Becoming Propositional/The Human Neuron.: Each Proposition/Activates Contrast/The Dialectic of Duration.

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The Dialectic Of Duration, Gaston Bachelard. 1950

Bachelard argues for a discontinuous time, made of instants out of which we construct new durations and deconstruct old ossified ones. A time experienced as durations that addresses the nature of time in its irreducibly fractured and interrupted state, and within which Bachelard urges us to launch projects and lead lives of creative rhythms. 

Becoming Propositional.

Developing in the Incipiency of Relations/Ecologies between Things/Phenomena.

One has to realize what restraint it needs to express oneself with such brevity. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be found where self-pity is lacking in equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sound can say things which can only be expressed through sound.

Arnold Schoenberg, from the introduction to the Six Bagatellies for string quartet, Opus 9, by Anton Webern, a Viennese friend and contemporary of Egon Schiele's.

Rachel's, Music for Egon Schiele. 1996.  

Individuations Dance/Relationscapes

There is no time to return to the line, the line must draw the movement, the gesture itself must become line. One pass with the paint and that's all, move the canvas. The result a vastness of localized movement, a movement across that is at once microscopic and macroscopic.

Erin Manning.

The Swimming Pool Drawings

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art.

We land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Whitehead. 1929.

The architecting of spacetimes of experience co emergent with bodies in the making.

Choreographic Propositions/Mobile Architectures, Erin Manning.

The choreographic proposition  serves not to delineate positions or forms from one another in a normative practice of movement notation, but to create a diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the qualities of movement expressibility, such that their force of form can be felt.

Deleuze defines the diagram via Francis Bacon as the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour patches, whose function is to be suggestive. He  speaks of the diagram capable of unlocking areas of sensation, suggesting that the diagram is chaos, catastrophe, but also a germ of order or rhythm.  

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

In Closing.

OURSELVES

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed  the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have been in existence. We belong to a short lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.

For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Carlo Rovelli. 2016.

It could be said that the most fantastic material is the human neuron. It dominates most materials around it, it is a prime agent of change and determines many forms on the planet.

For Cragg, ninety-nine percent of those forms are solely utilitarian, driven by survival and economics. The result is an impoverished material world. Utilitarianism censors the possibilities of form, this not only applies to designed objects and architecture the world over, it also applies to forms of education and society in general.

Our super-thinking material the human neuron with that prime position in the hierarchy of material, has a responsibility for all other material within its grasp whether mineral, plant or animal. 

Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings. 2011.

Each Proposition

Activates Contrast.

Architectures based on a full recognition of the embodied human condition and of the multitude of instinctual reactions hidden in the human unconscious. A piece of furniture sets up a proposition for a event, the encounter with itself and the body of the user.

Alvar Aalto's buildings are not based on a single dominant concept or gestalt; rather they are sensory agglomerations. They sometimes even appear clumsy and unresolved as drawings, but they are conceived to be appreciated in their actual physical and spatial encounter, 'in the flesh' of the lived world, not as constructions of idealised vision.

Juhani Pallasmaa, Alvar Aalto.

Choreography As Propositional/Relations/Generative Practice.

Choreography starts from any point, it cleaves an occasion activating its relational potential. It makes time, beginning its process anew, always from the middle of the event. Choreography is thus a proposition to the event. Choreography asks/inquires into the event, how its ecology might best generate and organize the force of movement-moving.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning.

Choreography, a self generating act proposed into a movement/potential motion/event of a milieu/gathering.

Making/generating/organizing as a proposition/task/technique to the material.

Developing in the incipiency of a choreography creative ecologies of the force of movement/making/movement. 

Tony Cragg/In and Out of Material.

Carlo Rovelli/Seven Brief Lessons On Physics.

Intertwining Thinking and Making.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Bayfield Hall.

Making and deploying theoretical objects/installations/workshops.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic based inquiry.

Creative entanglements in a world of/with materials/others.

CLAY.

Ceramic Components/Composite Sculptures.

Templates/Painted Cardboard. 

Extruded/Sledged/Moulded. 

Julian Stair/Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre.

