The Social : Catching The Light/Architectural Apparatuses/Spatial Methodologies

It would probably not be wrong to define the ex­treme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses.

To recapitulate, we have then two great classes: liv­ing beings (or substances) and apparatuses. And, be­ tween these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a sub­ject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses. Naturally, the substances and the subjects, as in ancient metaphysics, seem to over­ lap, but not completely. In this sense, for example, the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification.­

 I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of liv­ing beings.

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Alternative Photography : Photography and Architectural Space.

Photogram, a numinous construction, spaces amongst and within other spaces

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

PROXIMITY OF SPACE 

INTIMACIES IN SOCIAL SPACES 

SCRIPTORIUM

THREE STAGE METHODOLOGY (Kikutake) Mitsuo Taketani 

KA ‘ESSENCE’

KATA ‘SUBSTANCE’ 

KATACHI ‘PHENOMENON’ 

Characteristics of an architect

CHI ‘BLOOD’

TACHI ‘TEMPERAMENT’ 

KATACHI ‘EMBODIMENT’

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language. 

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012 

Relativity/Relationality through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory

Photograph (132) Cyanotype Alternative Photography

Documents from research archive

Tracing Light: Petworth House, West Sussex 2000 David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci

For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light

Petworth Window, 6 July 1999 Light's Windows And Rooms

Passing towards the Invisible.

The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.

CATCHING THE LIGHT

The entangled history of light and mind Arthur Zajonc

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900 Sight Unseen

Picturing The Universe Corey Keller

Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself.

The Social Photographic Eye Jennifer Tucker

Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.

An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

Invisible Worlds Visible Media

Tom Gunning

William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer

On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject

Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject­ effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world.

UNDER THE SUN

By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light

David Alan Mellor

Christopher Bucklow, Guests Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Matter is provisional and that includes me. If the physics is correct then we are neither alive or dead as we commonly understand it, but in different states of potentiality.

From The Adamantine Land

Variations on the art of Christopher Bucklow David Alan Mellor

Etienne-Jules Marey

A Passion For The Trace Francois Dagognet

Painting, Photography, Film Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

A Bauhaus Book

L. MOHOLY-NAGY:

DYNAMIC OF THE METROPOLIS SKETCH FOR A FILM

ALSO TYPOPHOTO OSKAR SCHLEMMER

MAN

Interaction of Color Josef Albers

The Elements of Color Johannes Itten

Pedagogical Sketchbook Paul Klee

The New Landscape in art and science Gyorgy Kepes

The Colour of Time Garry Fabian Miller

The Majesty of Darkness Adam Nicolson

The Unmade

The Pregnant

The Half Erotically Unmade

Camera Obscura of Ideology Sarah Kofman

An optical instrument, which used in drawing, allows one to see at the same time the objects being drawn and the paper.

I Am Not This Body 

Barbara Ess

Working Collages

Ann Wilde, Ulrike Meyer-Stump

A German Tradition of Photographic Typology

Collages made from contact prints from Blossfeldt's negatives, showing the isolation of particular motifs. The working collages were an archive, not for the negatives but for motifs.

The viewer is less interested in the subjects of the pictures, than in the effect created by the formal system subsuming them.

His photographic archive of plant forms is not a finished work, but material awaiting processing.

 

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus, In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with ap­paratuses?

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of serenity, a poetics of dwelling.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Art as Spatial Practice.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Posted 2018

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

 Outpost 130524

The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Drawing as Gesture.

Coda : Coded Imprints/Mediality

Contemporary drawing tending towards graphism, illegible writing, that can be seen as a regression from image and coded sign to what could be described as states of the 'pre-sign', of moments of inscription and the emergence of the signifier from the gesture or act of making a mark.

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

A fusion between the artist's mind, the artist,s hand and the beholder's gaze.

Even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.

The raw drawn line at its emergence into the world.

Line can no more escape the present tense of its entry into the world than it can escape into oil paints secret hiding places of erasure and concealment. This fundamental condition can bring it therefore much closer to the viewer's own situation than can the image in paint.

