CARETAKING/INTERSPACES The Weird And The Eerie/fluctuating networks of existential events : Photographic pathologies of alterity

RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES CRITICAL THEORY

SPATIAL PRACTICES : CANTERBURY 2009

PERIPHERAL VISION : RELATIONALITY, ROBERT COOPER.

I have quoted the entirety of this abstract, as its concise and articulate statement needs to be preserved as a fragment capable of reconstituting interest for others and, by keeping its first reading authentically present, it is presented “live” and synchronic with its other enactments.

“The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency .Relating is viewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuating network of existential events. Relating re-lates the human world as a restless scene of flowing parts in which whole, self contained objects take second place to the continuous transmission of movement. The relating of the world of moving parts is illustrated through the examples of modem methods of mass production and the transmission of information which both produce a “weakening of reality.”

Keywords: human agency, information transmission, the latent, part-whole relationship, production-prediction

Robert Cooper’s observation that relating is a continuous connecting and disconnecting, probes the possibilities of spatial encounters that can be grafted onto and within our readings of place. The notion of the temporal and the contingent, are never far away in this “fluctuating network of existential events.”

Cooper makes an informative comment on modern methods of mass production and communication, “categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality but they also hide its underlying complexities.”1

This sense of partial visibility, made and controlled by things, intrigues me as does the parts on the periphery of perception which remains with the potential to become relational. My work seems to be seeking out and mediating the interspace between the individual and their environment. For me this interspace becomes the space of unfolding implications, whose dynamics, or resonances, are achieved through connections that imply disconnections.

The photographic evidence utilized in my practice, the way emergent findings are presented and then over written, suggests that this idea of inter space, is totally contingent. This gives a sense of an archaeology of perceptive meanings, which are manifested as visual consolations. These held in an ever emergent state of contingences interests me. The space and time of relativity and relationship, Cooper notes is a place where “nothing can be itself and everything is suspended in an unfinished betweenness that seems to refuse simple location and identity.”2

Betweenness/walking into a latent field of relationality?

“Relationality re-lates latency. It re-lates in the double sense of connecting terms and thus creating coherent structures of relations out of gaps and intervals of disconnection, as well as narrating and making explicit the dormant and implicit nature of latency.”3

1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality (London: Sage Publishing, 2005), page 1689. 

2  .Ibid., page 1692.

3  .Ibid., page 1693.

Helena Elferova~Synagoga : Photographic Pathologies~Saturnian  lead, greyness, analogue processes.

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

PORTRAITS, STILL VIDEO PORTRAITS AND THE ACCOUNT OF THE SOUL, JOANNA LOWRY.

This text taken from Stillness and Time: Photography and the Moving Image is of interest, as it analyses the properties of the compression of time into a single image and our reading of such material. It is this central issue of time, or rather that photography can intercept it, that interests me through the use of simple light gathering devices. Joanna Lowry remarks on the ability of photography to disrupt “ our common-sense understanding of the relationship between past and present, stopping the flow of time and holding it in an uncanny stillness for years on end, revealing to us a present without a future.”1

Photography seems to be more about what remains after time is interrupted; it reveals “a fissure in the field of the visible.”2 This fissure could be said to be a frame of a detachment of time, a hermetically sealed dimension, preserving its own unique value of dwelling and promoting a sense of temporality of human subjects, surrounded by an exactitude of place.

One of the interesting properties of these “time based stills” is that they give a visual site for the triangular relationship between subject, spectator and time. The time element is duration, so therefore these images are filmic semblances, witnessing their subjects, or as Benjamin termed them as “growing into the picture”. The spectator of these encounters (framed by time) becomes aware of a photographic duration. This duration is constantly emerging and it is also constantly forming “sedimentary remains”. Perhaps as Lowry comments “they offer us a new enchantment with the provisionally and fragility of the pose."3

This new enchantment, or the site of its alternation, is created by a photographic absorption of a human performance. This phenomenon, of an absorbed and distracted subject as Benjamin has noted, belongs to the earliest forms of photography. What is also relevant here, is the observation made by Mark Godfrey “new technologies produce new forms of subjectivity.”4 Photography produces and procures a difference and a distance. It is a “differentiated space of the visible.”5

1 .Joanna Lowry, Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul (Brighton: Photoforum, 2006), page 65.

2  .Ibid.,

3  .Ibid., page 78.

4  .Mark Godfrey, Fiona Tann : Countenance (Oxford: Modem Art Oxford,2005), page76.

5 Joanna Lowry, Portraits, Still Video Portraits and the Account of the Soul (Brighton: Photoforum, 2006), page 77.

Artist Statement/Analysis  re Spatial Practices/Methodologies

My previous experiences have been drawn from a physical relationship to “site” and the possibilities that might be embedded to be encountered for others. It is in the spatiality of Drawing from which I am attempting to create a form, that allows the multiplicity of material associations and yet has a sort of transparency and physicality, that allows specific readings to be experienced through this membrane. Spatial practices offers up a frame of references and cross multidisciplinary approaches that are already offering possible solutions. 

