Assemblages of movement : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies/Body Matters

Outpost 201124

Parables for the Virtual.

Brian Massumi. 1985

When we think of space as 'extensive' as being measurable, divisible and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in thought. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality.

If you know where you where you will end up when you begin, nothing happens tn the meantime.

Bergson redefined space in terms of movement, space is not a ground on which real motion is posited, rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself. Space comes into being through motion or event.

On Architectural Experience.

Architecture has the potential capacity on human/spatial bodies to affect or to be affected.

Relations of Movement and Rest.

The bodies capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest, to affect or to be affected.

Massumi/Spinoza/Deleuze.

Architecture still remains primarily as a discussion of distinct bodies, spatial and human with the two remaining physically and psychologically distinct.

Violated Bodies-Spaces.

Intense confrontations between body and space.

Tschumi allows for architecture to be considered as an assemblage, composed of a space and a bodily event, however, even his 'equation' retains a demarcation between spatial bodies and human bodies engaging in event and maintaining that the two function according to independent logics, but  serve to affect one another.

Bodies and spaces excrete out of themselves, they penetrate one another, contemporary architecture does not know what to do with such borderless entities. It has no mode of thinking about assemblages of this kind, where once discrete objects leak into one another creating indiscernible masses. There is a multiplicity of bodies, bodies that are forever being created and dismantled, forever in flux.

Architecture between Spectacle and Use.

Anthony Vidler. 2008

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

For Vidler this spectacle architecturre is one that embraces the ideas of image and iconomy.

In addition to carefully placing and posing lone figures within architectural photographs, architecture is also synonymous with casting idealised bodies, Le Corbusier's athelitic figures and his 'Modulor' of an ideal masculine body. And then there are the bodies available in computer models, and the physical little white plastic figurines. These are all ideal figures, doing proper things.

Disjunction.

Volatility-Violence.

Sets in motion a particular series of potentialities that otherwise lie dormant, which can alter architectures physical, social, cultural, ethical and at times political properties. 

Creating a schism between program and space, space and program, it does this so precisely because event-space and movement each follow a distinct logic, that when they are superimposed over one another they create disjunction.

For Tschumi there is an intense confrontation that occurs between body and space, bodies violate space and space violates bodies, the relationship between the two is symmetrical.

Overspilling with Viscous Light~The Excess of Changefulness~Openings

Forward to The Sympathy of Things, Lars Spuybroek.

We see the excess of changfulness, at once immanent to and over spilling the structural integrity of the form.

Brian Massumi.

Overspilling Forms~Sympathy~Abject(ion)

Light forming compositions, architectures of processual excess.

An untimely beauty that will not stand still in its place.

Interiors, intimate sociological thresholds.

Spatial Bodies : Capacitors Of Light and Dark.

Visual Minor Keys : Gestures of sympathies/colour thoughts in a relational field.

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

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

Outpost 200924

On the simple undertaking of attending to the material.

russellmoreton.com

Oceanic Metaphors~An Interpenetrated Meshwork.

For Mauss, real-life human beings inhabit a fluid reality in which nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next and in which nothing ever repeats. In this oceanic world every being has to find a place for itself by sending out tendrils which can bind it to others.

Thus hanging on to one another beings strive to resist the current that would otherwise sweep them asunder. Things do not aggregate and they do not fuse. They do however interpenetrate their many tendrils and tentacles interweave to form a boundless and ever extending meshwork.

 On The Gift~Octopuses and Anemones.

The Life of Lines.

Tim Ingold

Material Matters.

Architecture and Material Practice.

Katie Lloyd Thomas.

Sensory Corporeality

Making Bodies~Experiential Clay : An emotional rootedness in our primal self, Beuys.

Intrinsic to how we gain consciousness of our world.

Abject(ion) Explorations, something instinctive, innately human, visceral, an organ exploring a strange situation.

Joseph Beuys.

Clay as process : Moving~Eruptive~Living~Experiential

Beuys understood that creativity is central to human existence. Making-works-with-matter that makes the mind~body~move through change and transformation as well as emotional rootedness in a primal self.

Tactile experience adheres to the surface of our body, we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quiet becomes an object, correspondingly as the subject of touch. I cannot flatter myself that I am everywhere and nowhere. I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go in the world and tactile experience occurs 'ahead of me' and is not centred in me.

Maurice Merleau Ponty.

Phenomenology of Perception. 1945

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.

