Wayfaring Forms : Living Architectures beyond Function.

 

Outpost 030125

Living Architectures/Wayfaring.

Environments formed/experienced through Movement and Attention.

Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Numinous Odyssey : Raveningham

Spectral Affinities : Architectural Constellation

Processual Bodies.

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

Art's Use of Architecture: Place, Site and Setting.

Artists in 'Psycho Buildings' explore architecture's psyche, through the production of places, sites and settings, sites and settings, which engender spatial experiences that connect the viewer psychically, as well as perceptually and conceptually, to broader social issues and cultural phenomena.

Art and architecture are frequently differentiated in terms of their relationship to 'function' or 'use'. Unlike architecture, art may not be useful in pragmatic terms, for example in responding directly to social needs, providing shelter or somewhere in which to perform open-heart surgery, but we could say that art provides a place for other kinds of function – self-reflection, critical thinking and social change. If we consider this expanded version of the term function in relation to architecture, we realise that architecture is seldom given the opportunity to consider the construction of critical concepts and spatial relations as its most important purpose.

Jane Rendell.

Processes/Processual Thinking that constitute entities.

Moving Attentively In The Field of Material Structure.

The Itinerant Library of Excessive Tendencies.

Heterogeneous matter driven by disparate parts and elements of assembly.

Bricoleur Performing Practices.

Discursive Inquiry/Reading/Making.

Abjection flows between bodies, it never solely concerns one body.

For Kovar, when abjection is one of those processes, a very particular assemblage manifests itself. Where boundaries are disrupted, connections made and zones of proximity that are otherwise absent, are reached. Abject(ion) causes an inherent schism on the physical and psychological levels.

It opens bodies, to one another.

It opens up bodies for 'exchange'.

Such that they are in a perpetual process of being made and unmade, unfinished bodies.

It is precisely because abject(ion) is not only psychological but also physiological that it straddles both genders and is not solely reducible to the feminine. Abject(ion) is both feminine and masculine.

Clay+Ceramics : Correspondences and soundings on deep surfaces.

Nomadic Structures~Compositions : 

Drawing Resonances~Surfaced Sounds

Works in action that are paused at specific sites of speculation.

Wayfaring~Making : Bodies Of Experience through Spatiality, Temporality, and Subjectivity.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

Art works in gathering and playing a 'series of exchanges or choreographed economies composed of actions, things, people, events and places' with critical spatial practices.

Jane Rendell.

Tim Ingold.

Ceramic Shelters : Transitional Zones between Thinking and Making.

Russell Moreton : A visual fine artist working with clay is exploring themes around 'Making' involving the imprint of the artist, and metaphysical immersive nature of contemporary art practices and architecture. He is Interested in developing speculative making spaces where craft, theory, art and architecture can come together.

Moreton's site-based practices using clay as his principle material  further develops his  inquiry into a site based speculative learning, and with it creative propositions for knowledge production through his ceramic objects. He finds in ceramics an analogy with architecture, in particular a resonance of a spatial structure in which the the drama of the building has now ceased. 

His practice investigates the interconnectedness of making interior spaces. These works in clay are processual in nature, developed by a need to demarcate and fold material into spatial forms and volumes. The act and gesture of drawing further adds ephemeral marks of process amongst the materiality of the built spaces. Clay slips and other incised marks on both sides of the clay are all interwoven into his spatial forms.

Assemble forms are then divided into several spatial interiors, in which the use of piercings are used  through the surface to set up a circulation for light to enter into the interiors. Further firings and more ceramic coatings are applied to further investigate the involuntary relationships that have emerged. These objects are unknowable as they are extracted from the kiln, and as such they act as forms that can take on a theoretical nature, gathering his discursive researches and readings into a performative ceramic body.

For Moreton ceramics help to facilitate the essential auditory experience of silence, as experience by architecture as tranquillity. He is drawn by the solitudes of libraries and the sounds of construction, of pounding on materials, of making and constructing space. Architecture also presents this drama of construction silenced into matter, space and time. His  finished fired constructions could  become a museum for a waiting, patient silence. The silence of architecture, like that of clay is a responsive, remembering and meditative gathering, a correspondence of matter(s). 

