Tuesday, 30 December 2025

Moments/Marks/Gestures differ because of their fecundity.

Outpost 010724


The Rehabilitation Of The Imagination.

Correspondences between humankind and the world.

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

russellmoreton.com




In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

Gaston Bachelard 





Imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create 'metaphors of metaphors'.

Reverie, reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication.

Gaston Bachelard.


Moments differ because of their fecundity.

The Intuition Of The Instant.


The imagination is not a state, it is the human existence itself.

William Blake. 


For Bachelard, Blake's poetics, presents a complex around the dialectics of rock and cloud. A dynamic imagination, he is a poet of absolute imagination for whom the unreal directs the real.


The Reverberation of Images.


In a word, the phenomenological approach is a description of the immediate relationship of phenomena with a particular consciousness. It allows Bachelard to renew his warnings against the temptation to study images as things. Images are lived, experienced, re-imagined in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness.


Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality.


From phenomenology Bachelard retains above all the admonition to return to 'phenomena themselves' this requires putting aside naïve belief in the reality of things and approaching phenomena through consciousness which is always intentional, always consciousness of something.


I realized then we were thinking the same thing. As we looked into each other's eyes, I felt, once again, the anxiety that had taken root in our hearts a long time ago. The light reflecting from the spray of the fountain lit R's face.


The boy was fiddling with a nondescript stone as though it were a toy with some elaborate hidden mechanism. His plain light blue gloves had obviously been knit by hand. They were connected to each other with a strand of yarn, to keep them from becoming separated. I remembered wearing the same kind, long ago, and, in this basement so full of anxiety, they seemed like the lone sign of innocence and peace.


The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.


The Immaterial Body.

Proposals through transparency and trans-illumination.


Sensate Inscriptions. 

The Mechanized Image.


Thresholds and projections of creative perception.


Drawing into the visual field.

Paint, pigments, lines, bought to light. 

Gestures, lines from sensations and its seeing.


Life Drawing/Corporeal Social Bodies.

Drawing/Sensations into the memory and anxieties of physical things.


Drawing attention to the relations of the body.

Social and sexual politics.


The Modernist Offence.

Schiele And The Naked Female Body.

Gemma Blackshaw.





Feminist art historians have developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and spectatorship.


As Abigail Soloman-Godeau has claimed in her exploration of photography and female subjectivity in the Second French Empire, the barriers between what is deeped licit and illicit, acceptably seductive or wantonly salacious, aesthetic or prurient, are never solid because contingent, never steadfast because they traffic with each other – are indeed dependant upon each other.


How might such an engagement with difference, with the binary system, shift not only our understanding but also our appreciation of Schiele's representation of the naked female body, of what continues to be described and displayed as 'the nude'? 


Egon Schiele.

The Radical Nude.



Monday, 1 December 2025

Architectural Stratification/Installation : Crafting/Painting Transformative Reconstructions/Relationscapes

Outpost 200623

Of doing and un-doing, of being~becoming un-done by theory. 


Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

Painting Matter, Lime, Gesso, Charcoal, and Indian Ink on paper.




Water.

Ceramics and Architecture.

 Architectural Stratifications, Carlo Scarpa, Intervening with History. 

















The Placing of Pots.

The Hungate.



The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

A Moment of Pure Presence.


Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett


The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.


Analysing The Observed.

To abstract from the observed means to simplify the complexities of seeing.

Piet Mondrian.


Space and Form are ignored in this type of Abstraction, the Lines and their Vectors of Movement become a Map, Mapping Forces onto the Surface of the Picture.


Thinking with directional, durational markings/feelings/intuitive judgements.




Small Perceptions/Perceptions in Folding.

Small perceptions are as much the passage from one perception to another, as they are components of each perception.

Deleuze, 1993.


Small perceptions are like what Arakawa and Madeline Gins call imaging landing sites.

Relationscapes.

Erin Manning.


'Incoherence' exists, which is why the composition 'Art' exists.

Art allows us to think the unthinkable, to posit one paradox after another in the hope of firming up wisps of our lives and feelings by transfiguring them. By giving them a shape, a design, a coherence, even if they remain forever incoherent.

Andre Aciman/Edmund de Waal. 


For nearly fifty years my darkroom and studio have been the focus of my solitude.


Landing Sites.

The Expanding Field of Relations.

Organism/Person/Environment


I need silence to be able to think clearly, and an empty space where my thoughts can accumulate undisturbed.