The drawn line in real time with its own momentum, its own trajectory.

A walk for a walk's sake, the mobile agent is a point shifting its position-forward.

Paul Klee.

The present of viewing and the present of the drawn line, hook onto each other, mesh together like interlocking temporal gears. They co-inhabit an irreversible permanently open and exposed field of becoming, whose moment of closure will never arrive.

Though it is impossible to reconstruct with any real accuracy the precise sequence whereby drawn lines on paper finally come together as a completed image. The permanent visibility of each unit of production, of each individual line on its own, means that there is no escaping the sense of the line as emerging from an initial state, blank paper to the state we eventually see.

The drawn line in a sense always exists bin the present tense, in the time of its own unfolding. The ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.

The blankness of the paper exerts a pressure that cannot be reduced or done away with, relentless its blankness forces everything into the open into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time.

If painting presents being.

The drawn line presents becoming.

Line gives you the image, together with the whole history of its becoming-image.

However definitive, perfect, unalterable the drawn line may be, each of its lines, even the last line that was drawn is permanently open, to the present of a time that is always unfolding. Even that final line, the line that closed the image is in itself open to a present that bars the act of closure.

A Walk for a Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Cy Twombly.

Works on Paper. 1979.

Such gestures do not ask to be interpreted.

Making marks that open-up a space where in which the distinction between human and non-human is undecidable. How are we to respond to gestures that do not ask to be interpreted since they are meaningless, or more precisely they are gestures in meaningless.

If drawing is to be taken as just such a gesture, how are we to respond to it?

It it is not directed to meaning or interpretation, what does it demand of us?

Instead of considering what its meaning is, we could place the emphasis on the fact that a gesture has been made, the fact that something has been left for us. A mark inscribed on a piece of paper, perhaps by someone. We would thus receive the gestural mark as the trace of the other without any need for that mark to be meaningful. We may well do so without reverting to the 'what' and interpreting the gesture as an expression.

We need to say nothing more than the other has left this mark.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

Michael Newman.

The gesture is communication of a communicability.

Means Without Ends.

Giorgio Agamben. 2000

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. What is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself, but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language. It is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term.

For Michael Newman, the drawn mark could be taken as a 'gag' in precisely the way Agamben outlines. Its relation to language lies not in language as a goal, but precisely in its turning back on itself to expose its mediality, which is the condition of language.

Materiality and Mediality

Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning. The questions addressed in this focus build upon ongoing research on textility. Material observations of textiles from Gottfried Semper onward have played a special role in the historiography of our field, and the study of textiles demands both new economic, social, and material approaches to the history of art, from canvas painting to tapestry, while also emphasizing global movements of materials, techniques, and makers.

More broadly, the study of materials encompasses both the complex negotiation of human makers with material resistances, and the way materials change physically and in terms of their reception over time. From the extraction and procurement of raw materials to the sensual qualities of finished products, the study of an object’s materiality brings forth histories of labor, trade, technology, and the environment that have been traditionally considered beyond the remit of art history. Concomitantly, media theory is a useful tool to examine how medium shapes the behavior of works of art, which becomes especially pronounced when new media emerge and spread. Both materiality and mediality impact the aesthetic, social, and ritual understanding of works of art. The study of materials and media invite approaches to the history of art that span geographies and chronologies in new and challenging ways. Materiality and Mediality serves as a broad framework to examine visual culture using sets of methodological tools that can shed new light on canonical works of art while simultaneously integrating overlooked objects into larger art historical narratives.

https://www.biblhertz.it/en/dept-weddigen/materiality-mediality

We are thus left with the question of how the mark received as trace of the other relates to the mark as gesture, even if the trace necessarily withdraws from the mark. How does the mark-as-gesture not reduce the trace to its mediation to expression in a medium and thus reduce the other to being a figment of my world, an actor on the stage that I project. The other is reduced to the same if the medium is conceived as a common substance, a kind of thing that joins two entities, communication as exposure breaks with this ontology.

