An asperity of thoughts/Vibrant Matter : Braking Down/Diffracting/ The Apparatus of Reading/Research

250323

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Building/Uncertainties into the explorations of making. Rem Koolhaas.

.

REVIEW into INTERIORS MA UCA 2013-15 Research into new forms of translation/transmission

MAKING vibrant gaps/assemblages between the texts/images/objects and everyday things LANDSCAPES OF AFFECTIVE AESTHETIC ATTRACTION

MATERIALS THEMSELVES become the TOOLS of PERCEPTION 

Enchantment from the potential of things.

The Fabric of thoughts

The invisible within the visible (energy,magic,causality)

RELATEDNESS, connected to the Place and Function of Things within a Field.

Texts, form their own contexts/reflexivity, breaking down phenomena into meaning, conclusions and critique, they render phenomena and its psychic information redundant.

We think we know how we should feel sociologically, yet in doing so we deny ourselves the direct affectiveness of people and objects that can provide different perceptual relationships.

EMBODIED KNOWLEDGE=ECOLOGY Lygia Clark : A Space open to time. Cornelia H. Butler

The World is a Collage

Collage and montage are quintessential techniques in modem and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Hapticity and Time

Notes on a fragile Architecture

The Perception of the Environment Essay in Livelihood, dwelling and skill Tim Ingold

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception Madeline Schwartzman

STILLNESS IN A MOBILE WORLD Bissell, Fuller

ECOLOGICAL approaches/affordances to aesthetic perception ART and AESTHETIC PATTERNS : into an ecology of mind.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information that it contains. Camouflage is addressed, perhaps, less to architecture itself than to the subjective processes by which 

human beings experience architecture. Illustrated by the photographic practice of Francesca Woodman, we see her seemingly absorbed by her environment in way that shows a desire to both identify with, and become part of her surroundings.

A desire/transgression met and mediated through a certain sensitivity and openness to the environment, fostering a sense of connectivity between human beings and their environment.

Neil Leach

EXISTENCE, SPACE and ARCHITECTURE Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

Developing the idea that architectural space may be understood as a concretization of environmental schemata or images, which form a necessary part of man's general orientation or 'being in the world.'

SUBSTANCES guide the kinds of practical actions that the organism senses from elements of the environment, creating affordances/utilities for the human body.

SURFACES separate substances from medium, the wall and roof of my house afford comfort by separating me from water and too much air.

AFFORDANCES as aesthetic sensations determined both by the environment and qualities we impose through observation, sensation and perception.

Without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible. The rational organization of society has its own Aesthetic Attraction

Symmetrical Patteming/redundancy : provides for the observing mind a maximum of insight with a minimum of intellectual effort.

Colour Light Time

Quintessentially relational phenomena in which location, background, density will provide for different perceptual relations.

Bringing back vibrant matter into a world cluttered by images that are standing in for the redundancy of that experiential experience.

WORKING TEXT: 16/May/2020 The R Value in Academia

Reading/Reflexivity/Research with precision and indeterminacy 

Research Material : Studio/Archive 2004-2020

The Language of Specitivity/Places of Inquiry Extradisciplinary Investigations

Social Utilities/Contemporary Art Practices imported from Political Philosophy

The return of limited and ancillary projects where the human being is the fulcrum and the fire of research in replacement of the medium and the instrument.

A whole range of materials and topics that do not fit, that can create an eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields.

Arte Povera, an aesthetic-philosophical movement, artists that chose to live with direct experience and feel the necessity of leaving intact the value of the existence of things. An art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen.

Germano Celant 1940-2020 

Developing discursive reading 

WORKING DOCUMENT/LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPES/Thinking Spaces

Concepts of space-time/Ecologies, embodiments through identity, individuality and environments. Our universe is evolving in time as our views are evolving

RIVERS/Eddies and husbandry

(in/with the phenomena of water, thinking with the fish in mind) 

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression. Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being. SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

Architecture/Built Environments Ecology/Political Philosophy

Spatial Practice, Culture, Creativity and Environment

Diffractive erotics of the body in her speculative post studio practice 

Asperities of flesh, dirt and the built environment

Neil Leach, Camouflage, F Woodman

 

The Enchantment of Modem Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate David Childers, Heart In My Soul

Spatial Practice Interior Design

Building a precision/working praxis that is both aesthetic and technical that can give an intimate understanding of the material and its situation.