Duration.

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid flowing time which is intertwined with an experience of being, where past, present and future merge into an experiential time of the individual being/becoming.

Steven Holl.


Darkrooms were dangerous places as well as magical ones, they are a painful metaphoric yoking of creation and destruction.


My final print is a golden square enclosing the pinkest dusk sky I had ever seen or imagined.

Filtered Light/Pot Metal Colours/Silver Stain/Filtows/Filters/Shadows.


The Light Gatherers.

Bodleian Libraries.

March 2022-October 2023.



Light Laboratory/Creation as Duration.

Glass vessels, as light filters shining the enlarger light through them and creating photograms. Garry's work oscillates with differential velocities. He works with great deliberation and then he works with abandon. I keep thinking about the tension between deliberation and abandon. You look at a painting by Agnes Martin and experience the temporal aspect of lines repeated slowly over days and weeks. A cell like structure repeats and changes, you repeat so that in return you can find the smallest oscillations of difference. An expanded field where you sense the development of different kinds of time, movements and their durations.


Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

Farewell to an Idea, Wallace Stevens/Edmund de Waal. 


Haecceity, thisness of things, which engenders feelings between ourselves/things/world.

I was grateful to have been able to live with so much pure colour for so long.


Space-Enfolding-Breath

Lake Of The Mind.

Ideas are already abstract.


Abstracted Transcriptions.

Drawing, Vectors and Forces of Subjectification.


Lines, mappings of forces across the surface of the picture.


Drawing on, analysis with, Dominants.


Formed by the dynamic forces derived from the outlines of objects and their surrounding spaces.


Palimpsest Collages

Psychogeographic Mappings

Architectural Models


The Process of Drawing/Building is Left Visible.


Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley.


Crafting Recovery and Regeneration.

Transformative Reconstruction.

SPAB, Summer 2023.

Michal Saniewski.


Falerone, San Francesco Monestry. Italy.


It's the forefront of modernisation, something that we thought the city was. The countryside is still the place where new ideas and experimentation actually take place..

Countryside : The Future.

Guggenheim Museum, 2020.


Heritage Conservation/Preservation

How do we insert new fabric into old and respect layers of history, of which the earthquakes are an inherent part? Perhaps some of the scars and cracks should be preserved to serve as a poignant  reminder of the past, becoming a living memorial? And perhaps there is potential to develop a new language of additive, 'surgical' architecture, where the contemporary timber frames serve a protective function, supporting and bracing the damaged medieval walls,  but at the same time can be inhabited, framing new uses and reprogramming internal spaces.


The reconstruction process should be used as an opportunity to add value beyond what existed before the earthquake. 


Exploring possible new functions and uses of currently empty spaces and damaged buildings, the local community was asked to participate in the act of psychogeographic mapping and thus rediscovering and revaluating the town on different levels.


Key themes of the New European Bauhaus initiative.


Renovation of existing buildings and public spaces in a spirit of circularity and carbon neutrality.


Preservation and transformation of cultural heritage.




Regeneration of urban or rural spaces.

 

Could Falerone become an experimental hotbed, an example of sustainable, community-driven reconstruction of urban fabric and place identity? The new crafts school could be an opportunity to achieve just that, stimulating collaborations not just with other towns and universities, but with regional authorities and even with the EU. 


Studio Cyanotypes.

Tools/Working Drawings and the Semblances of Spatial Agencies.



Keywords.

Visual Substance, Causal Doing, Investigating, Inquiry, Process, Agency, Matter, Material, Discursive, Iterative, Creative Apparatuses, Intra-Activity, Performativity, Bodies That Matter, 

Friday, 28 November 2025

Dwelling/Reverberation/Poetics : Physical Grammar/Passages

Outpost 200623

On The Experiential Level of Life

Investigating/Expanding 'The Spatial/Sculptural'
Space over Time/Operative Design













Tony Cragg
IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL


Demonstration

Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I'm interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it's an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.

Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?

Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.
I am not saying that that's not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.

Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?

Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn't ask your permission, there's something consensual about that, isn't there? Even though you don't like it, it doesn't look like you're making an effort to change it. And maybe there's some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don't like it, I wouldn't be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It's a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I'm not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.








Objects/Subjects in Space : Passages in Sculpture

OPERATIVE DESIGN : SPATIAL VERBS
To serve as a fundamental tool for spatial and architectural interpretation
Spatial operations, illustrated beginnings to activate architectural inquiry.


