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Assemblages for Inquiry/Reading (Circus, Sea, Ruin)

Thursday, 14 May 2026

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

Outpost 200623

Sites of building over lived lives.

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

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 


Sensing Spaces/Caryatid.

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








Clay.

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, 

Monday, 11 May 2026

FORMWORK / ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS~The Minor Gesture : Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

Making~Intensified Surfaces of a Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton


The 'exigencies' of the situation at hand.

Tim Ingold, MAKING. 


Clay becomes a procedural matter of concern(s).

Spatial Intelligence/Architectures

Abject (ion) Body and Matter in Process/Processual Relations.

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 














Indexical Drawing : Pencil, Wax and iron oxide on paper. 240x150 1008

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


IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY

ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments

Mediating the experience of LANDSCAPE

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax COLOUR AS CONDUIT / PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA / IMPROVISATION PIERCED  DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW / SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS / TECTONICS AND TEXTILES INDEXICAL / GESTALT  VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS / GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY










Without opposition nothing is revealed,
No image appears in a clear mirror If one side is not darkend.
Jacob Bohme, De tribus principiis 1619.
Everything is interrelated and suffers when it acts, so too the purest human thought. Holderlin, 1798.



Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment Between PLACE and SITE

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity

 LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner on painting)

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practices.


RAVENINGHAM THEMES : Working Notes


New Futures for Architecture Leon van Schaik

Spatial intelligence builds our mental space. Sensing Spaces

Architecture Reimagined Oak-Framed Buildings. Rupert Newman

Heidegger for Architects

Adam Sharr 


MAKING : ANTHROPOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Tim Ingold

Touching objects, feeling materials 

The Cathedral and the Laboratory


A Hut of One's Own

Anne Cline

Solar Pavilion

Alison and Peter Smithson Architecture is not made with the brain 

The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

HERZOG & DEMEURON NATURAL HISTORY

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. Speculative Architecture

On The Aesthetics of Herzog & De Meuron 


The Thinking Hand

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa

The Architecture of Natural Light. Henry Plummer

Peter Zumthor

Hortus Conclusus Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

The Potentials of Spaces

The Theory and Practice of Scenography and Performance. Alison Oddey, Christine White

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception. Madeline Schwartzman

Collage and Architecture. Jennifer A. E. Shields

COLLAGE

Assembling Contemporary Art. Sally O'Reilly 

Construction/Abstraction Body/Identity Environments/Geographies

Indexical

Absences

Actuality Immaterial Architectural Sensing Surfaces,

Textures

Dimensions, Sprays, Trace











Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

Repetition, Empirical Experiences

Forms, Pavilion, Hut, Shelter, simple enclosure

Minimalist, tuning objects, sequences to construct/de-construct environments 

Reflexive Surfaces into architectural presence

Art as indeterminate, able to arrest perceptions into different states/becomings 

Site, undoing of place. 

Gauze/Filtered Light/Phenomena

Gesture of the work, its situation,

Meshwork. The drawing grid, making of a proposition into space.

Cyan, Sky Blue, dappled light, membrane, responding to the weather/locality


AA Pavilion Project,

Its about learning through making, being involved in the process, the installation and its reception, dislocating contextual barriers.

Ephemeral Architectures, AA Document/Project, Prizeman

Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.

Immaterial Architecture The Illegal Architect Jonathan Hill

Oak 

Tree 

Oil

Paper

Plaster

Rust 

Sgratfito 

Silence 

Sound 

Steel 

Television 

Weather

Frosted Light

Index of immaterial architectures

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL. Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body. Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson

Interactive Abstract Body (Square) The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman

Stan Allen

Indexical Characters FABRIC=MASS+ FORM

Alan Chandler

The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.

ANTI OBJECT Kengo Kuma

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. 

What that form is called- ARCHITECTURE, GARDENS< TECHNOLOGY is not important. ReThinking Matereriality

The engagement of mind with the material world. Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden. Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things

Towards a Theory of Material Engagement Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency

Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency

We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts 

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things




Material Engagement and the Extended Mind. Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality. Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective Carl Knappett


People make space, and space contains people

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things. Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments






Architectures for Perception

Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts. Charles Goodwin





 

Sunday, 10 May 2026

Thinking Through Making~Design Anthropology~Materiality. Tim Ingold.

Thinking through Making.

Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

31 October 2013.


Ever since Aristotle, it has been customary in the western tradition to think of making 

as a bringing together of a preconceived, ideal form, in the mind of the maker, with an 

initially formless mass of raw material. In this view, all the thinking has been done 

before the making begins. And for those who encounter the finished object, the thought 

can only be recovered by reading back from the work to an idea in the mind of the maker. 

