered and Filtered Light,

Body, Movement, Mind, Assemblages, Exploratory, Speculative, Choreographic,

Deleuze/Guattari, understand the body more in terms of what AFFECTS it is capable of, instead of the consequences of having a body.

Peter Zumthor : Thermal Baths

Human Agency/Temporal transitions between matter and movement.

Immaterial/Concrete/Water : Bodies in contact/the corporeal social human body

Manifolds/Theory of Temporality/3 Synthesis of Time

Memory Past Preserved Condition

Present Habit Instants Agent

New Future, actual/virtual Creation of The New

Multiplicity, purality of contemplating souls.

Asymmetries between particular past and general future.

Temporality involves multiple interacting processes.

Architecture becomes Spatial Agency

We all make space : Jeremy Till

Paintings, space, volume, surface, passages, actualizations, claddings/camouflage

One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences, both phenomenological and filmic, reading a space by its depth of field, its thickness.

Turbulence House, New Mexico, Steven Holl.

Aesthetics/Asperities : Resultants that incorporate the friction (asperity) of their trajectories through a medium. Tilt-up concrete construction, Chapel of St, Ignatius, Seattle. Steven Holl.

Navigations and Vectors/conduits/intervals and traces between discursive practices.

Wrapped Silences : Assembled Sectional Elements/Thresholds

Surfaces on Mourning/Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness

Christopher Wilmarth : Poetics/Duality of Light and gravity

Light : Drawing into Sculpture
Archive Material/Folders 2008/2013



The sense that glass provides an opening, a means of passage through to something else, is as central to Mallarme's Poetry as it to Wilmarth's Art.
Steven Henry Madoff


Christopher Wilmarth
The Museum of Modern Art
May25-August 20, 1989

The exhibition features glass and steel constructions that manipulate light and shadow and suggest poetic, even romantic content through a constructivist, geometric idiom.

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.

Oscar Tuazon “See Through” : Working with Disjunction/Spatial Forms/Windows/Spatial Collages

Oscar Tuazon “See Through”

Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to present “See Through,” the gallery’s third solo-exhibition featuring new works by the Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon.

Oscar Tuazon‘s sculptural oeuvre is situated at the border of art, architecture and technology. His large-scale works – shown in exhibition spaces as well as public space and nature – often seem like functional do-it-yourself structures which were once inhabited or will be made inhabitable soon. In terms of form, Tuazon is close to artists of Minimalism and Land Art, such as Donald Judd or Carl Andre. He goes so far as to copy single works of artists like Richard Serra, but without the ironical distance that characterizes appropriation. The process of copying is rather to be understood as a re-building that reduces the work to its sheer material and potential. Furthermore, Tuazon doesn’t focus on the relation between work and architectural space, but on material, the process of building, and the physical agency of the work itself. Often, the collective process of constructing his large-scale sculptures could be seen as a performance which naturally takes place before the actual work is realized.

In “See Through,” Tuazon borrows a form which condenses various concepts explored in his previous work: the window. He installs massive wooden frames made of spruce, cedar, and plywood, that stand in the middle of the gallery space or directly against the wall. At first glance the sculptures seem minimalistic: geometrical frames that define and order space, and at the same time evoke, like Fred Sandbacks sculptures, larger structures. However, Tuazon transcends minimalism: his windows consist of two parts. One part is transparent with a pane of glass built into it, while the other part is crossed by three wooden bars which belong to the wall of a house. These objects, quite clearly, have a certain function. They are windows that separate inside from outside and, at the same time, are transparent. The title gives account to this main feature of windows. But contrary to minimalist sculptures, which put the focus on the surrounding architecture, Tuazon‘s windows exist as architectural elements themselves– constructed by the artist in the studio.

In the exhibition space, the windows are fundamentally alienated in several ways. First, they are not part of a house. Second, their layout creates doubt about their ability to separate inside and outside – to be tight. Furthermore, they don’t allow to look outside anyway: They are positioned either in the middle of the gallery or on the wall. In their quasi-functionality, they go beyond the way of perceiving space expressed by minimalist artists.

