Monday, 23 October 2023

Making Thresholds/Dialogues between the container and the contained.

 Outpost 260823


Clay-Drawings at Bayfield.

Observatory/Propositional Assemblage.










Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.


The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 


Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 


Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing and Telling. 


Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.


The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.


The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.


Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.


To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.


It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.


In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.



Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life


Are you interested in the idea of threshold?


What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.


The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.


A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.


Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.




Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.


Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.






Figure 2.3 Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram


Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object


Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 


Telling By Hand.


The Tacit Dimension : That we can  know more than we can tell.


Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.

Michael Polanyi.


Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.


Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.


The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.


Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another. 


Friday, 20 October 2023

Art Works Outpost Studio 2021 : Discursive Constructions/Speculative Practices of Knowing : Possible Worlds/Robert Lepage 2001

Art Works : Discursive Constructions/Speculative Practices of Knowing
Outpost Studio
020921


On the horizon, then, at the furthest edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species-the collective (generic) work of the species-on the model of what used to be called "art" indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an "object" isolated by and for the individual.

Henri Lefebvre, 
Openings and Conclusions. 
On Installation and Site Specificity (introduction) Erika Suderburg

The point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we are part of the world’s differential becoming.  And  furthermore, the point is not merely  that knowledge practices have material consequences but that practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

OUTPOST STUDIO 2021
The Potential of The Abstract Field
Robert Cooper

The Materials of Life
Tim Ingold








Possible Worlds (2001)
Reviewed by Jason Korsner
Updated 11 July 2001

The fourth film by the French Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage - his first in English - cements his reputation as a film maker with a unique vision.

"Possible Worlds" is a poetic study of the nature of human existence, wrapped up in a murder mystery.

George Barber (McCamus) is found dead with $1000 in his pocket but with his brain missing. Interspersed with the subsequent police investigation, we see moments of George's life as he struggles to make sense of the world - or worlds - he lived in. "Each one of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds," he muses, as he keeps meeting the same woman, Joyce (Swinton), although each Joyce he meets has a different past, a different present, and a different personality.

Lepage employs exquisite visuals as he explores George's imagination and the role it played in his life, asking fundamental questions like do our thoughts exist before we think them? Or is there another me?

Tom McCamus displays just the right amount of vacant confusion, while Tilda Swinton gives a remarkable performance - or four performances - reprising the same character in different but simultaneous worlds.

The pace is slow and deliberate, but any faster and the audience would get lost. "Possible Worlds" is not easy to watch, and poses more questions than it could ever hope to answer, but this intelligent film will certainly achieve the director's goal of inspiring discussion.

The Psychoanalysis of Fire : Gaston Bachelard. 1964









Wednesday, 4 October 2023

Cyanotypes : Creative Ecologies

The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen.

The Drowned World, JG Ballard.

Blueprints : Anthropological Forms
Botanical traces with leper graves

DSC_0205 Archipelagic

DSC_0250 Architectural Blueprint

Biosphere (Ecology and Entropy) 2012.