Transactive Spatial Gestures : Anticipation and Action/Affective Energies/Luminosity

12/10/2022

Reading with Deleuze and Spinoza~Radical Intuitions : Interacting with clay

Speculative and Exploratory Field Works.

Inscriptions, handwriting, cognitive connections across visual art materialisms. 

Gathered readings, walking across holloways and embodied dispositions, surfaces/inseparable cartographies of embodied experiences.

Undisciplined knowledge enables and sustains actions, gestures of a post disciplinary field.

Inseparable categories (containers and bodies) and their contents.

The Aesthetic,

The Economic,

The Political,

The Social,

Textures of Light : Vision and Touch in Irigarey, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty : Cathryn Vasseleu.

Bento's Sketchbooks : John Berger. 2015

Spinoza, practical philosophy : Gilles Deleuze. 2001

A concise and illuminating book about the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, one of the early thinkers of the Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism.

Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical and ontological propositions. His ethics is an ethology, rather than a moral science.

Attention has been drawn to Spinoza by deep ecologists such as Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and this reading of Spinoza by Gilles Deleuze lends itself to a radical ecological ethic. As Robert Hurley says in his introduction, "Deleuze opens us to the idea that the elements of the different individuals we compose may be nonhuman within us. One wonders, finally, whether Man might be defined as a territory, a set of boundaries, a limit on existence."

Gilles Deleuze, known for his inquiries into desire, language, politics and power, finds a kinship between Spinoza and Nietzsche. He writes, "Spinoza did not believe in hope or even in courage; he believed only in joy and in vision . . . he more than any other gave me the feeling of a gust of air from behind each time I read him, of a witch's broom that he makes one mount."

Gilles Deleuze was a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris at Vincennes.

Robert Hurley is the translator of Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality.

Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy : Hanjo Berressem. 2021

'The plane of immanence is entirely made up of Light', Deleuze writes in Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Engaging the whole body of Deleuze's work, including less rehearsed texts such as The Actual and the Virtual, Lucretius and the Simulacrum and his lectures on Spinoza, Hanjo Berressem traces the 'line of light' that runs through Deleuze's thought. The focus on the philosophical luminism that suffuses Deleuze's work delivers a novel reading of Deleuzian philosophy from the perspective of the complementarity of the photon. Berressem reveals a wealth of surprising and brilliant insights for anyone with an interest in Deleuze and in the implications of Deleuze's philosophical photonics for historiography, literary studies, painting and film.

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9781474450720

Reclamations/Ruins on the photographic surface : Volatile Inscriptions around the Body/Cartwheels

The Photographic Image/Volatile Bodies/Architectural Ruins

Helena Eflerova

Interior Spaces, Waverley Abbey.

The future must no longer be determined by the past. I do not deny that the effects of the past are still with us. But I refuse to strengthen them by repeating them, to confer upon them an irremovability the equivalent of destiny, to confuse the biological and the cultural. Anticipation is imperative. 

Helene Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1980:145)

The Language Of Women

Volatile Bodies/Sexed Bodies : Elizabeth Grosz

1  have  attempted  to  read  the  male  discourses  dealt  with  here  as  discourses for  and  about  men,  discourses  which  have  ignored  or  misunderstood  the  radical implications  of  insisting  on  a  recognition  of  sexual  specificity,  discourses  which have  presented  their  claims—radical  as  these  might  be—without  any  understand­ ing of their relevance to or usefulness for women’s self-representations. I have not attempted  to  give  an  alternative  account,  one  which  provides  materials  directly useful  for  women’s  self-representation.  To  do  so  would  involve  knowing  in  ad­vance,  preempting,  the  developments  in  women’s  self-understandings  which  are now  in  the  process  of  being  formulated  regarding  what  the  best  terms  are  for representing  women  as  intellectual,  social,  moral,  and  sexual  agents.  It  would involve  producing  new  discourses  and  knowledges,  new  modes  of  art  and  new forms  of  representational  practice  outside  of  the  patriarchal  frameworks  which have  thus  far  ensured  the  impossibility  of  women’s  autonomous  self-representa­tions,  thus  being  temporally  outside  or  beyond  itself.  No  one  yet  knows  what  the conditions are for developing knowledges, representations, models, programs, which provide women   with  nonpatriarchal  terms  for  representing  themselves  and the world from women’s interests and points of view. This book has been a pre­liminary  exploration  of  some  of  the  (patriarchal)  texts  which  feminists  may  find useful  in  extricating  the  body  from  the  mire  of  biologism  in  which  it  has  been entrenched.  But  the  terms  by  which  feminists  can  move  on  from  there,  can  su­persede  their  patriarchal  forebears,  are  not  dear  to  me.  But  perhaps  the  frame­ work  I  have  been  trying  to  use  in  this  book—a  framework  which  acknowledges both  the  psychical  or  interior  dimensions  of  subjectivity  and  the  surface  corporeal exposures of the subject to social inscription and training; a model which resists, as much  as possible,  both  dualism and  monism; a model which  insists on  (at least) two surfaces which cannot be collapsed into one and which do not always harmoniously  blend  with  and  support each  other; a model where the join,  the interaction of the two surfaces, is always a question of power; a model that may 