Between Thresholds/Spatial Stories : The Unbound Articulations/Gestures of Drawing.

Outpost 200224

In the activity of thinking in drawing, a drawing is not seen as a historical item, but as an embodiment of contemporary spirit unravelling before our eyes, it is always in the present tense, always a becoming.

The Stage of Drawing, Catherine de Zegher. 2003 

The Mirrored Self.

Coded Imprints.

Invested Bodies.

Chronicling Space.

To develop her project of questioning, Avis Newman returns to the initial moment of tracing and considers the genesis of the mark, from the viewpoint of the original spatial play that the hand stages and the importance given to the gestures of the hand as recorded in the traces left on the paper. She considers that the very nature of drawing is its psychic investments that are bound up in the gestures originating from the hand. The hand captures what neither the eye nor language can grasp. The gesture, its movement in space is anterior to what is drawn and articulated in the trace (Gesture, Max Kommerl).

Spatial Concepts/Paths/Places/Lines

Drawing Thresholds that we pass through.

Spatial Stories.

Michel de Certeau.

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.

On this view, in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a 'proper.'

In short, space is a practiced place.

Thus the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a place constituted by a system of signs.

The essential structure of our being is of being situated in relationship to a milieu, as being situated by a desire, indissociable from a direction of existence and implanted in the space of a landscape. From this point of view there are as many spaces as there are distinct spatial experiences. Our/the perspective is determined by a phenomenology of existing in/of the world. 

Intimus/Interior Design Theory Reader.

Spaces-Between-Thresholds.

How a space of blankness of no thing is 'overcome' and 'changed' into a space of relationships and encounters.

On spaces crossed/paths taken by their particular thresholds.

A poetic spatiality on the telling of possibilities and multiple coexistences, that are solidifying into spatial allusions which remain on hold. For the viewer, observer the invitation is not to unpick this tangle which has no centre, but to take part in the game of multiplication. To set off on a journey alongside and go with its surface flows. Into its spatial enigma, its garden of abstractions and concepts, amide nascent states in nature.

Thresholds : Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa. 2017

Ina Macaione.

If painting presents being, the drawn line presents becoming.

Norman Bryson.

Threshold as a emergent liminal space between emotional, physical domains, merging and separating through spatial movements/vectors/viewpoints and paths of desire.

The Small Space of a Constructed Limit.

The concept of architecture is the crossing of a space, a volume contained in an infinite space that creates a spatial sensation that becomes physically felt as one enters the space contained by that which is unmeasurable and infinite.

On Reading Gestures/In Real Time from the Drawn Line.

Drawing Conversations.

The Blank Evolving Page/The Unbounded Self.

Working from undifferentiated spaces into spaces that have become in some way have become claimed and  formulated.

Drawing/Visual Investments/Acting through gesture and evidence of beingness.

Through the acts of drawing the image comes into being, it comes about through the accumulation of repetitive acts of marking/inscription that are not anchored and not preconceived.

Avis Newman has developed a project of questioning of what drawing is?

All writing is drawing.

For Newman, looking at drawings, one may see not the thing itself, but its possibility, its suggestion and the uncertainty as to what stage it is in its becoming.

Gesture as the other side of language, a muteness inherent in humankind's very capacity for language, its speechless dwelling in language. Gesture for Agamben is not an absolutely non-linguistic element but rather something closely tied to language. It is first of all a forceful presence in language itself, one that is older and more originary than conceptual expression. 

Potentialities. 1999

Giorgio Agamben.

The Spatial Development of the Manuscript. 1994

Serge Tisseron.

Exhibition Spaces.

In architecture we enter space and its poetics.

Wrapped Body : Ceramic/Textile/Wire and Wax on Gesso.

A complex set of 'Propositions' emerging through her/our reflection on the found material.

A curatorial practice in which the work of Art itself, and not a theory in need of illustration, generates the searching criteria for an exhibition, a creating/curating a methodology that parallels the creative process of an artist.