Subjectivities interwoven through light and media Asperities of fabric and texture : White Collaged Postcards

CREATING AN ANTHROPOLOGY TOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE DEVELOPING MATTER AND DESIRE IN ART BASED ACTIVITIES

WORKING NOTES, 24 October 2018

SETTING UP THE CRITICAL DISTANCE / DISCURSIVE FIELDS OF ANALYSIS MEASURING AFFECT

PERFORMATIVITY ITS EXPERIENTIAL QUALITIES/PSYCHIC IMPACT RESEARCH IN LANDSCAPE AND ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN Visiting the Archive : Exploratory Workshop

September 1, 2018. W&BA Harleston

CREATING THE FEEDBACK LOOP

BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN PARTICAPANTS AND ARTISTS RADICAL INTERVENTIONS INTO THE EVERYDAY

Walking and Making with Clay, Brockwood, Speculative Learning Program

' the clay itself seemed to absorb them into a wandering relation with the landscape' A Field Guide To Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit.

In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty.

Tracks Across The Landscape

Setting up a critical spatial practice within the walking landscape of the everyday. Edward Thomas, Paths

John Piper, Covehithe, South Bank Show, painting/drawing both on site and in the studio. 

Watts Gallery, analysis and audit of activities from which to develop visitor programs and the experiential circulation of those who visit.

Melancholy and The Landscape, Jacky Bowring.

Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape. Investigation into the creative membership and activities of W&BA.

Sculpture Trail, Curatorial Strategies/Market/Audiences

From newsletter to art themed walks, Historic Culture/Landscape and Tourism Plotting points of social interactions, asking Why Here, Why Not There?

What directs events, governs outcomes? Success and failures?

Management and event led, members as audience? MA Arts Management

New Cultural Diversities

10 Days at the Laundry, Winchester 2009.

Group of creatives based in and around Winchester School of Art, use of fallow site in which to respond and to create for 10 days a contemporary arts festival. This original event 'fused' new creative partnerships that went on to produce other groups and exhibitions. The follow-up event 10 Days in the City, was funded, had more prestigious venues, but lacked the cohesion and community of the first site.

Supplementary content, resources, dossier outlining the inquiry of which the work is a part. MOVING THE CULTURE

DISCURSIVE FIELDS FOR NEW TYPOLOGIES/OPERATIONS AND TACTICS CONCRETE POETRIES

LOWER GREEN, NORWICH

' At the surface, the gorgeous materiality of Okon's work is seductive but her intention to breach superficial readings is much more serious. This conjugation of material is also a conjuration, an earnest attempt to attempt to imagine and materialise new possible realities.'

Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology, Andreas Weber.

SITE SPECIFIC EMBODIMENT, working, making, discovering. Post Studio Practices, Daniel Buren. Deep Arts Ecology Investment and Nurturing, 'it always begins with the art, Hans Ulrich Obrist. 

The heavy, awkward investment of actually getting people to 'place' to participate is difficult. New technologies could offer solutions that could in turn promote innovative creative ecologies.

NEW TOPOLOGIES FOR BEING IN THE LANDSCAPE NETWORKS, MESHES, NODES, CONNECTIONS

Becoming embodied within the making of the work, within an intimate dwelling place. Strange Tools, Art and Human Nature, Alva Noe.

Crafted Scenography, 

Exhibition, 

Visual Art, Tacita Dean

Shadowcatchers 

OUTPOST

STUDIO as a discursive site for un-doing and re-making relations/aesthetics between objects/the social/the everyday.

STUDIO ANALYSIS 2018-2020 21 September 2018-19 August 2020

Art School Spaces Outpost Studio Spaces Urban Fallow Institutional Buildings 

Open Plan Office Spaces

Studio 3.16, Central Norwich, nearby parking, Floor area/footprint 5.0mx5.0m, wall spaces 2x2.4mx5.0m, well lit, open plan, large making table 1.2mx2.4m. Electricity, small heater, lighting, running water WC, access 24/7.

Projects/Contexts bought into the studio space

Drawings/Southampton roof rubbing, drawings/art works as sociological shelters/habitats Immaterial Paintings/Cyanotype, layered papers

Raveningham sculpture elements from intervention Cley, sketch books and paintings

Re-presentation of drawings/collages with new research material/contexts

Paintings displayed with large analogue phonographic images and collages Architectural concerns, coloured glass, aesthetic surfaces, paintings with raw materials Installation of research bookcases as diffractive elements/spatial practice within the studio White paintings, used layers of paper texts, meshes and cloth

Ceramic objects on field paintings/grounds

Research material, folders, wrapped ceramics with fabric, yellow ochre on paper

Canvas painting, inclusions, shells/stones, cyanotype/yellow ochre, gesso/white paint, pierced 

STUDIO WORKS

Paper/canvas paintings 1.5mx2.4m Canvas re Raveningham Shelter, 2.4mx2.4m

Spray paint, large floor works left undisturbed during making Future proposals Cley 2021, Artpocket activities, Project Space,

WORKING NOTES

OUTPOST 12/09/2019

A Philosophy of Solitude

Hand Bookbinding

Lead/Waxed Paper

Art puts US on Display

Strange Tools

Art and Human Nature

The Politics of Things

The properties of Light

Fred Sandback/Luis Barragin

On Pictures and the Words that Fail Them Melancholy and the Landscape Process-Relational Philosophy

Jannis Kounellis

Christopher Wilmarth

The Ground of The Image

Sally Mann, The Flesh and The Spirit 

The Eyes Of the Skin

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

Raveningham/Trails and Wayfaring/ Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet. J. G. Bennett.