be represented  by  the geometrical form of the Mobius strip’s two-dimensional torsion in three-dimensional space—will nevertheless be of some use if feminists wish to avoid the impasses of traditional theorizing about the body.

Patti Smith

Cartwheels

Come my one, look at the world Bird beast butterfly
Girls sing notes of heaven Birds lift them up to the sky

Spring is departing Spring is departing

Her thoughts are darting like a rabbit Like a rabbit 'cross the moon
Shines of light over your hair As boys croon

Pretty in pink It makes me wonder
What could ever bring you down I see tears falling
From those eyes of brown

Hearing a voice, you turn your head You vanish into the mist
Of your thoughts And I
Want to grasp What brings you down
Open up those eyes of brown

The world is changing Your heart is growing

Hearing a voice you turn your head Girls turn by ones, by twos
Notes pour bad and tender Eradicate your blues

The good world The good world
Come my one, look around you Bird, beast, butterfly
Girls sing…

Atmosphere and Surrounding Objects : Loose Assemblages/Living Emotions/Theoretical Gaze

Paintings being living emotions. Mark Rothko

The atmosphere of a work of art, what surrounds it, that 'place' in which it exists - all this is thought of as a lesser thing, charming but not essential. Professionals insist on essentials ... not understanding that everything we use to make art is precisely what kills it. This is what every painter I know understands. And this is what almost no composer I know understands.

The Music of Morton Feldman, reprinted from his essay  "The anxiety in art"

OUTPOST STUDIO  July 2021

Loose Assemblages : The Movement of Ideas and Feelings

Touch and materials as a normative support/exploration for the theoretical gaze

Bento's Sketchbook : John Berger

Existence appertains to the nature of substance.

A substance cannot be produced from anything else: it will therefore be its own cause, that is its essence necessarily involves existence, or, existence appertains to its nature.

Ethics, Part 1, Proposition VII, Proof

Conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between organism and an object-to-be-known. Damasio

Architectural Body

Organism-Person-Environment

Drawing is a  form of probing. And the first generic impulse to draw derives from the human need to search, to plot points, to place things and to place oneself.

The Human Body through drawing and philosophy

Berger/Spinoza 141

Matters of a discursive consciousness are explicit and explainable, and the line between discursive and practical consciousness is fluctuating and permeable, both drawing on the other in the act of agency/making social.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

Generative energies, entanglements, sensorial diversions from an open studio window overlooking Anglia Square

Improvisations/choreographed with the music/ambient noise are exploratory encounters  between flesh and sound

A hut of ones own (within and bounded by others), crafted and organized around simple processes and interactions within a fallow site given over to creative ecology of energies and enterprise

Vibrant yet curiously passive form of  urbanism

Affectivity as a mimesis of lively transfers between things, humans and non-humans

Human subjectivity : Mimetic Encounters/Explorations

Art works by gathering up forms and materials for affective experimentations in subjectivity

Corporeal unconscious animated by sensitivities/sympathies, a putative affinity (haptic) between certain things including bodies and organs which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another. 