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

Outpost 120224

Studio Spaces.

A Scriptorium, a space within the wall.

St Jerome at his study.

Making Spaces/Proximities : Navigating theory and redundancy.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Theory Reader.

Julieanna Preston.

Mark Taylor.

Declaring a field of inquiry that lies beyond disciplinary boundaries of design and architecture, all of the texts included in this reader establish generative and active exploration of interior design as a practice informed by the intellectual scholarship surrounding its cultural production and creative practice. They are not foundational in that they do not recognise or declare an originary state or propose any fundamental canon. Collected in order to catalyse creative associations within this operational field, the texts in this volume are presented via an organisational strategy that refuses both chronologic and thematic structure.

Essentially they present a connectivity to do with inhabitation and spatial presence as outlined in the examples above that is at once distant, by discipline, and intimate, by content.

Proximities/On interior theory related to the specifics of inhabitation and bodily presence.

What is being teased out hear is a multifaceted dialogue between that which is theoretical in nature, abstract, knowledge-based and immaterial and that which is grounded, physical, phenomenal and concrete. Not wishing to pull these apart, but rather to encourage convergence, this book identifies a territory of emerging points that collectively register connections of understanding with reference to a field tentatively named as the theoretical domain of interior design.

This conception forms a working method for searching and organising texts, and for mapping their locations as a relational matrix. Described in other theoretical discourse as rhizomatic, networked or diagrammatic, matrices foster the formation of connections among notions as opposed to defining or creating singular isolated entities.

However, one image in particular harboured virtual potentials pertinent to our inquiry.

Within the pages of Emily Post's book 'The Personality of a House' is a photographic plate attributed to New York architect William Laurence Bottomley. This seemingly unassuming image gently frames the prevailing issues, topics and texts in this volume. 

The doors reveal a space between the opaque panelling, a space within the wall occupied by a small vanity or dressing-table. Another mirror backs the niche which doubles the light, and the ruffles and tassels of swagged curtains are softly gathered at the boundary of this closet and cloister. The room seems to be dressed in parity to the self-reflective body that inhabits it. And yet, it is a private space,  a space for one, a space for an individual.

The mirrors reflect very little of the greater surroundings, but the scale of the panelling and the floor-to-ceiling height help to extrapolate that this secret space occurs as an informality among the far more social and self conscious home atmosphere.

How might this 'Perfect Example of Dressing-Table hidden behind panelling when not in use' be physically, socially and theoretically constructed? How are the intricate details of curved timber work on the doors and stool indicative of current and historical values of ornament, surface, gender and politics? While the doors mask the presence of the dressing-table, the mirrored interior expands infinitely. What appears as a small enclosure is a mode of liberation. What one might assume to be self-indulgent or decadent decoration may be found to be a sign of self-expression.

While the architectural room is wrapped with abstract notions of time and space, this small alcove inhabits its periphery as a pocket where body is central, maybe even fluid, and space is temporal, perhaps even subjective. 

The archive of discursive fields of inquiry.

Navigating theory and redundancy.

On a theoretical praxis, a matrix for gathering material from the archive.

The matrix is intended to be used as a surveying instrument and ordering device with the purpose to catalyse cross- and inter-disciplinary insights.

A matrix or diagram mediates between the virtual potentials generated by the data ( the field of essays/excerpts) and the actual book. The matrix is to some extent graphic shorthand used to declare latent structures of organisation. The diagram is also generative, and can be used to order possible readings.

Seeking theory informative to interior design/spatial practices by trusting that through the act of searching various sources/databases/resources a range of associations and connections would verify an emergent practice. Such associations are fuelled by the abstract and diagrammatic quality of an organising tactical matrix in its flexibility to seek casual and coincidental links among related and sometimes assumed disparate disciplines. By looking for correspondences between seemingly unrelated research and practice, and by moving laterally between existing systems and categories, not in a haphazard manner but through productive leaps generated by rules that had consequential and significant outcomes. This process enabled the gathering of material from several disciplines when the linear historical model seemed inapplicable, and thematic structures too constraining.