An exhibition that acknowledges the significance of fragmented moments of consciousness of spaces of uncertainty. The creator is the one who agrees to venture forth with no certainty and follow this thread, unwinding ahead of him like Ariadne's thread and falling behind him like a spider's web.

The Stage of Drawing. 2003

Catherine de Zegher.

Avis Newman has long approached drawing as what she calls, an act of consciousness, an affirmation that I am conscious, I exist marked in a trace left by the gesture on the page. Her conception of drawing as a generative space of thought is a the very core of her practice and her selection for this exhibition.

A page that though blank is never truly empty.

Molecular Sieve/Performative Apparatuses : CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES/10 DAYS WINCHESTER

Winchester - Hyde Abbey Laundry

The site of approximately 1,500 sq. metres comprises redundant industrial buildings and a yard at the edge of the city centre and close to the Winchester School of Art. The site is considered to be important in townscape terms and being vacant is an underused resource. The Laundry ceased trading in 2007 and has been empty since. It is a short walk from the city centre, near car parks, leisure centre, Winchester School of Art, the Colour Factory artists’ co-operative, but in an otherwise residential neighbourhood. The site consists of a large industrial space with high ceilings, a series of different sized workshops around this main zone, and on its upper floors, office accommodation, staff canteen and a workshop. The private owner and his developer wish to demolish the old buildings and develop the site for housing; however, WCC planning officers wish to see the site or part of the site, retained as offering employment within the city.

Urban Fallow could encourage the owner to consider live-work units and studios for artists to be constructed on the site and demonstrate that there is demand for this type of activity. The Council’s Estates, Arts Development and Economic Development staff have for some years, been looking for potential sites and business models to establish affordable studios in Winchester. While demand is known, the value of assisting in the establishment of such a scheme is unproven. Urban Fallow has the potential to provide further evidence and advocacy for a permanent studio facility on this site. Winchester City Council would want to work with Winchester School of Art (arts faculty of Southampton University) and the University of Winchester, and the Hampshire Economic Partnership as partners in this scheme.

The building in its present state, although unsuitable for most purposes, is viewed by creative practitioners from a range of practice, as having great potential as studio space (in great demand in Winchester where suitable premises are hard to find - and afford). In the current market conditions, the site is likely to remain ‘fallow’ for some time to come until these issues are resolved, and the market conditions improve.

 Urban Fallow will bring into sharp focus areas of vacant urban land resulting from the slowdown in construction and the halting of some major redevelopment and housing projects. It is important that these spaces, many of which are significant in both scale and location are not allowed to deteriorate and damage the public perception of a place. The project will reanimate these areas of land by offering them for use by artists, architects, performers and other professionals with an interest in engaging with the public to develop temporary events and interventions. As well as transforming the spaces and reducing urban blight, this project could also have the effect of reinvigorating interest and potential investment in the spaces, encouraging developers and local authorities to look at them again with renewed creativity and optimism.

Urban Fallow/Solentcentre for architecture and design aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.

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

CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES

between the concrete and the spatial

THE WORKING PRACTICE IS FUNDAMENTALLY SUPPORTED BY ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS

CAPTURED BY APPARATUSES  

Heuristic Practices : The trace/space of the anthropological

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies. 

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge.

My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events. 

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. 

A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. My practice has now entered into a process that proposes a site for research driven by condition of acculturation. This site of inquiry will attempt to set up an anthropological place of localised relations amidst the condition of Supermodemity.

This proposed temporal demarcation, a marking out of a territory which will become adaptive, reflexive and spatial. Sets out to engender the inquiry of the ethnologist, to attempt of rather to reflect on how the place is organised. This site marks a private acculturation of material sourced from the world, from a hermetic and esoteric realm of private geographies, now processed and made available, accessible to the social.

The observer in the role of the ethnologist with others is invited to formulate their own invention of place through their own curiosity of encounter. This demarcation of space into the social, anticipates an intervention which creates a common adventure for a group in movement.