My initial use of surfaces Ceramics and Glass, in architectural surroundings, is being redrawn into relationally with the notion of an interlocutor being an active participant and for those others whose proximities and contingences they might create. 

Analysis of my assemblages, which are housed in book form, reveal a spatial overwriting of both written annotations and diagrammatical routing of specific elements. All of this occurs, or is illuminated adjacent too and between, photographic evidence of place.

This evidence of place is itself a surface of compressed time, inscribed during that time by light. Light therefore suggests itself as the ultimate vehicle of transparency, of both being able to illuminate information and also being able to stream and superimpose seamlessly contingent knowledge’s as they appear. 

The intertextuality of Language, as something that might be configured as an inclusion into physical place is a possibility. My work seems to require this transparency on one hand and yet recent reviews of my drawings, reveal a dynamic engendered from precisely drawn articulations, to a nebulous semblance on the same surface. In effect my interests are on the transition points, thresholds even, of the periphery of perceptions being retained, whilst other things become open and emergent. 

This dynamic across a spatial volume activates the possibilities of seeing things becoming interwoven with creative potentials.

Other observations, brought from the presentation of working practice, have been the issue of intensive notations, almost as if the photographic surfaces, themselves vestiges of solitudes were being re-enacted by a choreographic sense of re-encountering place. The embedded durations, overwritten by light within the photographic surface, give a semblance of the notion of inter- textuality, or rather its creative possibilities; in fact they are ensnared continuances. 

J G Ballard refers in his writing that it is being envisaged in the visionary present. The extended durations of “the present” captured on a photographic surface could be said to be a concretization of the present by the past. 

These extended durations of always “becoming present” have something about an indexical mark in a state of a constant erasure of becoming, held captive within them. A further visual distortion, achieved by the use of a chamber as the receptacle to mediate the relations between the light outside with the light that penetrates, produces a kind of visual psychosis, a distorted sense of being captive which seems to accompany the image.

The Phenomenology of Construction : Caruso St John

 

THE PRESENCE OF THE BUILT OBJECT IN THE WORLD THROUGH THE MANNER IN, WHICH IT IS BUILT.

Mark Fisher : a culture made and defined by repetitive cycles of retrospection and pastiche.

Architecting sensations and instances between concept, materials and experiential praxis. 

Texts composited from spaces and rooms into reading vectors for  illuminated thinking.

Caruso St John : The Phenomenology of Construction

 

At the end of the twentieth century, with late capitalism more widely accepted as the economic model than ever before, the ideology of newness has become transparently associated with the workings of the market. Recent interest in airports, shopping malls and infrastructure emerges from an idea that it is these places where the processes of the contemporary economy are most brutally apparent. For architects to engage in these programmes is for architecture to become a commodified product and to be subject to the tyranny of the new.

Adam Caruso, The Tyranny of the New.

 

History is the raw material of architecture.

Aldo Rossi

 

Originality does not consist in making up new words that do not have the fine character of experience, but in using existing words well. They can be sufficient for everything.

Auguste Rodin

 

A radical formal strategy is one that considers and represents the existing and the known. In this way artistic production can critically engage with an existing situation and contribute to an ongoing and progressive cultural discourse.

Adam Caruso, The Tyranny of the New. Pp70-73

 

RADICAL FORMAL STRATEGY

THEORY PRAXIS MAKING

 

DEEP ECOLOGIES OF CONSTRUCTION

 

RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN:

VENACULAR STRUCTURES and HIGH STATUS ARCHITECTURE

 

SPATIAL CONTINUITY: MAKING, DWELLING

 

TRADITION

 

There is no compelling evidence as to why architecture should reject more than 400 years of working within a liberal arts context, nor is there compelling evidence that architecture is any more marginal than at other times over that period.

Adam Caruso, The Tyranny of the New.

 

Continuity involves the legacy of existing buildings produced by architects as well as the much larger legacy of existing, vernacular structures. In trying to connect these things, Caruso St John are part of a tradition that includes figures as diverse as Adolf Loos, Auguste Perret, Alison and Peter Smithson, Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Mies van der Rohe, Roger Diener, or Hans Kollhof. These architects have all questioned the abruptness of the radical break inherent in the formation of orthodox modern architecture.

Eric Lapierre, Caruso St John, The phenomenology of construction.

CONSTRUCTION

 

Adam Caruso on the medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.

 

Today the nuances of language that make up these architectures only exist as an intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more general culture of their construction. When this formal language ceases to be novel, a building becomes part of a more normative condition, the condition of not ‘being new’ and its qualities increasingly emerge from the more long-standing and stable world of construction.

 

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002

 

 

By ceasing to be new, a building attains a more ‘normal’ condition, it becomes finally more banal, from a viewpoint that has much in common with Perret’s famous aphorism on ‘a work that would seem to have always existed’.