Coupled with its ability to engage the complexity of the real, the matrix assists in making sense of the found texts and their potential reformations. Conceptually, such order is not made towards the specificity or hegemony of a discipline, but rather to turn outwards and mobilize forces of action and imagination between matter and information.

Pragmatically, the matrix positions each text relative to a disciplinary body of knowledge (social, political,philosophical, technological, gender and psychological) and then relative to prominent interior design/spatial practice issues (material, colour, light, space, decoration and furnishing). Within this methodology an interpretive role is played in ordering these texts and the multiple locations in which each text could be placed.

Producing an interdisciplinary database search using terms typically associated with interior design as a decorative craft, an architectural speciality, a spatial art or a physical articulation of social interaction located essays framed by a wide range of types of theory, genres of writing and sources of textual discourse.

Many of the researched essays did not declare that they are concerned with 'interior theory', but instead they either operated critically on spaces, places and inhabitation of the built environment's interiors, or offered observations and abstractions of use and inhabitation that engender a criticality in this collection of texts. To include this material raises questions of what constitutes theory, and how theory relates to the critical study of the interior.

Thresholds of experiential concern.

Architectural Body/Transactive Memory.

The reclamation of theory, other spaces, further sites for production and inquiry. 

In their book 'Intersections : Architectural Histories and Critical Theories', Iain Borden and Jane Rendell outline nine epistemological tendencies on which theory is constituted within critical discourse. Rather than champion a narrow definition or description, their categories are expansive and inclusive, and when considered relative to the scope of our inquiry assist in substantiating numerous items that would normally fall outside the limits of architectural or design theory, most notably some that take the form of turn-of-the-century advice literature or historical analysis of a place or activity.

Of particular interest are those texts that are observational in nature or assert new paradigms of dwelling in light of technology. In most cases, selection of such texts proved a matter of locating the speculative mode of inquiry within the written work, registering the inferences and extending them as conduits to other contemporary works or notions. In other cases, it became an exercise in dwelling in the period, revelling in the details specific to when the text was written and recognising that theory and critical history have been defined and couched differently across time.

For if theory is conditioned by inquiries and speculation about what occurs between events, situations, objects and actions, then the method of inquiry or the analytical device employed is of primary concern.  

Art Works/Spatial Relations.

Beyond the formal values/qualities of drawing.

Figuration and the spatial inter-personal concerns of/found in drawing.

Extending the body in drawing.

Jenny Saville.

Cecily Brown.

Manuel Neri.

David Smith.

Atmospheres/Light.

The Flame of a Candle.

Charcoal, Alternative Photography.

Gaston Bachelard. 

CLAY.

Mythical city of Orion. 

Speculative retreats/Tarkovsky/Krishnamurti/Hannsjorg Voth.

Making for life on the hospitality of the body.

The architectural body and the body in care.

INTERIOR SURFACES.

Photographic Exhibition/Retrospective.

Desiring into the pathology of the image.

Breaking into corporeal and subjective spaces.

Erasures/temporalities within the materiality of photographic sensations and their memories.

Art and Architecture : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Jane Rendell

Art and Architecture. 2006

If a site is a location that can be defined in physical and material terms, a situation can be both spatial and temporal, the location of something in space and a set of circumstances bounded in time – the conditions of a particular instant, a moment, an event. The associated verb to situate describes the action of positioning something in a particular place, while the adjective situated defines something’s site or situation. Situatedness, then, is a way of engaging with the qualities of these processes of situating or being situated.

 ‘Critical spatial practice’ came to my mind back in 2003 as a helpful way of describe projects located between art and architecture, that both critiqued the sites into which they intervened as well as the disciplinary procedures through which they operated. In Art and Architecture (2006), I argued that such projects operated at a triple crossroads: between theory and practice, between public and private, and between art and architecture, and I was keen to stress three particular qualities of those works: the critical, the spatial and the interdisciplinary. 