Intentionality/Sympathy/Sentiment/Difference

Inducing a particular set of ethical/political/social responses in actor/social audience 

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Calling a sympathy/subjectivity between coloured cloth/wallpaper/display cabinet and human flesh

Francesca Woodman

Mimesis and suggestion in the social,enacted through layers of mediation surrounding humans, objects and non-humans.

Camouflage. Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming 

Sensations in Space and Time (the experience/entanglement of phenomena and idea)

Agency/Foraging/Making/Gathering

Subjectivity is relational (always in process)

A Species of Making Spaces

Tentativeness, attentive to situatedness 

A diffractive methodology enables a critical rethinking of science and the social in their relationality, moving beyond separate entities, separate sets of concern. 

Karen Barad 

Organism 

Person

Environment

Arakawa and Madeline Gins

For Merleau-Ponty, Experience can only be understood between the mind and the body or across them in their lived conjunction.

The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

Elizabeth Grosz.

Richard Serra : Verb List Compilation

Actions to Relate to Oneself, 1967-1967

Drawing in its frameworks and dimensions/presence and absence/its here and elsewhere

Exploring the fragility of a painting in the landscape

Canvas as sheltering construction, Raveningham Sculpture Trail

Diagram-Map-Chart, is a symbolic depiction emphasizing (mapping) relationships

Diagrams For The Imagination : Arakawa

Apokatastasis : Jim Jarmusch, Jozef Van Wissem

Litany Of Echoes : James Blackshaw

New Music, for old instruments : Paul Metzger, Jozef Van Wissem

Brilliant Trees : David Sylvian

Body As Cultural Product

Both psychic and social dimensions must find their place in reconceptualizing the body, not in opposition to each other, but as necessarily interactive.

Volatile Bodies/Chaos-Territory-Art : Elizabeth Grosz

Spatial Asperity/Mesh, Membrane and Gauze, Möbius Strip, Pattening, 

Actuality : Robert Mangold

Paintings around the particles/flows of things/boundaries/intervals of presence and absence

Induction/Capacitance/Encapsulated Layers

Drawing and its attempts to map out/make visible contingent things

Contingency, is what remains, as it comes up against causality/constantly passing through

Objects/Things conceptualized by the exploration of drawing (intervals of blindness)

Linking Surface to the Aesthetic Experience of Space.

Experiences incorporating interests with environmental textures into Art.

Points of Contact/Confluence of Circumstances

Materials bound by contact/canvas

Patina, absences, gesso, textile wrappings, field chalk, exhumed oyster shells, yellow ochre,

A philosophy of Reading/Matter/Rooms, 

The Lake of The Mind

Stochastic Thinking, Steven Holl

Solitude/Libraries : Cell/Court/Domain

Capacitance, relationships between intensities and movements

Clay, Waxed Surface, Liquid Rust, Calico,

Sensate Bandages/Windings/Armatures : Corporeal Landscapes/Assemblages/Things

Flesh, elementary pre-communicative, subject and object develop.

Making as Growth : Tim Ingold

Social Architectures/Anthropologies/Imaginary Projects/Interfaces/Screens

Timothy Morton : Realist Magic

The elasticity of sensation, affective and wonderous

Sally Mann : Matter Lent/Collodion wetplate negatives

Corpus, liquid light, flesh, spirit, trace, outline, human body, performative,

Paintings/Enactments : Canvas as a spatial verb

Espace-Milieu, painting as environment/entanglements and situations

Ceramic/Process and its theoretical objects 

As a series of practices, making reality by bringing things together or separating them into their singularities, or making machines/desiring machines

Desire can be seen as an Actualization

Gathering Notations : Bernard Tuchumi  

Both presence and absence are coupled in this framework

Deleuze/Guattari

Glass/GLAS : Resistivity/Inclusions, A Field in England.

Translucent aesthetics, beyond the opacities of the sensible the rational.

An image that adequately expresses both the efficacy and the temporariness of the phenomena ( joining a diffused/invisible flow of energy, a breadth that wends its way ceaselessly through the world). Animating it as it goes.

Vital Nourishment, Departing from happiness, Francois Jullian.