Tuazon’s sculptures are easy to grasp, but it’s difficult to spell out their complexity. As windows, their basic function is to disappear. They should be transparent. At the same time, they are displaced, don’t quite work the way they are supposed to, and so are alienated from their usual function. Ultimately, Tuazon’s objects create their own space, which is not equivalent with the surrounding gallery space. What happens within this new space expands the space itself: What happens between the objects and their perception is left to the exhibition visitors – and even that can’t always be controlled individually.

at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich

The Living Thing : Hidden Curriculum (Intermezzo)

a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage
Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine

ASSEMBLAGE:

An assemblage is any number of "things" or pieces of "things" gathered into a single context. An assemblage can bring about any number of "effects"—aesthetic, machinic, productive, destructive, consumptive, informatic, etc. Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of the book provides a number of insights into this loosely defined term:

In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines 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. All this, lines and measurable speeds constitutes an assemblage. A book is an assemblage of this kind, and as such is unattributable. It is a multiplicity—but we don't know yet what the multiple entails when it is no longer attributed, that is, after it has been elevated to the status of the substantive. On side of a machinic assemblage faces the strata, which doubtless make it a kind of organism, or signifying totality, or determination attributable to a subject; it also has a side facing a body without organs, which is continually dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or pure intensities or circulate, and attributing to itself subjects what it leaves with nothing more than a name as the trace of an intensity... Literature is an assemblage. It has nothing to do with ideology. There is no ideology and never has been. (3-4)
The book, as described above, is a jumbling together of discrete parts or pieces that is capable of producing any number effects, rather than a tightly organized and coherent whole producing one dominant reading.
The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, 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.

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html



Speculative Learning Environment : Russell Moreton.

Re- Imagining Education, Brockwood Park School.

2011.

Spatial Representation/Practice : Discursive photography and documentation

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

 

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

 

Gaston Bachelard.

 

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

 

Jacques Monod,

The Human/Straw Dogs, John Gray.

Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?

— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

Jana Sterbak

Remote Control 1989

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

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines, 

Sensorium : A Partial Taxonomy, Caroline A. Jones.

Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.

Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

Objects, Causality, Art Ontologies : Drawing/Watching/Walking

 

Outpost 071022

The Quadruple Object.

There are two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities, real and sensual in both cases.

Real objects and qualities exist in their own right, while sensual objects and qualities exist only as the correlate of some real object, whether human or otherwise.

I am not saying that a work of Art reveals the secret of life and being to us.

A work of Art affords the peculiar pleasure, an aesthetic performance in which the inwardness of things, their executant reality is opened to us.

Ortega.

Giacometti.

Created a visual lexicon of nothingness and being, of community and isolation.

Making fleeting visions, interactions between the modelling object and the space within which it exists. Concentrating, extracting a female nude from the atmosphere of a city, creating a space that oscillated with their shared community and isolation.

There is no direct knowledge of anything only relations-on-knowledge.

The real object withdraws inaccessible from the scene, as the new object generated by metaphor takes over the situation.

The real objects at stake in aesthetics are ourselves.

It would be more accurate to say that in Art the part of the image which looks towards the object is always subordinated to our efforts, because as basically Thespian beings we become the new object generated by metaphor.

Object-Oriented Ontology.

A New Theory of Everything.

Graham Harman. 2018

Aesthetics Is The Root Of All Philosophy.

Robert Mangold.

Creating a new mysterious real object with new sensual qualities.

Compound Objects

Assemblages

The Quadruple Object.

Since objects cannot exist without qualities and vice versa, there are only four possible combinations.

In Object-Oriented Ontology real-sensual objects and qualities always come together.

Object Relations

Potentiality/Receptivity

The Theatricality of Metaphor.

Art makes explicit the tension between qualities that are experienced in the real/sensual object.

I myself am the sole real object in all experience, encountering any number of sensual things.

Every objective image, on entering or leaving our consciousness produces a subjective reaction.

Art is primarily theatrical in nature, since the spectator becomes a sort of 'method actor' a theatrical actor acting out the structure of metaphor. 

Ortega, An Essay in Esthetics By Way of a Preface. 

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with ultimate questions of what reality and real things are.

Bruno Latour, defines modernism as the view that there are two permanently distinct kingdoms, known as nature and culture and that it is the task of modernity, to purify these two domains from each other.

Metaphor is not knowledge about a pre-existing object, rather it  brings about the production of a new object.

All we are saying is that the real object at stake in metaphor is neither the absent cypress-object to which we never gain direct access, nor the human being who takes note of it. But rather the new amalgamated reality formed from the reader who poses as a cypress-object and the qualities of the flame.

The successful metaphor much like the successful joke, will occur only when the reader or auditor is sincerely deployed in living it.

The metaphor is theatrical, in the same sense as one is living one's role on stage.

Red is not a colour/Filtered Light/Program/Tschumi/Sainsbury Centre.