Other practitioners and theorists have since worked with the term, evolving it in different directions. For example, there was the reading group and blogspot initiated by Nicholas Brown in the early 2000s, which came out of discussions around Brown’s own artistic walking practice. In 2011, Nikolaus Hirsch and Marcus Miessen started a book series with Sternberg Press called Critical Spatial Practice which focused on architectural discourse and practice, and in the first publication they asked the question: ‘What is Critical Spatial Practice?’.

But as this website shows a whole multitude of practitioners and theorists have been developing work in an ‘expanded field’ such as this, quite different perhaps from the one Rosalind Krauss identified in 1979. This is work that overlaps, diverges, converges, runs in parallel, and in circles, and in many cases came before and goes beyond; from transparadiso’s ‘direct urbanism’ to Steve Loo’s ‘sites of perdurance’, these practices incorporate ‘event scores’, ‘insertions’ even ‘banalities’ and pay close attention to relation, position, performance and situation, as well duration.

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

The artwork in the image consists of slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the visual artist Russell Moreton. 

His work often explores the intersection of architecture, spatial practices, and ceramics, using clay as a medium to investigate themes of construction, silence, and architectural space.

These specific pieces feature a rugged, structural appearance, incorporating textures and forms that evoke architectural elements.

Moreton's practice is deeply rooted in process-based inquiries, where the material and the act of constructing the sculpture are central to the final expression.

The artist is based in the UK and his sculptural work is frequently described as a meditation on materiality and existence.

Artistic Practice: Moreton is known for his work that explores ceramics through an architectural lens, often creating pieces that evoke the feeling of interior spaces or structures where the "drama of the building has now ceased". 

Style: His work frequently features weathered, structural forms with muted, monochromatic palettes and textured surfaces. 

Focus: His practice often investigates the interconnectedness of materials and the creation of interior, spatial structures. 

This image shows a field containing several poles, which are often used in environmental or ecological studies as Robel poles. These poles are typically used to measure visual obstruction, which helps estimate the density of vegetation or the amount of biomass in a specific area. 

The poles are placed at various locations within the meadow or grassy area to collect observational data.

In studies, these measurements are often combined with other techniques to assess habitat quality or vegetation growth.

Research collage with objects (Shoa) appears to be a mood board or an artist's research wall, heavily focused on the themes of film, memory, and decay. It features references to seminal filmmakers and philosophers who explore how time and history are captured or lost.

Key References in the Image

Andrey Rublev (1966): The central black-and-white photograph is a still from the film Andrei Rublev, directed by the legendary Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The text box explicitly identifies "Andrey Rublyov: The painter-monk on his journey." The film follows a 15th-century icon painter through a turbulent period of Russian history.

Bill Morrison: On the far left, a vertical strip of text quotes the experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison: "maybe what the ruins of Cinema, patiently and violently are tracing, is disappearing." Morrison is best known for his film Decasia (2002), which uses decaying archival film footage to create a haunting meditation on the fragility of the medium and human memory.

Marc Augé: On the right, there is a quote from the French anthropologist Marc Augé: "Ruins, as a notion and phenomena are slowly disappearing from our cities. Out of a lack of time, we are condemned to preserve the past." Augé is famous for coining the term "non-places" and writing extensively on the relationship between time and space in the modern world.

Themes and Context

The collection of these specific quotes and images suggests a deep interest in "The Ruins of Cinema" and the physical or conceptual disappearance of history.

Tarkovsky is often associated with the concept of "Sculpting in Time," where the filmmaker uses the medium to fix and observe the passage of time itself.

Bill Morrison's work literally shows "ruined" film, where the chemical emulsion is melting or rotting away, yet creating something new and beautiful.

Marc Augé's quote reflects on how modern society lacks the "slow time" required for ruins to form naturally, instead opting for immediate, artificial preservation.

The architectural drawing and the physical cardboard model (possibly a "section" or "maquette") visible on the right suggest this board might belong to a student or professional in architecture or film production design, exploring how physical spaces can embody these abstract concepts of memory and decay.