As proposition to the event, choreography does so not by abstracting itself from the event but always as part of the event, it can never be separated out from its coming-into-itself-as-event. 

Choreography/unfolding-as-event is the fielding of a multiplying ecology in a co;constitutive environment, it develops in the incipiency of the in-between, spurred on by tendencies that waver between  the rekindling of habit and the tweaking of a contrast that beckons the new. 

For an event to tune itself choreographically many techniques are necessary. Techniques can be generated as tasks, or they can be self generated. 

Chorepgraphy as a generative practice must ask, how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more than the enabling constraints that set it into motion.

Erin Manning.

On The Body of Drawing/Demarcations

Localized/Relational/Choreographic.

Transparency/Translucency/Erasure 

  

What Remains/Of The Other Sister

Dead on Arrival.

The life drawing separated from its corporeal event is now just a representation marooned in its media.

The Life Room, a space where an individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Artworks : Living on the macroscopic description/analysis of what happens.

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Art, suggests that there are other ways of conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality. 

An intermediate period of free energy in motion from one system to another.

Living on the macroscopic description of what happens.

russellmoreton.com

Architectures, processes of thought that are analogically driven and developed into further recombinations, poetics.

The disequilibrium of the world we live in. 

We reread the notes we had made in the ferry logbook in order to commit everything to memory. Then, to be rid of the evidence, the old man tore out the page and tossed it in the stove. Engulfed in flames, the paper shrivelled and dissolved. We stood in silence for a moment, staring into the fire.

The work began the next day. I divided the research materials from the storeroom into small batches and burned them in the garden incinerator as though disposing of old magazines.

The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in aches. Why would I keep them when I don't think I will be able to recall the meaning of the word 'photograph' much longer. Nothing comes back now when I see a photograph. No memories, no response. They're nothing more than pieces of paper. A new hole has opened in my heart, and there's no way to fill it up again. That's how it is when something disappears.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa 

Art works through the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning. What happens when we react to  a work of art is not down to the art object in itself, rather it lies in the complexity of our brain  in the kaleidoscopic networks of analogical relationships with which our neurons weave, for what we call meaning.

We are involved, engaged, being into art, takes us out of our habitual, sleepwalking, reconnecting us instead with the joy of seeing something anew in the world. 

Carlo Rovelli.

The disequilibrium/entropic nature for traces and memory. 

Men feel free because they are aware of their choices and their wishes. But they ignore the causes that lead them to will and to choose, and do not give the slightest attention to theses causes.

Spinoza.

Making/Building Utility and Relevance : Works are rooted in the physical world.

 

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Elective Affinities.

Tate, Liverpool.

Penelope Curtis.

The Liveliness of Materials.

The nature of our involvement is crucial as we begin to select our meanings, as we have to also begin to exercise personal choice. 

The starting point for this exhibition was to find art which involved the spectator, an spectator immediately and which makes the body the bridge between the art and the spectator.

Using works that elicit a reaction from us based on physical recognition.

Engendering affinities both psychological and philosophical, much of the meaning in our world relates either actually or metaphorically to the body.

Creating art works that set up a network of psychological allusion.

Drawings, maps, lists, doodles, photographs, paintings, collages,scribblings and drafts, which are the secret and unformed property of the artist. These are not to be seen as artworks so much as the wild-eyed and compulsive superstructure that bears the song or book or script along. They are a support system of manic tangential information. 

What you see in this book lives in the intricate world constructed around the songs, and which the songs inhabit. To me these pieces have a different creative energy to the formed works, they are raw and immediate, but no less compelling.

Stranger Than Kindness.

Nick Cave.

Properties do not reside in objects, they are between objects.

Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet.

Intimate Everyday Notations.

A Book Of Days.

Patti Smith.

The 'works' evoke a physical affinity that sets up a complicity in which the viewer is implicated in the work.

The possibility of identification with the 'works' is frequently assured by their liveliness.

Fundamental to this art is the fact that its viewers stand in front of it and physical experience is highlighted or becomes part of its conceptual framework.

A photographic skin neither dead or alive, it is the blemished surface which gives the work a fragility.