 RODIN AND BEUYS

THE ALCHEMY OF BUILDING WORKING PRACTICES

RUINS, REDUCTIONS, and the LOSS of SUBSTANCE.

FRAGMENTS, ASSEMBLAGES and INTERIORS that re-enter the world of creativity.

The Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities.

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche Can one achieve architecture without resorting to ‘design’? What if, instead of designing a new building, you keep the one skated for demolition? How do you insert an original program inside the old and new structures simultaneously? How do you reconcile coherence with multiplicity? Bernard Tschumi 2012

 PROGRAM. Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 1999/2012 Architecture was no longer an autonomous and isolated discipline but participated in the movement and confrontation of ideas. Tschumi, Red Is Not A Color. 2012

Collage/Abstraction/Assemblage/Beyond Discourse : Architectural Plan/ Library/Victorian Corset/Blueprint/Spatial Frame

Postmodernity is no more than 'modernity' without illusions

Zygmunt Bauman

We are less interested in whether we are living in a critical or post-critical era, because these terms circle round each other. Indeed, it is the fate of all 'post' terms (postmodern, post-critical, post-theoretical) that they never escape the hold of the condition that they would wish to succeed.

On Discourse

From a sociological point of view, discourse includes all that a particular category of agents say (or write) in a specific capacity and in a definable thematic area. Discourse commonly invites dialogue, but discourse is not open to everyone, but based on social appropriation and a principle of exclusion.

Beyond Discourse : Notes on Spatial Agency. Tatjana Schneider and Jeremy Till.

Blueprint, Photogram and Collage

Collage : Diversions/Contradictions/Anomalies

Collage and Architecture

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

a thousand plateaus
Deleuze, Guattari

http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

Assemblage

The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, 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.


Becoming
Body Without Organs
Nomad
Rhizome
Smooth Space
State
War Machine

Camera Obscura : Reflections and the dark room.

The Library : A Meditation on the Human Condition (Giacometti, artist-philosopher)

Books can step up to us- into us- in many ways.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich was for me that rare precipitate force which calls another book into being.

Mario Petrucci, Heavy Water, a poem for Chernobyl.

Paths and Boundaries : Stonehenge

Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."


-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Footnote

Critical Modernism, where is post-modernism going?
The Garden of  Cosmic Speculation
Charles Jencks

MATERIAL MATTERS : STRANGE TOOLS AND THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

STRANGE TOOLS
ART and HUMAN NATURE
ALVA  NOE

THE CONDITION OF POSTMODERNITY

DAVID HARVEY

As David Harvey argues in his seminal Condition of Postmodernity, architecture becomes one of the aestheticised products by which global capitalism and political regimes express themselves. It is with this realisation that we must reverse the equation. Not space and time in architecture, but architecture in space and time, in an  concepts of the former acceptance of Harvey’s conclusion that ‘neither time or space can be assigned objective meanings independent of material processes, and that it is only through investigations of the latter that we can properly ground ourselves’.

ARCHITECTURE IN SPACE AND TIME

Jeremy Till | Collected Writings | Architecture in Space, Time 1996

There is a feeling of intimidation for the architect faced with a broad cultural landscape, and so an understandable reaction is to look for stable elements. In this way architecture, fixed and permanent, shrugs off the ephemeral and the present, and enters into dialogue with the deeper structures which may condition culture. The language of traditional anthropology (mythic, ritual, cosmic, symbolic) is used as a vehicle for architectural exploration, with the intent that architectural will engage with enduring and stable cultural factors. The architect here reverses the role of the anthropologist. Where the latter may investigate and describe social practices through their inscription in space and time, the architect describes temporal spaces in which to set those practices. There is an emphasis on architecture as a setting for ritual and as the embodiment of archetypal human situations, all constituted within cultural tradition. At its worst this approach reeks of conservative nostalgia, at its best it is a project of interpretative re-visioning of an active tradition in which to set human action. It is an architecture that is firmly rooted in space and time, but in very particular interpretations of them. The space is one of concrete representation, informed by the search for authentic meaning. The time is one which combines the cyclic movements of cosmology and nature with a backward-looking naturalisation of history, both characterised by the sense of reinterpreted repetition. The implication is that time and space should stand outside the contingent forces of the present, and that production must resist immanent distractions in an attempt to ground architecture in a more profound cultural horizon. It is this detachment that is both the real strength of this approach but also its weakness, because in looking for the truth it bypasses the real.

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