Encountering Material Matter : Making/simple undertakings of attending to the material.

Outpost 200924

On the simple undertaking of attending to the material.

Material Matters.

Architecture and Material Practice.

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

The practice of architecture and the discourses surrounding it are, as so many ways of understanding and constructing the world, structured around a distinction between form and matter where the formal (and conceptual) is valued over the material.

On the encounter of a woodworker making a table.

Mattering forms that can have a future potential to affect and be affected, and rise out of its individual past formed by cultural actions for a preconceived particular purpose. The material, at any particular point in time, is brought into existence through a developing chain of events, both 'natural' and cultural, and has the potential for a myriad of future interactions and transformations. Massumi suggests that what is important in this encounter is not the distinction between form and matter for:

There is substance on both sides: wood; woodworking body and tools. And there is form on both sides: both raw material and object produced have determinate forms, as do the body and tools. The encounter is between two substance/form complexes, one of which overpowers the other.

Brian Massumi.

Massumi provides us with an (Deleuzian materialist) alternative to the hylomorphic account of the architectural material, which suggests that material is itself active and does not distinguish between the physical forces (the plane smoothing it) and immaterial forces (the building standard that determined its fire treatment in a certain way) that produce it.

For Massumi, distinctions between real and ideal, between digital and manual, between formal and material – all disintegrate.

The World is Full of Holes

There is always some kind of truthy interpretation space in which your thoughts and ideas and actions are taking place, and the thing to remember about this space is that (1) it's not optional and (2) it's not totally sealed off, it's perforated. What does that mean? First of all, it means that not only the mental but also the physical (and psychic and social) ways we 'interpret' things are in that space.

Being Ecological, Timothy Morton. 

Encountering/Thinking with and in Clay.

Developing an indifference to be able appreciate/coexisting with ambiguity.

After construction, of joining and relating matter into a spatial form of inquiry.

Marking/Inhabitation of the ceramic structure through earthen slips and natural occurring oxides.

Drawing in the Hungate.

Wellbeing.

Caryatid 

Blind Drawings in the Rotunda/WSA. 

Drawing/Feeling through touch and sound.

Michael Grimshaw. 2003.

Creating a meaningful relation to phenomena/mattering.

Three types of metronome speeds,

Unknown plastic figure/animal,

Hand clapping,

Another persons heartbeat,

Blind paper tags,

Cotton Wool,

Toy bear,

Caryatids : Drawings in wax, charcoal and Indian Ink.