Ultimately it is the ambiguity of this photographic flesh, its skin of visual tenderness that is most unsettling.

This phantasmal world of quanta is our world.

Speculative Experiential Formwork.

The Nature of Matter/Liveliness of Materials.

The Primal Level of Physical Being.

The Order Of Time.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

Cyanotype Process and Concepts of Practice.

Technically the work is more in line with that of the photogram. It is used to record light and shadow from a specific site, through the use of intermediaries, stencils and their movements across the duration of daylight.

Conceptually the use of the cyanotype process historically references architectural blueprints and the proofing of early photographic procedures.

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The Artist's Reality

Philosophies of Art

Mark Rothko, 1940-41.

Without question the work I  found as incomplete and in places, frustratingly obscure, but it was a book, and a substantial one. It was clearly written as a volume, its contents speaking to a public rather than constituting an artist's private musings

Christopher Rothko, 2004.

The Artist's Dilemma

Art as a Natural Biological Function

Art as a Form of Action

The Integrity of the Plastic Process

Art, Reality, and Sensuality

Particularization and Generalization

Genalization since the Renaissance

Emotional and Dramatic Impressionism

Objective Impressionism

Plasticity

Space

Beauty

Naturalism

Subject and Subject Matter

The Myth

The Attempted Myth of Today

Primitive Civilizations Influence on Modern Art

Modern Art

Primitivism

Indigenous Art

Rembrandt discovered that his patrons were not interested in his plastic preoccupations with light when he painted The Night Watch, and that they preferred the obvious illustrative gifts of his contemporaries and followers. Monet and Cezanne discovered the same, watching Sargent and the exhibitors at the academy sell far inferior goods, succeeding because they adopted the French masters' method in its superficial aspects, while including enough familiarity so that the spectator revelled in the familiar while he was talking about the unfamiliar.

Things and Bodies/Shifting Signs

The haptic image/indexical/involuntary markings and the present instant, a body at the limit of its moment when it is most definitely intensely alive and in the present.

Beyond the body's blurred contours and indexical markers, to see through, to see sense challenged.

Time is persistently liminal, a suspended, extended present.

Mattering/Mutability,Accident, Flux

Experience/Existence/Presence 

Life Drawing/Staging Oneself/Others

Body in Space/Resilience,Endures

Organism-Person-Environment

Haptic slippages/propositions between subject and object, human and non human, between what is alive and what is animate.

Drawing/Anamorphic Perceptions, apprehended and felt, more than seen.

Drawing is not the form; it is the way of seeing the form.

Edgar Degas.

The human figure, like any animated object is alive. Even when in a seemingly static position- whether sitting or lying- it is actually in constant motion. To capture this fundamental fact, which makes the body profoundly different from a statue or a mannequin, one must learn to see both its physical structure and its actions in space.

Daniela Brambilla.

Between seeing and drawing, what is felt, hidden, made rendering visible.

Blindness, searching, instants marking the barely known phenomena between organism, person and environment.

The searching and reflexive nature of drawing, a questioning through the performative social body, and its perceptual spatial agency and with materials, environments and others.

Human Figure Drawing

Drawing Gestures, Postures and Movements.

Daniela Brambilla, 2014.

With a series of curved lines drawn quickly, without lifting the pencil from the paper, in a loose way and almost without looking away from the subject, identify the lines that make up not the outside, the external contour or the details, but the morphological whole of the figure at that precise moment- in a certain sense the internal engine, a synthesis between intentions and actions, between mind and body.

To achieve this result draw around the form's centre and at the same time beyond it, without defining volumes with closed lines.

Gesture

Seeing Contours

Superposition

Interior and Exterior

Proportions

Modelling

What It Isn't

Memory

Balance

Techniques

Light and Shadow

Chiaroscuro

Viewpoint

What to Say?

Movements of the Soul

The Forms of Age

The Sketchbook

Imagination

If you have learnt to write, you will also learn how to draw. The manual skill is the same; you are just changing your way of seeing and feeling. To understand the meaning of this statement, ask yourself:

 “Where am I when I am drawing?”