Making/Matter/Material : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Claywork/Correspondences : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Drawing Participation : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Indexical Awareness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Mechanisms of Mutuality : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

Viewing Assemblage : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

A Process of Consciousness : Situated interactions between bodies and habitats.

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

Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces~Studio Practice : A space between, movable and nomadic.

Making matter(s) of correspondences with the continuous weather-world.

Studio Practices : Speculative spaces between organism~person~environment

Studio Works : Between body and architecture

Clay Based Making.

Clay+Ceramics.

Folded Readings~Heuristic Spatial Forms from Fired Clay.

Ceramics from clay constructions of indisciplined spaces where experiential markings and imaginative readings between theory and practice develop new material discourses.

Possible Outcomes~Clay Based Ceramic Propositions

Architectures~Making Spaces in Abjection.

Bodies, Spatial Bodies and their Relations.

A place between is spatial. It is a mapping of the topographies between here, there and elsewhere. It is also social, an articulation of the place of dialogue, of the ongoing discussion between one and another. A place between is temporal, it pays attention to time, to the ways in which we locate the then from the now, the now from the yet to come. 

Jane Rendell.

The Experience of Existence.

Fired clay meditations on a materiality, a willingness to survive and endure.

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

Clay~Making : The Analogous Atmosphere of  Experience.

Asking how making is a thinking in its own right, what else that thinking can do?

Erin Manning.

AI Overview

This artwork is a sculptural assemblage by Russell Moreton, featuring ceramic vessels and forms. 

The work explores themes of reverberation, innerness, and volume through a processual approach to clay. 

Moreton's practice investigates the interconnection of making interior spaces, demarcating and folding material into spatial forms. 

These pieces are described as 'extreme atmospheres' or 'fired clay labyrinths,' utilizing textural surfaces and industrial-like perforations

This image features mixed-media ceramic artworks by artist Russell Moreton.

These sculptures are part of an exploratory research project titled "Clay/With Fire," focusing on architectural themes.

The artist explores the concept of "making" through the interconnectedness of interior spaces, using clay as the primary medium.

The pieces are processual in nature, meaning they evolve from the direct experience of working with the material.

The works incorporate the artist's imprint, exploring the metaphysical and immersive nature of creation.

These images feature exploratory, architectural-themed ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Theme: Architectural structures and spatial practices.

Focus: The imprint of the artist and the material itself.

 

Interdisciplinarity~Spatial Collaboration.

Spaces between Forms for Speculative Creative Outcomes.

Making Spatial Stories : Over time and through space.

Restless Objects~Fictioning : Sheltering Spaces, Movable and Nomadic : Slab Built Ceramics

The objects in the image are architectural-themed ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 

These works are part of the artist's exploratory research into materials, often incorporating themes of "making," spatial perception, and site-specific installation. His practice frequently involves building with slabs of clay to create forms that engage with their architectural settings. 

Humanities : Spatial Involvements/The Laboratory of Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture

Spatial Practice/UCA Canterbury 2009/10

Researching Proactive Apparatuses : A laboratory for speculative social evolution.

SENSORIUM  AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR

A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).

Drawing a relationality through others in site.

VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM

THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :

The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.

THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.

CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES

THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL

PAINTING, Robert Mangold.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY

BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO

ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS

GESALT, 

GRISAILLE, 

LEITMOTIF, 

MATRIX,

FORMAL PATTERN,

SURFACE

John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, (London: Routledge, 1998)

The Virtual Embodied, “ explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge and space to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence,” these parameters are being investigated and researched in my creative practice.

Embodied knowledge and virtual space.

Physical, Psychological and Virtual Realities, Max Velmans.