What is a body capable of -  

Spinoza

Building/Making, into the theoretical performative object (that does theory)

Albers/Clarke : Interactions, Counterpoints, Intervals between colour/forms, 

Membrane, Discursive, Diffractive, Sensory, Layered and Filtered Light,

Body, Movement, Mind, Assemblages, Exploratory, Speculative, Choreographic,

Deleuze/Guattari, understand the body more in terms of what AFFECTS it is capable of, instead of the consequences of having a body.

Peter Zumthor : Thermal Baths

Human Agency/Temporal transitions between matter and movement.

Immaterial/Concrete/Water : Bodies in contact/the corporeal social human body

Manifolds/Theory of Temporality/3 Synthesis of Time

Memory     Past Preserved                    Condition

Present       Habit Instants                     Agent

New           Future, actual/virtual          Creation of The New

 

Multiplicity, purality of contemplating souls.

Asymmetries between particular past and general future.

Temporality involves multiple interacting processes.

 

Architecture becomes Spatial Agency

We all make space : Jeremy Till

Paintings, space, volume, surface, passages, actualizations, claddings/camouflage 

One conceives and reads a building in terms of sequences, both phenomenological and filmic, reading a space by its depth of field, its thickness.

Turbulence House, New Mexico, Steven Holl.

Aesthetics/Asperities : Resultants that incorporate the friction (asperity) of their trajectories through a medium. Tilt-up concrete construction, Chapel of St, Ignatius, Seattle. Steven Holl.

Navigations and Vectors/conduits/intervals and traces between discursive practices.

Wrapped Silences : Assembled Sectional Elements/Thresholds

Surfaces on Mourning/Samsara, a beauty fed on emptiness

Processual Drawing : Bioscleave/Blue Particle Cloud/Diagram.

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

ARCHITECTURAL Body

An ORGANISM that PERSONS

Gins and Arakawa 2002

Although the human condition is a crisis condition if ever there was one, few individuals and societies act with the dispatch a state of emergency requires. The fact that the human condition is a crises condition gets routinely covered up, with culture invariably functioning to obscure how dire the condition is and to float it as bearable

If organisms form themselves as persons by uptaking the environment, then they involve not only bodies but domains, spheres of activity and influence 

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave

Procedural Architure/Architectural Body 

Gins and Arakawa

The role of architecture as a tool for researching the body-environment towards the implementation of these considerations is paramount

The goal of an experimental teaching and learning space based on architectural procedures would be that the process of design and construction would allow students/staff to rethink, re-imagine and enact the curriculum

An Arakawa and Gins Experimental Teaching Space/A Feasibility Study 2013

Jondi Keane

An Architecture of Viability

To help to sustain one throughout life/ to stay tentative

Bioscleave House as an inter-active laboratory of everyday life 

Wayfinding (unpacking discourse/meaning) through Landing Sites and Architectural Bodies

What is the metachallenge that bioscleave demands of us? Is it, I propose, wayfinding, a wayfinding defined at many scales from finding one's way as a person to finding one's way in a strange physical or social environment

Exploring the Roles of Trajectoriness, Affectivatoriness, and Imaging Along 2013

Reuben M. Baron

Figure/Ground : Double Occupations of Discourses and Events (relationships/co-existances)

So as a diagram (performative agent), the figure/ground does not function to represent even something real. But rather constructs a real that is yet to come (theoretical object/apparatus) as a new type of reality

Situated Field/Constructed Site of People, Institutions, Apparatuses, Events, Discourses

We see intraventions as heuristic devices, as apparatuses that are imbued with a will to transform.

The intravention is not autonomous but contingent and relational and dependent on many other things

The intravention is made as it happens, and it makes us at the same time

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects

Oren Lieberman, Alberto Altes

AEffect initiating Heuristic Life

Procedural architecture, developed in both their written and buillt discourse, providing a process by which to connect theory to practice, disciplinary inquiry to knowledge and art to life

Research should be conducted , not in a library or laboratory but where living happens, enabling the complexity of relationships to be studied within and across the organism-person-environment 

Jondi Keane

Carnal Knowledge

Towards a New Materialism through the Arts

Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt

To provide observational heuristic devices so that persons may devise transformational and reconfigurative opportunities