Thinking Bodies : Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-woman

Nicole Dawson, 2008.

Deleuze and Guattari have argued that we cannot reach outside of a dualistic conceptualization of human bodies simply by seeking to transcend or bypass it. They contend: “The only way to get outside the dualism is to be-between, to pass between, the intermezzo”. We  do not get past or move beyond the dualism. This is not a successive stage of progression. The dualism is a conceptual event whose historical and contemporary activity gives rise to consequences that cannot be invalidated or ignored, thus, the situation is not such that we put the dualism behind us, move on or forward as if unaffected. The only place to go, to move, if we are to get outside the dualism is between: “one must pass ...through binaries, not in order to reproduce them but to find terms and modes that befuddle their operations, connections that demonstrate the impossibility of their binarization, terms, relations, and practices that link the binarily opposed terms”.

A Thousand Plateaus : Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari.

Volatile Bodies : Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

 

Being Alive~Creating physical origins/entities : Correlations of Utility and Relevance.

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Creating physical origins.

Biology of Cognition.

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation; by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process.

Autopoiesis and Cognition.

The Realization of The Living. 1970.

Humberto R. Maturana.

Francisco J. Varela.

For Niels Bohr,

Nature is richer than our metaphysical prejudices, it has more imagination than we do.

The well defined and solid picture of the world given by the old physics is an illusion.

Meaningful Information : Utility and Relevance.

Natural systems rooted in the physical world.

Correlations that care both physical but also intentional.

Relative information is generated by the interactions that weave the world.

The organism cares about its relevant relative information, it connects between something internal and something else generally external, 

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

The Minds Eye

Bridget Riley.

POETICS/ARCHITECTURE.

Effective Correlations : Architectural Body.

Recasting/Reconfiguring Life.

Madeline Gins and Arakawa. 2002. 

Drawing Apparatuses: OUTPOST 2022.

Daylight observed, spatial exposures and tracked blueprints.

Intermediaries induce space between (relations) object and process, they create, set in motion diffractive phenomena.

Deconstruction, removal and revealing of objects by taking away, an archaeological process of context sheets to reference a layered and exploratory removal of material.

SPAB Shotesham Working Party.

An attitude to historical buildings.

Well-being within the preservation and social agency of what remains of the building.

Working with lime, soft capping, clay lump, flintwork.

The ruin, its tower and the early church in the landscape.

Wayfinding/Shelters/Involuntary Remains/Sculptural Outcrops. Exposed Architectural Fragments.

Lime/Flint a plastic architecture, a fabric made up of instances of building gathered from the locality.

The 'lift-line' and the shuttering and infilling of flint-work, prior to the whitewash render finish.

Undifferentiated Landscapes.

A Field of Earth.

Jean Dubuffer.

Dubuffer used a plasterer's technique, in which walls are coated using shaken branches instead of loaded trowels. He applied many layers, scattered substances such as sand and other materials, the mortar was scratched, poked and prodded until it gave the impressions of teeming matter, alive and sparkling, he could then use it to evoke all kinds of indeterminate textures, even galaxies and nebula.

Earth Colours.

CHROMAPHILIA.

A mortar of mixed material, of added soil, ash, gravels and other earth elements added to this viscous paste.

Anthropology, a study of what remains from  human societies, rituals and artefacts.

A contemporary art/architecture that takes on anthropological and sociological concerns.

The sensorial realm of practical making, learning and well-being through the hapticity of craft.

Mobility-Movement-Being Alive.

Tim Ingold.

Red Kiln 

Hebden Bridge, 2007.

Refurbish, new fibre lining, ceramic fibre adhesive, fire cement, gas burners.

Re-locate and re-assemble for larger architectural ceramics.

Outpost Members

Submit archive material. 

Anglian Potters.

Demo day with Rebecca Appleby.

Creative explorations of concept, media and scale.

An Artist Who Uses Clay As Her Medium.

In 2019 Rebecca started a new body of work titled 'Graces' which was of great significance and helped her to re-ground her practice in sculptural exploration of symbolic relationship between architecture, industrial and bodily transfiguration. 