 

 

AFFECT SPACE POLITICS : NIGEL THRIFT

 

REVERBERATIONS : BACHELARD

 

RUINS : MARC AUGE

 

REFRAINS : AFFECT READER

 

SPACES OF ENCOUNTER : RE-DISCOVERY OF SPACE

CLAY : INNERNESS, CRAFTED FROM THE VALLEY/DWELLING/SITUATION

 

CONSTRUCTION AS THE APPLICATION OF MATTER

 

PHENOMENOLOGY vs. CONSTRUCTIONAL truth

 

 

THE QUESTION OF RUINS or the differences between the architectural ideologies of Auguste Perret and Caruso St John.

 

Beautiful architecture makes beautiful ruins, affirms Perret, since in ruins, only the structure remains visible.

 

When Adam Caruso observes the ruins of Fountains Abbey, he is concerned with physical matter.

Waverley Abbey Project : Reading Rooms.

Interior Design MA Farnham

Russell Moreton 

 

The ruined state of the buildings serves to exaggerate the presence of material. The feeling is that of an enormous weight drawn out of the ground into the volume of the valley and held in place by a matrix of structure whose schema is described by the pattern of stone joints.

Adam Caruso, Towards an Ontology of Construction, KnittingWeaving Pressing 2002

 

The essential change in perspective between Perret and Caruso St John is that of a construction as structure to a construction that is the application of matter. Perret observes the organic dimension of buildings from a distance that makes the structural framework’s overall logic intelligible.

Caruso regards buildings much more closely, at a distance/closeness that enables him to grasp their tactile dimension: he looks at them with his hands. In Fountains Abbey, it is the brickwork joints that are essential; on the rear façade of his Van Nelle factory building, it is the micro-topography of the façade.

 

Luis Moreno Mansilla remarks that buildings by Sigurd Lewerentz, one of Caruso St John’s main inspirations, can only be seen close up.

 

For Caruso St John, construction does not refer to a constructional technique, nor to the coherence of its application as a technique, but rather the presence of the built object through the manner in which it is built.

 

Interestingly Perret’s positivist and absolute approach belongs to a mindset that excludes all form of doubt or ambiguity. To this approach, Caruso St John propose a phenomenological approach in which construction frees itself from pure technological logic to find meaning, both inherent and more relativist, in the field of architecture itself.

 

 

 

INNERNESS/AFFECT : THE CHANGE OF PERSPECTIVES

 

SURFACES, Juxtaposed without articulation.

QUESTIONING STRUCTURAL LOGIC, by playfully obscuring it.

 

INCREASING THE BUILDINGS PHENOMENOLOGICAL AND PERSPECTIVE COMPLEXITY

 

CONSTRUCTIVE DIALOGUES/CLADDINGS Through CRAFT, PROXIMITY, INTIMACY and SITUATION.

 

 

The depth of the exposed beams in the exhibition areas is not proportional to their respective spans, but to the overall heights of the rooms in question. Walls with claddings of vertical timber boards alternate with bare concrete walls that seem to have been cast in shuttering identical to the timber cladding. These two surfaces are sometimes juxtaposed, without articulation, and question structural logic by obscuring it, thereby increasing the building’s phenomenological and perspective complexity.

New Art Gallery, Walsall. Caruso St John

 

The load bearing walls appear to be folded along the complex contours of the non-orthogonal site. At the corners, bricks are cut and bonded together with resin to adapt to the geometry, while maintaining the size of standard bricks. Although they are load bearing, these walls become surfaces that have tactile and phenomenological qualities as well as being constructed surfaces with real architectonic weight.

The Brick House, London, Caruso St John

ATMOSPHERE: CLADDINGS and ARCHITECTONICS.

 

 

CLADDINGS and their ability/capacity to create ATMOSPHERES

 

AESTHETICS AND SUBJECTIVITY: KANT to NIETZSCHE ( Andrew Bowie)

 

 

The artist, the real architect, has firstly the feeling of the effect that he wants to produce, and then he imagines the spaces that he has to create. The effect that he wants to create on the beholder, will come from the material and its form.

Adolf Loos

 

It is through the splendour of truth that the building attains beauty. The truth is in everything that has the honour and task to carry or to protect. He who hides a pole makes a mistake. He who makes a false pole makes a crime.

Auguste Perret

 

 

The originality of Caruso St John’s work lies the fact that this atmosphere is created by claddings that have a strong architectonic character. As opposed to Loos, they use paint very rarely, and prefer to use construction materials in the traditional sense of the term: brick, concrete and wood. They do so in order to continue to create architecture, not as a spectacle, but by merging two traditions –that of Perret’s structural rationalism and that of Loos’s claddings –to define an architecture that speaks to us of the contemporary world in a truly critical manner.

 

Eric Lapierre, Caruso St John, The phenomenology of construction.

Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity.

 

Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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’