Spatial/Diffractive Bodies Situated in Place : Matters of Fidelity and Precariousness.

 

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative entanglements in a world of materials. 

The Environment Without Objects.

Tim Ingold. 2008

Intermediaries within the cyanotype process.

Trace drawings on paper with organic and material from the built environment.

Drawing/Making Processes.

Architectural Body : Organism, Person, Environment. Arakawa and Gins. 

 "[...] the body [...] continually transforms itself and is already not, at the moment when I speak of it, what it was a few seconds ago." (Laplantine, 2015:13)

Laplantine, F. 2015 [2005]. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.

Through the choreographing of our learning processes we create the conditions for engagement/entanglement and production/transformation, which are all modalities of movement and action. So we see pedagogical, architectural and professional practices as potential practices of transformation and co-learning. Dance – somehow both connected to and different than choreography – brings with it a whole set of values which we consider significant for the architectural pedagogy we enact. 

Lepeki lists the 'constitutive qualities' of dance as 

"ephemerality, corporeality, precariousness, scoring and performativity" (Lepecki 2012:15) 

He goes on to say that "[t]hese qualities are responsible for dance's capacity to harness and activate critical and compositional elements crucial to the fusion of politics and aesthetics …"(Lepecki 2012:16)

His 'compositional' and 'critical' elements echo the event/discourse relationships within our pedagogy and in our use of choreography as dance/writing. These qualities allude to specific modes of engagement and making, and state particular values. We will use them to underscore our pedagogical modes, and develop them as necessary in a teaching practice which desires students' engagement, empowerment, and caring.

In that sense, ephemerality can be related to immediacy and an engagement with the here- and-now which cares about effects and duration. Corporeality speaks of a body, but if we ask whose body or what body, then we can expand it to be any-body, in order to speak of matter or, more precisely, of mattering and bodying. Other names for precariousness can be fragility or vulnerability, somehow always already a condition of our impossibly immediate interventions. Scoring, which can be both a ‘writing’ and an unfolding, creates spaces and times and modes for and of improvisation. And performativity always returns us anew to movement, multiplicity, effects and life.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care: Choreographing Values

OREN LIEBERMAN

ALBERTO ALTÉS

Abstract

Thinking through choreography as dance/writing – both the doing and the score for that doing, the event and the discourse - we propose to shift the focus of architectural practices and pedagogies from an emphasis in the attainment of competencies and  static  knowledge,  to  a  privileging  of  processes  and modalities of learning that nurture the values of engagement, empowerment and  caring  responsibility.  Choreography  situates  our  work  in  the  realm  of performative action and transformation, and it does so with and through our bodies; also, it helps us frame the power of our intraventions, which aim at transforming the world through immediate, responsible and often fragile acts of engagement with matter, movement and life.

Keywords: 

Intravention, matters of care, choreography, architectural pedagogies, modalities of learning.

More on ’intraventions’ can be found in:

Altés, A. and Lieberman, O. 2013. Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes 

of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures. Baunach: Spurbuch Verlag.

2023

Propositions and Structures/Landing Sites/Event Markers : Experience in the making.

Outpost 190723

Ceramic Forms/Speculative Spaces.

The ambient wholeness of the world at large is impossible to take in.

Erin Manning/Arakawa and Gins.

Demarcations/Sensations in the Landscape of Perception.

The Apparent Blindness of Little Perceptions.

White Sticks and Subsidiaries.

The Meaning of the Tactile Experience.

Curriculum Making as the Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

The Environment without Objects.

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative Entanglements In A World Of Materials.

Tim Ingold.

Subsidiaries exist, as such by bearing down on the focus to which we are attending from them, and are integrated one to the other by the act of a person, and last only as long as a person, the knower, sustains this integration by indwelling (living in) them.

The proof of the existence of two kinds of awareness comes when we try to observe how we do all this. If our blind man shifts his attention from the tip of his cane to his hand, the meaning on the end of the cane disappears (or becomes something else). Deprived of the meaning of its actions, any description of the process is merely a description of the 'mechanics' and not perception at all.

Robert Irwin.

Relationscapes : Erin Manning.

For Arakawa and Gins.