List of “typical beliefs about physical, psychological and virtual realities”. PHYSICAL REALITY

Extended in space-in the world

Exists independently of the observer

Has tangible properties, e.g. Mass and solidity

Descartes s proposed our classical view of the mind/body split into res extensa ( material that extends in space) and res cogitans (thinking material). We commonly associate the physical world as having both extension and location in space.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY 

Non-extended in space-in the mind 

Existence depends on the observer

Is relatively intangible and insubstantial

Psychological realities do not have spatial dimensions, and their location is only metaphorically “ in the mind”. It is crucial to note that psychological realities are only real for a given observer. Velmans notes” these intuitions are confirmed by the fact that physical realities have tangible, substantial properties such as mass, solidity and weight. Whilst psychological properties are, by comparison, intangible and insubstantial”.

VIRTUAL REALITY

Appears to have extension in space, but has no actual extension Appears to be in the world, but is actually in the mind

Existence depends on the interaction of the observer with VR equipment

Can appear to have tangible properties ( with suitable equipment) but does not have such properties.

Virtual realities via appropriate headsets which give “feedback” from bodily movements and visual displays, conspire to give the appearance of a virtual world extended into our physical space, but they have no actual 3D physical extension. Interestingly such worlds are physical in the fact that they rely on the physical existence and placement of equipment, virtual realities seek to create apparent changes in “self location” which do not correspond with actual changes in location. New developments can now give a physical realm into the virtual by the use of body interfaces that can restrict the movement of the body to correspond to the visual perception of a virtual identity.

Fragment from material resonances project, spatial practice research, CSA.

THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION

Perception is in the “condition” of an interruption. 

Rehearsal is the creative part of any performance.

Humanities : Spatial Relations

Interested in the speculative nature of work-sites that contain a narrative intervention via a device that registers and records the documentary and its rehearsal.

Work as revealed into a final sequence of superimposures on a surface created from the collective transparency of the text.

Thresholds that reveal the interspace between the Human and its condition/environment.

Photographic surface of events, a visual entropy resolved as a history of consolidated exactitudes/enactments.

The photographic surface shows that which no longer exists, it concretizes contingences on offer into an image of irreversibility.

Double Occupancy , Dwelling with the critique and its realization of an uncovering event, criticism collides with and into the work. Deleuze, Baroque house (65).

Presenting both a virtual walk through “text” ,using the transparency of “text” both as a literal transparency and its phenomenal “physicality” as applied to surface and structures within the site. Using the body of the visitor to enable

enactments/sensitivities to be derived from the site encounter. Enactments triggered by the singularity of an individuals engagement with walking amongst the working site. The final experience/superimpose remains uniquely a product of the visitor. This site driven explorative experience undertaken by both a passitivity and a curiosity on the part of “the guest” creates a self /space/time/ place relation, a localised intimacy that promotes an encapsulated sense of enchantment/wisdom.

The entirety of the “text” is stored latent in the interlocutor as they investigate the physicality of material relationships and spatial significations. In this respect the interlocutor defines his/her “traits” through a recognition and curiosity with their own body as it weaves a narrative of navigation through the experience of “site”. This theorizing by the body of its encounters, material and spatial, alone or within the proximities of others interests me as a “trace” of the encountering space through the human agent. This working notion and its site begin to posit the idea of an 

“interspace” between the human and its environment. This theoretical and abstracted site could be utilized to research interventions and their effects, to attempt to register the spatial relations/traits of contemporary society. How might this material and its spatial census (human/ site temporalities) be gathered, registered and finally presented.

10 days, Observational material from site, They sense this articulating moment, their consolation becomes recursively and inexplicably consolidated with others unfamiliar undistinguishable, they are rendered into the resultant homogeneity of a surface relation bonded by specifics of space and time.

10 Days, Observational/Reflection, Journal notes Their erasure by the transits of change and chance of others over-writing themselves to reveal the transparency of temporalities as registered by the photographic duration of capture.

What remains is an exactitude of “what occurred” in a form/manner unknowable to those present, by dwelling in this visual interface of the photographic surface, things become inexplicably and irreversibly compounded with a time stretched and stilled.

Photography has the unusual attributes to be able to act as a particle accelerator on the human subject, it can present material assessed from numerous durational encounters with time. It can render a seduction and conversely an invisibility.