Here I present an alternative account of making, as an inherently mindful activity in 

which the forms of things are ever-emergent from the correspondence of sensory awareness 

and material flows in a process of life. Artefacts and thoughts are the more or less 

ephemeral cast-offs of this process, strewn along the way. Rather than imposing form on 

matter, the maker -- operating within a field of forces that cut across any divisions 

between body and environment -- is caught between the anticipatory reach of the 

imagination and the frictional drag of materials.


Research Lines~Modes of Existence~Inquiry.

Ceramic Passages~Circulations~Volumes : Proposals for experience.






Anthropologist Tim Ingold challenges the traditional model of creation, proposing that genuine creativity arises from improvising with materials rather than imposing pre-existing ideas. 

This approach advocates for understanding knowledge as something that grows from within our active, sensory engagement with the world.




The act of making has increasingly been reframed within contemporary discourse not as a secondary stage of production, but as a primary mode of thinking and knowing. 

This shift recognizes "making" as an epistemological process—a way of creating knowledge, rather than just materializing a pre-existing idea. It moves from a model where thought precedes production to one where knowledge emerges through engagement with materials and tools. 

This paradigm, often referred to as "[Thinking Through Making]" or an "[Epistemology of Making]," is prevalent in design, architecture, and anthropology. 


Key Aspects of Making as Knowing

Embodied Cognition: Knowledge is generated through the body's interaction with materials, often described as "thinking with your hands" or "ping-ponging" between mind and material.

Emergent Process: Forms and knowledge emerge "from the inside" of the process rather than being imposed on materials.

Epistemic Objects: The objects created are not just final products, but active participants in the learning process, allowing makers to see, tinker with, and understand problems differently.

Materiality and Resistance: The constraints and friction encountered during making (e.g., in crafting, digital fabrication) force critical thinking and adaptation, which are essential to developing expertise. 

Context in Contemporary Discourse

Design Research & Pedagogy: Architectural pedagogy is shifting toward a process-oriented approach, where empirical making and experimentation are central to critical thinking.

Design Anthropology: "Making" is used to understand the world by actively participating in its creation, treating design as "world-making" rather than just problem-solving.

Social Constructionism: This perspective implies that knowledge is not static but created through ongoing social and material interactions. 

This reframing moves the maker from an "artisan" filling an intellectual blueprint to an "active thinker" whose understanding grows through engagement with the world. 



Wednesday, 6 May 2026

Making Iterations/Procedures Crafted with Care ~The Interweaving of Everyday Experience in Texture~Pattern~Weave

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 


Affective~Ecologies~Immersive Atmospheres.

Matterings~Un-doing theory into the making of the everyday.


The Anthropology of Skill.

Architecting with experience.

On the distinction between Art and Technology.

Yet speech is no ordinary skill. Weaving  together in narrative, the multiple strands of action and perception specific to diverse task and situations, it serves, if you will, as the 'Skill of skills'. And if one were to ask where culture lies, the answer would not be in some shadowy domain of symbolic meaning, hovering aloof from the 'hands on' business of practical life, but in the very texture and pattern of the weave itself.

Tim Ingold. Beyond Art And Technology.

Circulation Diagram~Lines of Flow amongst Clay.












2025 Diary Content.

May 26 - June 1

Readings and their speculations of theory into the realm of everyday practices.


Interior Spaces.

Infra~Bodies of Immediacy 

Becoming Volatile, matter(s) entering into movement, creating in~with bodies.


The permanency of ceramic objects both reflect and indexically link clay with its very nature of uncertainty and change through the very extreme and  volatile processes of firing. 


Clay is about the primacy of the corporeal human body as it attempts to express~abject itself through bodily metaphors or nesting, dwelling, nurturing and enduring.  


The Inner Life of Pots~Ceramics

Tunings~Innerness~Thresholds~Change

Sounding Voids/Muted Light


Brian Clarke

Concordia

Film, analysis, organisation of human access, wonderous, the best of myself.

Elements of flight, collage, and sensate fictions.


Hannsjorg Voth

Working with intensity(building structures)


Architectural Reflexive Spaces

Inhabitation's into the continuous weather world.

Landscapes~Making~Building~Ecologies


Innovative Objects~For Critical~Philosophical Thinking~Living.

Cognitive nature~potentiality of matter(s) of making worlds. 


Tectonics materials, matter(s) of wood, light, clay and water.

Outposts, observatories, places of inquiry, dwelling, self builds.

Independent researcher, artist in residence, works manager, project development. 


Constituting Consistencies.

Bodily/Corporeal Metaphors, Analogies and Poetics. 

Calvino, exactitude, lightness, quickness, visibility, multiplicity.


Sunday, 3 May 2026

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

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices
Outpost Studio : 03082021

Materials as Leaky Things/The Correspondences of Surfaces  : For Tim Ingold






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,