Heuristic tools whether built hypothesis or discursive sequences, are of no use if they do not provide a way forward, a way of learning

This house is a tool, a procedural one

A functional tool, whether it be a hammer, a telephone, or a telescope, extends the senses, but a procedural tool examines and reorders the sensorium

Interlude : Cornering a Beginning

An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling

Relationscapes : Movement, Art, Philosopy

Erin Manning 

Born into a new territory, and that territory is myself as organism. There is no place to go but here. Each organism that persons finds the new territory that is itself, and having found it, adjusts it

Ellipsis,(gaps in everyday narratives) 

The Construction of Representation of Identity

Using their bodies and immediate surroundings and environment as both subject and context

An Organism-Person-Environment

You cannot see me from where I look at myself

Francesca Woodman

An organism-person-environment has given birth to an organism-person-environment

Bioscleave

Chaos, Territory, Art

Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Elizabeth Grosz

Body, Personal Relations, Spatial Values

Upright Human Body : Space and Time

Yi Fu Tuan

Figuring It Out

The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists

Colin Renfrew

The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency. Relating is viewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuating network of existential events

Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality but they also hide its underlying complexities

Relationality 2005

Robert Cooper

Spatial Agency/The Arts and the dance of thinking : The body is open to the intensities of the present.

BIOSPHERE

And all of our thinking, for its part, forms its own ecosystem as well. Mind is an ecological phenomenon, the result of a collective dance.

Gregory Bateson was fascinated by the fact that the relational networks between  root hairs and  mycelial filaments,  between  predator and  prey,  partners and  competitors,  have a form similar to  the neural pathways between the different hubs of our brains. Bateson drew several conclusions from this: that the landscape is also capable of thinking—not in  ideas and  words,  but in  forms,  colors,  tones,  and  scents.  Its thinking has no  object,  and  it therefore knows nothing  of either accusations or reproaches.  The natural world  thinks by  transforming  itself as a subject. The relationships within  an  ecosystem thereby  constitute something  like the synapses of a landscape’s nervous system (a very  specific nervous system,  which  has the form of a very  specific landscape).  In  this,  an ecosystem resembles a brain. Like a brain, it is capable of cognition. The way in which vegetation changes as the climate around it becomes more dry, for example, could be imagined as the way in which that ecosystem imagines a drought.  The biosphere is a system that constantly  produces new relationships by  responding  to  existing  ones.  Our brain  does the very  same thing.  Moreover,  since it resides within  a body,  it does not just map  the relationships from the outside,  but is itself a part of the relational network within an ecosystem.

Matter and Desire, an erotic ecology, Andreas Weber. 2017

The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

Elizabeth Grosz.

Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality, but they also hide its underlying complexities.

Peripheral Vision, Relationality. Robert Cooper. 2005

Oxford Dictionary of Geography: spatiality

The effect that space has on actions, interactions, entities, concepts, and theories. Physical spatiality can also be metaphorical. It is used to show social power—thrones are higher than the seats of commoners, and ‘high tables’ for university teachers in most Oxbridge colleges physically elevate the teachers over the taught. People use proximity to show how intimate they want to be with others (See personal space), or orientation; we may face someone or turn away from them. Institutions and governments have used large architectural spaces to invoke awe, while restaurateurs may create ‘cosiness’ in small spaces.

FILMIC COLLAGE : Veiled Melancholy/Book Narratives

  "He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear - evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow - was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable."

H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

"Spatial turn" The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. Easton Glebe, Dunmow,1921.

EMULSION : Photographic Landscape

I do not start with the idea but with the experience
Peter Lanyon

The Experience of Landscape
Paintings, Drawings and Photographs
South Bank Centre

An Anthropology Of Landscape
Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
Timothy Morton

Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology

Andreas Weber

BLUE SPACES : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

Ordinary Lives
Studies in the Everyday
Ben Highmore

RUINED INTERIOR : Consumerism and Culture.

The Art of Survival?
Jacqueline Rose
Essay for 'Elsewhere' Therese Oulton

Hermeneutic Philosophy and The Sociology of Art
Janet Wolff

Hermeneutics
Jens Zimmermann