Overflowing Forces~in-acts of Sympathy with the Anarchic share of Existence.

Extreme Atmospheres : Fired Clay Labyrinths.

Interpenetrations~Visual Art Materialisms.

//russellmoreton.academia.edu

Clay~Anarchive Matter(s) : Transitive Forces of a Minor Key.

Research-Creation as Spatial Practice.

Clay Bodies~Baffles : Atmospheres and the Continual Weather World.

On a making that is a speculative pragmatism reaching out into the more-than anarchic share of existence, creating the conditions for living better. Moreton/Whitehead/Manning/Ingold.

Making Processual Architectures.

Clay+Ceramic+Anarchive : Minor Gestures~Interstitial space of emergent expression

An anarchive is a dynamic, creative, and "feed-forward" process that acts as a repository of traces rather than a static, traditional archive. Coined by philosophers Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, it functions as a "living" collection that encourages new, generative creations and potential rather than merely documenting the past.

Key Characteristics of an Anarchive

Active Process: Unlike an archive, which preserves and fixes, the anarchive is in constant flux and continues to evolve, focusing on potential rather than just the past.

"Feed-Forward" Mechanism: It is a "springboard" or "curating score" that triggers future artistic, social, or research-based work, rather than just acting as a reference to a past event.

Traces vs. Documents: Anarchives collect "traces" or fragments of events, which are seen as "carriers of potential" for further, often unpredictable, development.

Subversive Nature: It acts against the rigid, linear, and "destructive tendencies" of traditional archiving.

Collaborative & Experimental: It often involves the co-creation of knowledge, often in the form of multimedia projects, such as the anarchive.net project. 

The term is often used in arts-based research, such as the "Walking Anarchive" project, to describe how researchers can work with memories, experiences, and artistic materials in a non-linear way. 

Pure Presence~Clay Stories : Ethics/Aesthetics/Politics, Jane Bennett

Anarchives/Clay Stories : Lines of Flight/Dovecotes for Philosophers.

Discursive Documents : Enchantment/Somatic Affects, Jane Bennett.

Visual Art Materialisms : Spatial Bodies~Human Bodies

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

2013

Erin Manning for Brian Massumi : Sylvian & Fripp - Every colour you are (live '93)

Relationscapes

Erin Manning

Movement/Art/Philosophy

For Brian Massumi

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Drawing is a philosophical trigger/Roni Horn : Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities

Brian Massumi refers to all arts as 'occurrent' because any and every perception, artefactual or natural is just an experiential event.

It is an event both in the sense that it is happening, and in the sense that when it happens something new transpires

Semblance and Event, Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts.

Brian Massumi 2011.

Drawing is a philosophical trigger.

Roni Horn.

Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities.

Outpost Studio 14/03/2022

Occurrent Assemblages : Knowledge Objects

Choreographing

Events and Demolition

Trace and Encounter

Data Captured/Visualizations

Creative Ecologies/Drawing Concepts : Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

Clay/Fire/Space-Situatedness.

An Exploratory Ceramic Based Inquiry.

Propositional Drawing/Speculative Architecture.

Drawing Inscriptions : Situatedness in Ceramics

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.

Shallow - Space Constructions

Veils

Structural Cuts : Skyspaces

Skyspaces : Autonomous Structures

Site Specifity

Dark Spaces

Autonomous Structures : Models

Perceptual Cells

James Turrell

Fundacon 'la  Caixa' 1993.

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

The House is all about the poetry of shelter and siege from the elements and cosmos.

Gaston Bachelard.

Volume And Space.

Alberto Giacometti's sculpture, 'Man Pointing,' is an important statement in Western art for many reasons, not the least of which is what it says about volume and space. The elongated and spindly form gestures vaguely in the vastness of the space surrounding it. The gesture seems more about the space opened up by it and around it than it does about the physical. There is power in space more palpable than substance. This also is the conceptual heart of the Japanese garden.

Scott Meyer.

With Fire.

Richard Hirsch.

A Life Between Chance And Design.

Scott Meyer.

The Psychoanalysis Of Fire.

Gaston Bachelard.

Gaston Bachelard was intrigued by the process of imagination, the way in which the pensive mind brings to any given reality a multiple perspective. About many substances such as earth, air, water, and fire, he contended, we harbour subconscious convictions which modern science may disprove in fact but cannot seem to eradicate from artistic reverie.

Northrop Frye. 1964.