An interesting comment about gendered space in classical literature examines the relationship between what might theoretically and spatially link the interior with its exterior boundary is to found Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs written by Jean-Pierre Vemant. In this account Vemant describes the spatial and social arrangements of the Hestia/Hermes couple. Marc Auge acknowledges this relation as

“Hestia symbolizes the circular hearth placed in the centre of the house, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself (and thus in a sense of its relations with itself);

while Hermes, god of the threshold and the door, but also of crossroads and town gates, represents movement and relations with others.”2

Auge makes the critical point that in anthropology studied by both classic literature and history it is identity and relations that form spatial arrangements which are also inscribed in time. It is this time that materially renders the temporal dimension of these spaces and with it our reading of anthropology.

My earlier usage of long durational photographic devices (large pinhole cameras) was an attempt to realise the identity and relation of a place (its spatial activity and fixity) is totally contingent to its method of register and the particularities of fixed and temporal details. In fact these surfaces rendered from these devices are evidences of historical spaces of hidden social itineraries.

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

2  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page58.

Fragment, research/Mechanisms of Seeing/The Architecture of Image

Architectural Apparatuses of Affect : Daniel Libeskind/Small Voids/Cameras

light; the darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement.

Daniel Libeskind’s building will, when finished, offer a path for the visitor, the path of history that crosses the void of commemoration. This void is the body of an absence—that of the Berlin Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The void makes us meet this absence, but we meet it by passing through it. When an absence, in the form of a void, meets the surface of daily reality, memory marks that surface. The Holocaust has created such a void, which, in projects such as the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, is brought to the surface and given a place and a house. The void intersects the surface of time and creates a place of passage, of commemoration, of ritual in our daily life. The void is linear sign: lest we forget. But the incisions in the walls of the main exhibition spaces, spaces which house the historical material about the city of Berlin, create voids through which light is let in. These calligraphic empty spaces create a near biblical writing on the wall.

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

Russell Moreton, 10 Days in the Laundry

MOLECULAR SIEVE, is a performative analysis of “this place” utilising the simple properties of the pinhole camera. This appropriated apparatus makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it is deposited on the photographic surface. The extended durations required to register “place” impart a sense of dwelling as recorded by the apparatuses passive gaze. These surfaces record and register a relation constructed by the architecture of the chamber and what is beyond it. Movements when visible appear as simple abbreviated enactments caught like inclusions within this consolidated and timely consolation of place.

 

Time as it accumulates on a photographic surface.

This performative investigation utilizes a large pinhole chamber which is given mobility via a sack-barrow. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into spaces a “spatial practitioner” in its own right. My aim is to utilize this device as a means of registering “worksites” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-performative state. The mobility of this research could be used to illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall spaces or even a

“sandwich board” would render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities or conversely off-site arrangements would be organised.

Artist Statement 2009/10 Days

SITE is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.1

This “undoing of place” might instigate a threshold and a situation/room from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Practitioner with earlier experience in ceramics and glass, recently completed visual arts course at Winchester, now at Canterbury studying spatial practices. Interested in drawing, photography and interventions that can explore our sense and experience of place. My work seems to harbour a need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences. The use of materials from the locality (field chalk) imply a personal geography drawn from the direct relationship to an inherited Earth. There is the suggestion that the absence recorded by the trace is an inclusion, a legacy set into a field of materiality, but it might also suggest a metaphysical field of thought. This act of drawing becomes its own experimental field of exploration, a sort of “in­ between reality"( Merleau-Ponty) an enmeshed experience. Perhaps all that remains is some sense of a material memory encountering the realm of the insubstantial.

Interested in collaborative projects and ventures that might facilitate issues of “site” as being the very undoing of place. Site for me is part of the rehearsal for the construction of place, site holds relations and intimacies/geographies that will be over-written by methodologies destined to be terminated to create place.

What is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben

by the term “apparatus” I mean a kind of a forma­tion, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The appa­ratus therefore has a dominant strategic function.

I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.

I wish to propose to you nothing less than a gen­ eral and massive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured. On one side, then, to return to the terminology of the theologians, lies the ontology of creatures, and on the other side, the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide them toward the good.