Material absorbed in its own thoughts :
Wednesday, 8 July 2026
Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity : Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.
Tuesday, 30 July 2024
Form Giving Improvisations : Creative Entanglements in a world of materials.
Outpost 060123
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/
Haecceity, a certain gathering together of the threads of life.
Deleuze and Guattari, A thousand plateaus. 2004.
Intermediaries : Inducing place between things and the process of practice.
The drama/performativity of encountering place.
Setting things in motion.
Reading diffractive phenomena.
Bringing things to life, creative entanglements in a world of materials.
Life is all about relations that hold a being in place.
Tim Ingold, The environment without objects (EWO).
Graham Harman, Object-oriented ontology (OOO), a new theory of everything.
Steven Holl, Parallax.
Carlo Rovelli, Helgoland.
Penelope Curtis, Elective affinities.
Mark Burry, Jane Burry, Prototyping for architects.
Lynne Elizabeth, Cassandra Adams, Alternative Construction, contemporary natural building methods.
Bridget Riley, The minds eye.
Monday, 23 October 2023
Making Thresholds/Dialogues between the container and the contained.
Outpost 260823
Clay-Drawings at Bayfield.
Observatory/Propositional Assemblage.
Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.
The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism.
Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.
Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold.
Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing and Telling.
Thinking From Things.
To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.
Deleuze and Guattari.
The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.
Tim Ingold.
The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.
Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.
To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.
It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.
Tim Ingold.
In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.
Sensing Spaces
Making
Thresholds
The Materials of Life
Are you interested in the idea of threshold?
What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.
The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.
A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.
Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.
Telling By Hand.
The Humanity of the Hand.
The Eyes of the Skin.
Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.
Figure 2.3 Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram
Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object
Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.
Merleau-Ponty.
Telling By Hand.
The Tacit Dimension : That we can know more than we can tell.
Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.
Michael Polanyi.
Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of what it means to know.
Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.
The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.
Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another.
Tuesday, 21 February 2023
Drawing passages in the ecology of experience : Disappearances opposed by assemblages of evidence
Outpost21022
Drawing passages in the ecology of experience.
The Silent Room.
Silence/Intimacy/Reading.
Drawing is about following/keeping up with a form/becoming in life.
What shall I do next?
The entwining of ever extending trajectories.
I was asking you: where are we when we draw? The question seems to be expecting a spatial answer, but mightn't it be a temporal one? Isn't the act of drawing as well as the drawing itself, about becoming rather than being?
Isn't a drawing the polar opposite of a photo? The latter stops time, arrests it; whereas a drawing flows with it. Could we think of drawings as eddies on the surface of the stream of time?
From each glance a drawing assembles a little evidence, but it consists of the evidence of many glances which can be seen together. On the one hand there is no sight in nature as unchanging as that of a drawing or a painting. On the other hand, what is unchanging in a drawing consists of so many assembled moments that they constitute a totality rather than a fragment. The static image of a drawing or painting is the result of the opposition of two dynamic processes. Disappearances opposed by assemblage. If, for diagrammatic convenience, one accepts the metaphor of time as a flow, a river, then the drawing, by driving upstream, achieves the stationary.
John Berger 1926-2017.
Improvisation is to join with the world or to meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune.
Deleuze and Guattari.
Points are not joined so much as swept aside and rendered indiscernible by the current/energy as it sweeps through.
Life is open-ended, its impulse is not to reach a terminus, but to keep on going. The plant, the musician or the painter in keeping going, hazards an improvisation.
Tim Ingold.
Moments of shared physical and bodily intensities in the enactment of constructions, activities and inhabitatations.
Drawing/movements into transitions articulated with gaps and spaces for improvisation and the incorporation/corporeality of the quotidian and the unexpected.
Francis Bacon, The Human Figure.
Figuring it out, Colin Renfrew.
The assemblage/collaged/choreographic object works to keep us attentive and entangled/engaged in the world.
LiAi:
Laboratory of immediate architectural intervention.
The workshops/laboratory demonstrated how architecture could be about encounters in space, sensitive material tectonics and social urban exploration, engagement and transformation.
Monday, 16 May 2022
Postmodern : Contested Landscapes for Melancholy
Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,
"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.
Melancholy And The Landscape
Locating Sadness, Memory And Reflection In The Landscape
Jacky Bowrin
Path : Analogue Film Process
St Catherine's Hill, Winchester
Anthrocene : Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Skeleton Tree.
Walberswick : Beach Slides/Digital Pinhole
Covehithe : Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape
Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane
“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:
Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”
“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”
Landscape : Entanglements of Affect
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,
Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging
Pinhole Photography (Holga)
Landscape : Entanglements of Affect/Aesthetics
Nihilistic Aesthetic : Bleached Cyanotype







Friday, 8 October 2021
Relational Movements : Temporal foldings and the experience of wonder
Francesca Woodman : Becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible, becoming-a-subject-in-wonder.
Lone Bertelsen
For Irigaray, Air is the first element, wonder as the first of the passions.
We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but of a vector of subjectivation.
Guattari
Woodman's work produces an intimate mode of looking, a questioning body on time and space
Intermediaries/Intervals remain after folding subject and object into one another.
Relationscapes : Erin Manning
The Elasticity of Sensation/The Experience of Wonder
Deleuze argues that Bacon is not fascinated by 'movement' as such, but by its effects on an immobile body and with 'interior' and 'invisible forces'.

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