Against Hylomorphism.

Gilbert Simondon. 1964-89-2005.

Individuation, the generation of things, should be understood as a process of ontogenesis in which form is ever emergent, rather than given in advance.

The Clay can take to the mould and mould the clay.

Simondon, took the essence of matter or the material to lie in form-taking-activity.

Brian Massumi. 2009.

Concepts rendered into material relations.

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities for thinking about the world.

Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially.

A modern version of hylomorphism is enacted by a culture that furnishes the forms and nature the material. In the superimposition of one upon the other, human beings create the material culture with which, to an ever increasing extent, they surround themselves.

Tim Ingold. 

Frames, Handles and Landscapes.

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things. 2016

Eduardo de la Fuente.

The tool/the thinking hand, has grown to be a part of the hand, using a tool is both a practical and aesthetic action involving the artful manipulation of material by hand.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Affordances of Things.

Affordances provide strong clues to the operation of things. A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things.

Donald Norman. 2002.

Ecological Approaches to Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Patterning/Matters in Everyday Life.

Organism-Person-Environment

Ecological, interested in the organism-environment relationship.

An aesthetic ecology, each thing is a mere transitional point for continuously flowing energies and materials, comprehensible only from what has preceded it, significant only as an element of the entire natural process.

Theory/Culture/Society, Simmel 1994.

Matter and materials are lively and require attention. 

Materials continue to thwart us in unpredictable ways.

Jane Bennett.

Aleatory, by chance, lots of the 'acts' of nonhuman agents are aleatory exactly because they are not directed by any intension.

In And Out Of Material. 2007.

Tony Cragg.

All our senses scan the space in front of us; the future, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, lies before us.

Tony Cragg, 1998.

Cutting Things Up.

Material In Space.

Scale.

Impulses through Drawing.

Working Things.

Generation/Generative/Material.

I think mass and energy need to be generated, any effective change has to be generated. It's to do with a positive directed  initiative to change things.

“Generative” for me, in terms of my work, is the fact that within my own work, within any given period the work generates itself and there is a self-generating characteristic. The work I'm making today is only possible because of the previous work of three or four months ago and that was only possible because of the work of nine or twelve months ago.

Even if it's not a linear thing, things are generating. There is a sort of self-propagating, self-generative energy that is inherent in the material, I think. And even in the  term “generative”, from “genus”, is the idea of making a family group of things, whether making an associative group of things or creating a population, a species of things which “relativise” generation.

Tony Cragg.

The material is just part of the vocabulary of meaning.

Cragg wanted  to give the materials 'more meaning, mythology and poetry' He used the skills available to him at the EKWC residency to create ambiguities and tensions, to suggest past and present, to complicate rather than to describe.

European Ceramic Work Centre, Netherlands. 1990, 1992.

With the return of Cragg to studio based work in the early 1990s, when he was experimenting with clay; ideas around humanness, archaeology, and ritual were being explored within different areas of the fine arts. In addition, studio ceramics were frequently using the vessel as an initiating point to develop new forms and sculptural ideas.

Laibe, with its rich possibilities of interpretation that incorporates the past in the present and the universal aspects of human survival within the ceramic vessel form, lies at the heart of these complex and overlapping areas of practice.

Imogen Racz. 2009.  

The Ceramics Reader. 2017.

Andrew Livingstone.

Kevin Petrie.

Ceramics : Materiality and Metaphor.

Why are Ceramics Important?

The Existential Base, Philip Rawson.

Containers of Life: Pottery and Social Relations, Silvia Forni.

Ceramics and Metaphor.

Analogy and Metaphor in Ceramic Art, Philip Rawson.

Sculptural Vessels, Tony Cragg's  Laibe and the Metaphors of Clay, Imogen Racz.

Ceramics in Contexts.

Historical Precedents.

Studio Ceramics.

Sculptural Ceramics.

Ceramics and Installation.

Theoretical Perspectives.

Conceptual and Post Studio Practice.

Contemporary Clay, Clare Twomey. 

Extending Vocabularies: Distorting the Ceramic Familiar

Clay and the Performative 'Other', Andrew Livingstone.

Gender, Sexuality and Ceramics.

Identity and Ceramics.

Image.

Figuration and the Body.

Ceramics in Education.

Ceramics, Industry and New Technologies.

Museum, Site and Display.

Re-defining Ceramics through Exhibitionary Practice (1970-2009), Laura Breen.