In 2021 Rebecca was awarded a grant from the Arts Council to take risks and connect with a broader network and audiences, enriching and invigorating her career.

Interested in Order-Chaos-Impermanence, philosophical concepts addressing change.

Influenced by ceramists Gordon Baldwin, David Roberts.

Work/Making/Exhibition Titles

Urban Traces/Fragments/Translations.

Ceramics and The City.

Palimpsest. 

Fractures/Personal Trauma.

Concrete Cancer.

Ceramic sculptural works derived from Painting, Collage and Drawing.

Research material around abstract painting and architectural de-construction.

Ashraf Hanna, clay body, 55% mixed molochites.

Handbuilt slab forms fired to 1180 degrees centrigrade.

Monoprinting with slips on newsprint, underglazing, body oxide washes,  paper stencils, scratched, sprayed, and incised mark making. 

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Diffracted Bodies~Matter(s) in Movement : Speculative~Performative Space~Time Drawings

Evidencing Atmospheres/A Calling To Think.

Reading diffractively through reimagined patterns/atmospheres that penetrate the body-text-space-time compositions. 

Spatial blueprints/propositional and emergent diagrams on speculative readings from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.

Apparatuses and Intermediaries.

Everyday Practices, Harleston. 2022

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

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The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Bachelard comments, once we have been touched by the grace of super-imagination, we feel in the presence of the simpler images through which the exterior world deposits virtual elements of highly-coloured space in the heart of our being. The image with which Pierre Jean Jouve constitutes his secret being is one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as this is probably not 'white-washed.' But this room in which he is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name, which is, the 'solitary room! It is inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is 'in the imagination.'

Here the poet inhabits the cellular image. This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous, in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does not lend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid framework for secret being. And secret being feels that it is guarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls.

The cell of the secret is white. A single value suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And it is always like that, the poetic image is under the domination of a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls, alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It  is stronger than all geometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.

The Dialectics of Outside and Inside.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space demonstrates Gaston Bachelard's ability to bridge scientific logic with poetic analysis. As a phenomenological reading of the poetic image, it probes the geometrical divide between inside and outside through an analysis of the imagination of matter. It resists simplification, engaging with both physical and psychological body-space relations, and describes an exchange between interior and exterior in which the latter might be 'an old intimacy'. The dialectical condition of 'interior immensity' and the 'immeasurable outside', attests to the spatiality of being as a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Reader.

Unlearning Conceptual Frameworks/The Inconceivable.

Dante, like any traveller who knows that the first step, that of abandoning the familiar paths is the most difficult.

White Holes

Inside The Horizon

Carlo Rovell. 2023

Every place in the universe has its own time, different places can send each other signals, like the 'hiss' sent to us from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. But time passes at unequal rates in different places, and no single one of these times is 'truer' than any other.

There is no universal time, rather there is 'temporality' which is the network formed by many local times and the possibility of exchanging signals.

The Distortion of Time.

Bringing into doubt something that seemed self-evident to us.

Einstein, General Relativity.

Rovelli asks, how did an idea as bizarre as the relativity of time come to be devised and accepted?

In order to digest new ideas there lies a difficulty, not so much with the new concept, as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem so obviously to be true. To bring them into doubt seems inconceivable. We  are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more. The difficulty lies not in learning, but in unlearning.

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

Practices that are all about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning.

Art/Science/Philosophy, all have within them the capacity to change the organization of our thoughts , that allows us to leap forward. To produce singularities by re-conceptualizing reality. Our conceptual structures are neither  the definitive ones, nor the only one possible, rather they are the ones that  evolution has led us to cobble together in order to negotiate our daily needs, and often they do not work beyond that.

Making clay+ceramics, taking liberties, playing with and through a creative analogical reasoning.

Situated Practices/Theoretical Objects that develop a conceptual structure through analogy and recombination.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa. 1994

English translation, Steven Snyder. 2019

I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first, among all the things that have vanished from the island.

In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time-but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant. The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had disappeared from their heads.

It doesn't matter, she said. To you, this is no more than a few drops of water. But it can't be helped. It's all but impossible to recall the things we've lost on the island once they're gone.