This catalogue thus introduces the possibility of understanding spatial formation as a process that can be derived from fundamental actions, here grouped into volumetric addition, subtraction, or displacement, which define a lexicon of starting points for the creation of space and also imply the relationship between oneself and the space created.

OPERATIONS
to | Expand | Extrude | Inflate | Branch | Merge | Nest | Offset | Bend | Skew | Split | Twist | Interlock | Intersect | Lift | Lodge | Overlap | Rotate | Shift | Carve | Compress | Fracture | Grade | Notch | Pinch | Shear | Taper | Embed | Extract | Inscribe | Puncture |

MAKE SPACE

Space matters. We read our physical environment like we read a human face.

The Eyes Of The Skin
Architecture and the Senses
Juhani Pallasmaam Steven Holl
2005

How to set the stage for creative collaboration
Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, David Kelley
2012

Surface + Volume
Generative Process
Combinations and Aggregations
Implementations

Writing and Seeing Architectue
Christian de Portzamparc, Philippe Sollers
2008

In and Out of material : Passages in Sculpture




COMBINATIONS
to | Inscribe + Inscribe | Intersect + Intersect | Split + Split | Embed + Embed | Taper + Taper | Bend + Bend | Branch + Branch | Shift + Shift | Notch + Notch | Inscribe + Intersect | Intersect + Split | Split + Embed | Embed + Taper | Taper + Bend | Bend + Branch | Branch + Expand | Expand + Shift | Shift + Notch | Notch + Twist |  

Languages,dialogues,conflicts that can evoke form,experience and interaction.
Research, inquiry and practice as a systematic approach through operative terms.
Investigating the 'Spatial' its formal/experiential essence/action and character for spatial opportunities.

The Feeling Of What Happens
Body,emotion and the making of consciousness
Antonio Damasio
1999

The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe
A Polemic
How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture
Charles Jencks
1995

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
ARCHITECTURE, ART AND DESIGN
V&A Contemporary, Lucy Bullivant
2006

to fold
to modulate
of tension
of entropy

Richard Serra, "Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself" [1967-1968]

to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to compliment to enclose to surround to encircle to hole to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of cabonization to continue

AGGREGATIONS
to | Reflect | Expand
Reflect + Pack | Skew
Pack | Inflate
Pack + Stack | Branch
Stack | Bend
Array + Stack | Rotate
Array | Taper
Join + Array | Pinch

Join | Split

Poetics and Place
The Architectures Of Sign, Subjects and Site
Kristen Kreider
2014

A Hut of One's Own
Ann Cline

Open Office/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture



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



SPATIALITY
Writer as mapmaker, literature of the city and urban space, concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.
Robert T. Tally Jr
2013

OPERATIVE DESIGN
A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs
2012/18

IMPLEMENTATIONS

to | Carve + Offset
Poli House : Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Offset program | Perimeter Services | Thickened Openings

to | Embed + Branch
Villa 1 : Powerhouse Company
Branched Programs | Volume Wrapper | Embedded Entry

to | Embed + Overlap
Casa para un Carpintero : RCR Arquitectes
Overlapping Program | Circulation Core | Embedded Entry

to | Expand + Nest
House N : Sou Fujimoto Architects
Expanded Outer Volume | Nested Private Program | Nested Living + Dining




Collage/Drawing Frame : Passages in Sculpture
to | Overlap + Expand
House in Minamimachi 2 : Suppose Design Office
Overlapping Light Wells | Stacked Program | Expanded Volumes

to | Bend + Shift
Nursing Home : Aires Mateus
Shifted Volumes | Bent Massing | Embedded Massing

to | Embed + Taper
Leimondo Nursery School : Archivision Hirotani Studio
Tapered Volumes | Thickened Roof | Embedded Program

to | Lift + Carve
Gouveia Law Courts : Barbosa and Guimaraes
Carved Massing | Lifted Program | Carved Plinth

to | Lift + Extrude
Carabanchel Housing : Dosmasuno Arquitectos
Extruded Living Spaces | Lifted Massing | Carved Plinth

to | Overlap + Rotate
Ironbank : RTA Studio

Rotated Volumes | Stacked Utility and Circulation Cores | Plinth and Street Facade

Anthony Di Mari
Nore Yoo

Volumetric Spatial Operations/Agents/Variations/Combinations

Additions
Subtractions

Displacements


Colour/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture/Architectural Glass
Mesh Topologies : Pattern and Chaos
Speculative Narratives 12
DSC_0018 Spatial/Visual Apparatus
Spatiality : Space over Time
DSC_0476 Spatial/Architectural Drawing
Reading Collage : Spatial Drawings/Documents/Analogue Photography
Speculative Narratives 8
Flickr









Tuesday, 25 November 2025

Photography/A Fragmentary Whole : The Temporal Flow of Things


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.

“Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”

Literary cartography is not a literal form of mapmaking, after all; rather, it involves the ways and means by which a given work of literature functions as a figurative map, serving as an orientating or sense-making form.

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:
Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel
Robert T. Tally Jr.


Path : Circular, Stonehenge

Transparency,time and matter #2

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011. #4

Dark Session's : Shadowy speculations in the pottery. Kilquhanity 2011

Silver gelatin prints from a "room obscura" set up at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011 as part of "Back to Free school, Drawing out the Archive".

Blue Spaces : White Absences #2
https://visualartpractices.wordpress.com/

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

London/Millennium Bridge : Architectural Abstracts/Drawing Traces




















Sunday, 23 November 2025

Diffractive Surfaces/Visitors : Imaginative Cartographies/Spatialities/Fictions/Epistemologies

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices
Outpost Studio : 03082021

Visual Diffractions~Water~Abbey : Orthoclase, or orthoclase feldspar.

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice.

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Google Lens.

The image displays a large black-and-white photograph of what appears to be an abstract or textured surface, potentially a wall or rock formation, mounted on a sheet of paper with various textual annotations and clippings. 
Textual elements in the background include references to the film "VISITORS" directed by Godfrey Reggio, and a quote attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche: "We have art that we may not perish by the truth".
Other text fragments mention architecture and specific locations like Suchumi.
The primary image itself is a high-contrast, grainy depiction of a rough, dark surface with lighter, irregular patches.
The overall composition suggests an artistic or documentary presentation, possibly an exhibition piece or a study of texture and decay.














Discursive Reading (against linearity)/New Modalities of Inquiry

New Generative Boundaries/Situatedness

Wayfinding and Heuristic/Everyday Practices


Reading is also thinking through the body

Viscous Porosity/Flesh of the world

Enfleshed Materialism/Membranes that affect interactions


Words Become Material

Troubleyn Laboratorium/Jan Fabre


In this moment the words become a performative agent writing and acting on the body

Installing ourselves in the event, that emerges in our reading


Reading diffractively means that we try to fold these texts into one anther in a move that flattens out our relationship to the material. In so doing we install ourselves into its/our becoming

Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research/Barad Thinking with intra-action

Alecia Y. Jackson, Lisa A. Mazzei


Paintings/Art Works are boundary making apparatusses

The Diffractive Apparatus/Analysis of Intra-ventions/actively/entanglements

Phenomena and Thresholds from which to create new analytical questions/forms


An entangled state of agencies, that which exceed the traditional notion of how we conceive of agency, subjectivity, and the individual.

Agency is an enactment, not something that someone has. Such entanglements require an analysis that enables us to theorize the social and the natural together.

Barad


Diffraction

Two major authors write about the metaphor of diffraction, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.
They explain how diffraction is a method for reading and writing based upon the physical phenomena. Diffraction is a way of coping with epistemological problems of representation (invisible knowledge maker as a false sense of objectivity, self-vision of reflexivity as totalizing and undermining knowledge claims).

To paraphrase Haraway, from "Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse" diffraction is an attempt to make differences while recording interactions, interference, and reinforcement. It does not have an origin and has a heterogeneous history. In addition, the practice of diffractive reading and writing never sediments the relationship between signifier and signified. Van der Tuin explains, "Diffraction is meant to disrupt linear and fixed causalities, and to work toward ‘‘more promising interference patterns’’ (26). She also explains that this can be practiced by reading texts through one another, and rewriting.This disrupts the temporality of a piece of writing, transverses boundaries such as discipline, and can change meanings in different contexts opening up meaning.

https://newmaterialistscartographies.wikispaces.com/Diffraction


Diffracting Photography/Painting/Collage Works
Heuristic reconfigurations through making/understanding/encounters with material









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


Collage Works, A Hut of Ones Own
Jana Sterbak
Remote Control 1989






















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,