Fielding Microperceptibility.

Suddenly we are no longer simply watching things moving, we are feeling movement moving. We are moving with our watching fielding the finding form of microperceptions. This finding form of microperceptibility that gives rise, to a quasi registering of an affective tonality rather than a particular emotion. 

We move-with the movement even as we are moved by it, 

The more ambiguous the surroundings, the greater number of Imaging Landing Sites. 

Imaging Landing Sites are virtual events in the making, they foreground the kinaesthetic flickering that propels the taking form of an event.

Landing Sites are event markers in and of the event fabric that is organism-person-environment.

Landing Sites corner the experience in the making.

Imaging Landing Sites give affective resonance to the relation between experience and feeling, they give force to the taking form of the experience.

Arakawa and Gins.

Hungate Glass Abstracts

Raveningham Site Drawing on Architectural Paper.

White Sticks/Visual Feeling/Drawing on Blindness/Feeling through Subsidiaries.

Feeling Drawing/Drawing with Trace and Inscription.

Breathing/Perceiving in the landscape through the phenomenal sensations of subsidiaries/white sticks integrating an awareness of both an indwelling (living in) and a visual demarcation of that movement of gathering sensations.   

Drawing into the phenomenal by using media/tools and sensations/experiences through the site of the situated body of the knower.

Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi.

The semantic aspect of this transformation is that the information the man gets by feeling with the cane is the meaning of the tactile experience.

Picture a blind man probing his way with a cane. While he is alert to the feelings in the hand holding the cane, the crucial distinction may be defined by saying that these feelings are not watched in themselves, but he watches something else by way of them, that is by keeping  aware of them.

He has a subsidiary awareness of the feelings in his hand, feelings which are merged into focal awareness at the end of the cane, constituting two kinds of awareness that are mutually exclusive-'from awareness' and 'focal awareness.' There is here a particularly interesting phenomenal transformation. The sensations of the cane on his hand (the surface of the cane as it touches the palm of his hand, etc.) are lost. Instead, he feels the end of the cane as it touches an object.

Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

All perceptual knowing is knowing in action (change) and the equivalent of the phenomenal.

Change is the most basic condition (physic) of our universe. In its dynamic, change (alongside time and space) constitutes a given in all things, and is indeed what we are talking about when we are talking about when we speak of the phenomenal in perception. Most critically, change  is the key physical and physiological factor in our being able to perceive at all.

For Irwin, our perceptual process is a kind of 'perpetual motion' assimilator. No change, no perceptual consciousness. So while it is perfectly understandable that the overwhelming majority of our conceptual energies are spent on organizing this myriad of perceptual data into some 'familiar picture' we can work and live with, what is not so understandable is how much of those intellectual energies have been spent on trying to avoid this fact and its effects on our lives. 

LEARNING TO LEARN

On Learning

Brockwood Park School.

J. Krishnamurti.

MAKING : Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Knowing is Movement/Knowing from the inside.

Tim Ingold.

Transvaluation Symposium 2015.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care.

Choreographing Values.

Thinking Things-in-Phenomena.

Diffractive Readings.

Karen Barad.

Oren Lieberman and Alberto Altes.

LiAi : Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention.

The shift we propose in architectural practices and pedagogies- towards a privileging of processes and modalities of responsible making and learning- starts with an active stance that focuses on the transformational nature of interventions performed in real times and places. 

Through the performative, we shift our attention from what a thing looks like to what a thing does, and from objects and artefacts to 'movements' as well as to the effects of our practices and actions in life. This transformational 'mode' echoes the proposed category of worlding- with its accompanying history of 'indefinition' and 'indetermination' as well as its clear co-responsive engagement in the making of the world-and locates us in the realm of 'situatedness', or inside phenomena.

We are within, and active parts of, specific situations that we encounter in relationship to a series of concerns, things that really matter and have to do with the ongoing becoming of the world. Becoming inside these situations requires a certain fidelity, a certain willingness to stay and to endure; a caring in duration. In this duration it is both possible and necessary to develop situated knowledges, which emerge as 'ways-of-doing-and-making' from our engagement in worlding practices, practices which are also, for that reason, learning experiences.