It seems strange that you can still create something totally new like this-just from words-on an island where everything else is disappearing, he said, brushing a bit of dirt from one of the pages as though he were caressing something precious. I realized then that we were thinking the same thing. And what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.

From One Place to Another : Contained Inner Spaces/Systems.

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Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space.

Art is energy.

Graham Gussin.

We take ...our everyday external reality very much for granted: the room that we sit in, the streets around us, the virtual space of billboards, and movies and TV ... we take all this for granted. But in fact it is, literally speaking, an illusion generated by our central nervous system. It's as much a virtual reality as the one the cyber people are working on ...Within our minds all these different planes of spatial reality are intersecting.

J.G. Ballard, KGB 7, KGB Media, 1995

All of Graham Gussin's work engages in some way with the human experience of the infinite. He is conscious that our perception and understanding of the world is manipulated and transformed by a complex layering of mass communications and consumer culture. Often his work suggests a sense of displacement, playing on our desire to be somewhere else, in a different time or space.

He has been particularly influenced by science fiction, especially of the sort that presents a set of circumstances requiring resolution, such as H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, or touches on what J.G. Ballard has described as the 'internal landscape',

Any Object in the Universe relates to a romantic tradition of landscape, together with the idea of a uropian space which is often explored in these types of science fiction.

Much of Gussin's work is experiential, dependent on the viewer for its completion. In Beyond the Infinite of 1994, for example, the artist appropriated a scene from Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. He edited and displayed two film loops of the same scene, one slightly longer than the other so that one loop appears to wait for, or follow, the other: 'The shorter loop has the spaceman wandering around the hotel, endlessly looking for himself. The longer loop includes not only this search but also the discovery of himself as an old man', Kubrick's narrative sequence is effectively disrupted. Standing between the two monitors, the viewer becomes a conductor of time and space between the two scenes.

States of mind seem to be the main subjects of Gussin's work, conditions or states that might be, for example, associated with the sublime, the sense of awe and wonder that takes one out of oneself, But it is the failure to find the sublime moment that he appears to linger on. In Fall (7200-1) he deals very literally with the agitated state of expectation, Confronted by a large video projection of an unspectacular landscape the viewer stands on the edge of it waiting for something to happen, Suddenly the tranquility and emptiness of the landscape is disturbed by something falling dramatically out of the sky, shattering the still surface of a lake: 'I like the idea that Fall embodies the possibility of this thing happening without anybody seeing it. The splash occurs infrequently so the subject of this piece isn't really the disturbance- rather it's the possibility of it happening'.

The idea for Any Object in the Universe stemmed from a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, A Tale Of The Ragged Mountains, which the artist summarises as follows: 'The whole text is a vision ...there is a character who takes a lot of opium and coffee. He then goes for a walk and slips into a previously unrecognised region within his geographic locality. Within that second or parallel space he dies, but somehow returns to tell the tale of his death in that space. When his tale is complete he dies in real space and time. So it's a kind of closed loop, returning in and out of and being effected by two parallel spaces, an illusory space that becomes so powerful that it results in death'.

A similar notion of slipping between two spaces underlies Any Object in the Universe. Walking in to a darkened room the viewer steps on to a slightly raised floor, each step producing an electronically generated echo. The walls are clad with what appears to be sound-proofing material. Projected on to one wall is an image of the same room, empty but for a microphone on a stand. Confusingly, the echo appears to be coming from the fictional, projected space. 'What at first seems to be an echo chamber becomes a space where sound cannot escape, a trap of some kind.' The viewer, like the echo, seems to be caught between a real and an imaginary space.

The other fictional space that influenced Gussin's making of Any Object in the Universe is the sound- proofed capsule depicted in Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film The Man Who Fell To Earth, a capsule where, as Gussin describes it, 'all sound is deadened and disappears ...It's an enclosed, very precise and exactly measured space, but also an infinite space ...In the film David Bowie falls to earth. The whole film is a struggle against gravity, ...about him attempting to get back into the sky, which he doesn't achieve'. Commenting on his use of an image from the cinema screen the artist has said, 'I like the way that filmic space spills out into reality'.