Spatial Practice is in effect a laboratory (of the self and worlds) from which I define and register and relate material tested under those conditions. This makes me part of the process and part of the results, part also of the problem of the investigation.

Reflections on the use of “the Negative” expedient use of material creates this inherent property, interesting analogy with human process of vision, in as much as the after-image rendered by the eye is always in the negative. This final image of what was is in effect being erased by the negative/negated. The perspective of the negative reveals more informative relations about the spatial/displacement of the environment in which the “objectivity” is being both immersed and conversely displaced. Like the displacement of a solid form by a liquid of the same displacement, the negative reveals the object displacing/relating in spatial terms. The negative gives proof to our mutual dependency and our forgetting of air as both surface and support.

In Drawing and Mapping it is tensions between the negative and the positive objectivity of things that helps to define a limit, a definition of form that is both simultaneously relational and indexical. The “Trace” also maintains these properties but interestingly it contains a transparency, a dimensionality that makes it both reflective and confrontational, it remains registered to the present but unable to escape its signification of the past.

Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts. Giuliana Bruno.

Series of "essays" on the relations between Architecture and The Arts. Bruno notes the critical role in which architecture constitutes and supports a "public intimacy" initiated through both historical references and Contemporary Art. This spatiality of a public constructed space that grants the reception of an intimacy is seen by Bruno as being a "new moving space- a screen of vital cultural memory". She proposes a view that Architecture is mobilized as a screen/vessel in which to define a frame of memory. Architecture in this sense becomes not just "a matter of space but an art of time." Interestingly it is in the work of Rebecca Horn that she notes the combination of both the scientific and the artistic. This combination has a resonance with the architectural model and intended purpose of the anatomical theatre. Rebecca Hom and a growing number of contemporary practitioners are actively engaged in creating "works" which use architectonics and situation to create personal and profound experiences, intimacies evolved from public spaces. This new conceptualization of "body space" and its relationship to the production of space is ultimately being absorbed back into Architectural practice, the work of Nigel Coates "Guide to Ecstacity" and Rem Koolhaas use of materials and interventions that challenge our sensory and cultural aesthetics about architecture illustrate issues around the spatialisation of the body and its intimate consumption in the public realm of the senses.

To Live is to pass from one space to another. Georges Perec.

Bruno Taut, The New Dwelling, Women as Creator, (Leipzig : Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1924).

Taut asserts that it is a woman's way of inhabiting space that creates and modifies architecture, see also Mark Wigley, White walls, Designer dresses: The fashioning of Modern Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT press , 1995)

I would say that my fiction is set in the visionary present. J G Ballard.

Underlining the Hostility of the external world, The Autopsy Room/Theatre.

Victims surrender all that is left of their unique identities, what is left after the basic components are separated, nothing much to claim not even a faint presence of existence. We feel pity and the oblivion patiently waiting for us. J G Ballard on CSI

Frozen frames of a perverse geometry, flickering into a narrative of their own volition. The work is accompanied by a critical voyeurism that has the ability to reveal a prognosis.

Ballard, Every paragraph of this "fiction is frightening obscure and an obtuse puzzle. Surreal geometries, with a pervasive atmosphere of doom and imminent cataclysm that "exposes" the sordidly within us all.

Ballard, Obsessions- Dystopias/Sexuality/Technology and their discontinuities' Ballard, Abstractions-Science/Psychiatry/Mathematics.

Questions the "concrete delinearations of morality, ethics and sanity". 

Notion that Aesthetics/Landscapes can harbour relations, The Gaze, male/female. 

THE RESEARCH POSTER, a document outlining a field of inquiry, placing ones pitch into the public domain. 

Life is Data

Progress is Optional

Understanding is a product of good marketing.

Attempting to keep the moment from being realized. Robert Rauschenberg 

On Photography, Rauschenberg.

My photography is supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. Rauschenberg uses his camera as a social shied, he has "a need to be where it will always never be the same again." He comments that "photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts". His concern is to move at a speed within which to act in the "archaeology" of what light or its darkness touches.

The object itself is dictating your possibilities.

Validity, cannot exist without standards. How long are standards fresh? Every minute everything is different everywhere. Where is the basis for criticism. Criticism collides into the work ,it attempts to arrest it, it deliberately attempts to affect a stop.

Oren Lieberman, The "Plastic Wallet thing/Spatial Practice interview Canterbury" They promote attention, They are seductive in their surface, they "house" temporalities into a permanent/recognisable system or archive. They are deterministic in the sense of belonging to an instantly recognisable protective and presentational system of storing information. The indexical "holes" themselves promote the notion of a terminology on the material within them, sort of ironic when they contain thoughts and issues about methodologies. Perhaps these useful wallets have just become another material victim of contemporary homogeneities. Corrupt their inherent homogeneity by removal or adaptation of their indexical register (the punched holes) thereby making them unique or of a non­ purpose, or for a purpose not yet disclosed/realised.

Tim Ingold

MAKING 2013

Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Practical Geometry

The Architect and The Carpenter

The Cathedral and The Laboratory

Templates and Geometry

The Return to Alchemy

Cyanotype image from pinhole camera with sound intervention/device within the apparatus of the camera, performative material gathered from the Canterbury School of Architecture.

UCA Spatial Practices MA under Oren Lieberman.

The marked agency and its absence of the artist leaves the site live and open. Oxford MOMA 2006 Jannis Kounallis left his coat hanging by a window adjacent and in the same room as his installation.

RUSSELL MORETON. MA SPATIAL PRACTICES.

Artist Statement used to accompany promotional powerpoint display at UCA Canterbury, 2009.

Spatial Practice provides an interesting set of methodologies in which to explore our own “relationality”1. This is particularly relevant in respect to my understanding and subsequent proposal for the role of the interlocutor within my work. Becoming increasingly interested in the concept of “ open text ”2 to explore the nature of space and its relational properties that create place, or rather a self placed. At present using Photography (large pinhole chambers) embedded in working environments to further explore properties of latency, transparency and the peripheral dwelling of spatial material.

The Practice.

Currently exploring the dynamics and dwellings of spatial relations. The use of a large oil drum as a “pin hole camera” creates a tool that records/witnesses a specific duration (dwelling) in place. This duration of approximately 45 minutes renders visual data that underpins our temporality as we constantly re-form spatial relations with each other and that of the architectural environment. The internal architectonics of the chamber gives a sense of both the proximity of peripheral space and the distance/dislocation of a filmic surface concretized by time. These imaged surfaces render a sense of place, an aura and a psychosis/pathology around images and their representation.

1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality ( London: Sage Publishing, 2005) 

2 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between ( London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)

METHODOLOGIES/PROJECT PROPOSAL

TIME 

RELATIONALITY 

CONTINGENT 

SURFACE 

CONSOLATIONS 

The Trace becoming a material witness to an event/situation

Use of “information” gathered from site being re-invested with another sense of time and ambient light.

Transparent/Translucent materials “surfaced” by contemporary digital technologies, corporate media presentational light boxes, large format 24 square metres.

Use of “interventions” liquids between visual and haptic membranes, utilization of direct drawing within and amongst the “media technologies”.

Direct more of “working practice” into larger scale painting investigations with drawing and photography as inclusions. Suggest notion of temporary space situated in fine art.

Explore relationships of “objects” as the custodian of place. Analysis of the Reception and relations generated by this “first objectivity”.

Relation of “what was ”to what is left being a “spatial involvement” placed back into the continuum of ongoing spatial relations.

Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).

Drawing a relationality through others in site.

Drawn inscriptions that leave traces for others to respond

Documents of a theoretical investigation over the surface from both beneath (the place) and from above (the event). 

A performative membrane/drawing/diagram/script that gains its authenticity/performativity from being there and allowing what might occur to be witnessed.

Drawing as a “open text” that allows a perspectival immersion/situatedness, because it is still active, un-resolved needing to be taken further under the authorship of viewer.

These fragments of precise interventions/enactments  engender a dynamic of relational possibilities.

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