As if standing in front of a painting by Mark Rothko, or on the 'beam-me- up' platform in Star Trek, we stand on the raised floor, waiting for something to happen, desiring to be transported in some way to another dimension. The artist explains: 'What I was interested in trying to do was to place the viewer in the space that is projected, just for a split second, so that it makes him or her disappear from the space he or she is standing in to occupy that space, even just for the blink of an eye ...That's where the work really lies, in that momentary confusion of not being able to tell'.

Alongside Any Object in the Universe Gussin shows a number of black and white line drawings. Like the installation, these Drawings of Nothing and Nowhere explore how we experience space. The rectangular shapes seem to hover on the surface of the paper yet perspectivally they disappear towards a central vanishing point. As familiar as the introductory credits for Pearl and Dean advertising that prepare audiences for the immersive space of cinema, they ask the viewer to think about location, about their position in time and space. The drawings cannot succeed in the aim suggested by their title, instead they draw attention to the way we attempt to articulate and measure both internal and external space.

Text written by Virginia Button

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/art-now-graham-gussin

From One Place to Another.

From Another System.

Contained Spaces/Systems.

It's true, I know, that there are more gaps in the island than there used to be. When I was a child, the whole place seemed ... how can I put this? ...a lot fuller, a lot more real. But as things got thinner, more full of holes, our hearts got thinner too, diluted somehow. I suppose that kept things in balance. And even when that balance begins to collapse, something remains. Which is why you shouldn't worry.

Yoko Ogawa.

The Memory Police.

Things oriented in time present themselves to us as irreversible phenomena.

Drawing, traces that create the intermediate spaces of perception.

Visual traces of both the macroscopic and microscopic phenomena/memory/of matter.

Art is all about energy (free energy from one system/person to another)

Durational/Immediate Matters of Concern/Media.

Things/Correspondences in their propositional state of becoming.

Developing the creative liberty with a conceptual structure. This development grows through analogy and recombination. Making an analogy involves taking an aspect of a concept and re-using it in another context, preserving something of its original meaning, while letting something else go. In such a way that the resultant combination produces new and effective meaning.

Carlo Rovelli.

Drawing as an analogically informing process.

Architectural/Conceptual Frameworks.

Making Immediate Spatial Relations/Situatedness.

What Remains?

Why Does It Remain?

The intermediate/immediacy space of drawing as the traces of disequilibrium. 

The formation of every trace is nothing other than an intermediate step towards equilibrium. 

If the present has traces of the past it is solely due to the disequilibrium of that past. It is for this reason that we remember the past not the future. Because of the disequilibrium in the past, we know the past, because there are traces of it in the present, in our memories for example. To say that the past is determined is to say no more that we have traces of it. It is not a direction intrinsic to time that makes the past knowable, determined.

What we call the past is how things were arranged at one point in time.

It is the disequilibrium of the past, only that, that gives rise to traces.

A meteorite that falls on the moon carries free energy with it, its crater is the trace that it leaves until the incessant unravelling of things erases it. In this intermediate phase, the crater is a trace of the impact/event, a memory of it. Only traces exist in this intermediate period. 

The same goes for a photograph, for the memory in our brain, it exists thanks to the fact that free energy has arrived in a system, the camera film, our brain, from another system that was not in equilibrium with it, and the fact that it takes time for equilibrium to be re-established.

White Holes

Carlo Rovelli.

Notes

36. The low entropy of the past is the ultimate source of all the information contained in every trace or memory.

37. The distinction between causes and effects has no meaning in the microscopic description of phenomena. At the microscopic level of things there are regularities, physical laws, and probability and these notions do not distinguish between past and future. The distinction between past and future is a property of history of the universe from the variables that we call macroscopic, it is only for this reason that we can speak about causes.

Gaston Bachelard never developed a metaphysics capable of unifying his reflections on science and poetry.

Much that our powers here cannot sustain is permitted there.

We fly to the other side of space and of time.

The equations of quantum gravity describe a world more complex than a simple spatiotemporal continuum.