Existing between the subjectivity between things.

You Are The Weather.

Roni Horn.

Clouds and Clocks.

The project arises between a dialectic between the poetic and the systematic.

Between Science and Art.

The Embodiment of Minimal Gesture.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. 

Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Everyday Aesthetics : Ordinary Lives

What shall I do next?

Tim Ingold.

Finding enlightenment in the ground beneath one's feet.

J. G. Bennett.

Tim Ingold is an anthropologist who has looked at the interface between people and the environment. In The Perception of the Environment, he argues that ecological psychology and the philosophical writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty share the view that the world becomes  meaningful through active inhabitation, or 'dwelling', rather than cognitive representation. 

Curriculum Making : The Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 

Raveningham/Scripted Places

Garden/Ground/Circulation Diagrams.

Doing Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things/Walking/Listening to the wind 

Boundaries/in the making between the personal and the commonly shared.

A space where the individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 2011

The Autonomy of The Natural Environment.

Sculpture/Playing with the existence of things.

Field Studies : Pathways around the Sun.

Drawing : Assemblage of Lightness and Weight.

Enmeshed Space : Working Drawing with Handwritten Notes.

Lawn Deliberations/Mappings of Human Agency/Space/Time.

Space projected from the body is biased towards the front and right.

The future is ahead and 'up.'

The past is behind and 'below.'

Time as a structure/place to observe things in constant motion/relation.

Drawing Site/Spiral Windings/Diagram/Spherical Markers

Terracotta, lime wash/lamp black/blackboard paint/chalk/ink

Ground Pegs/Labels/Text Markings/Archival Information

Points becoming lines, Tim Ingold.

Reading Matter/Rooms.

The Lake of The Mind.

Stochastic Thinking.

Steven Holl.

Raveningham : Site-specific project place

The Garden of Ongoing Differences.

Diffraction/Energy/Analysis/Attunement 

Site Cyanotypes/Drawings/Intermediaries

Spatial Collages Reconfigured  

Walking/Thinking with Ideas/Observations.

Site Drawings and Observational Mappings.

Cultivation Field.

The circle and square together embody what I think of as human nature.

Dark Room, Garry Fabian Miller.

If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume's version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.

Ben Highmore

Rich Lyrical Motifs.

Brilliant Trees.

Within each lesson lies the price to learn.

David Sylvian. 

Artist's Development.

Planting Research

Vital Nourishment.

Raveningham Garden Project.

Circle/Linear Time/Centred on objects.

Spiral/Deep Time/Awareness between things.

Architectural Ceramics.

Inseminations/Sketchbooks

Cell/Seeds/Dispersal/Cloud

Organism-Person-Environment

Working Ideas/Proposals into Matter/Making

Contents/Description/Instructions/Diagram/Drawing

Presentation/Ritual/Repetition.

Art is contemplation and must act upon our consciousness.

Objects/Things are part of the artist's immediate existence.

Contemplative experiences become truly meaningful when they occur in everyday life and when nirvana or the state of superior awareness blurs into samsara or ordered time.

For Tapies, repetition is above all else a perpetual questioning or a perpetual becoming.

A working process that is additive, which incorporates changes and accidents and as such his methods are hardly erasing anything that is already present on the canvas.  

A Summer's Work, Antoni Tapies.

The Garden/Material of/for Forking Paths.

The Diagram/The Program/The Inquiry

Marking Durations.

Ground Mappings.

Solar/Daylight Observed/Shadows Recorded 

A Garden Observatory/Philosophy of Silence/Solitude. 

Raveningham Sculpture Trail. 

Site Visit 160423

Sculptural Spacings and Sensual Engagements.

Showing Points/Lines/Vectors of Change/Movement.

Dwelling Demarcations/markers of temporality and disappearance. 

A poetics derived/driven from both the systematic and the small wonders of the everyday.

Circular Breathing/Cyclical Lines. 

The Peripheral Movement/Moment

The Space/Time between things.

The Concept of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

The Array, a phonographic inquiry recording transits of the suns pathways across the sky. 

Wanderings, caught up in the wanderlust of stillness and slowtime.

Paths of movement, paths of observation, paths of existential abstractions following daylight.

The artist's creative act of a self amongst others.

A sculptural deliberation that engages with the experiences of working a site in the landscape.

Curatorial.

Spatial Practice.

Practice/Display/Audience.

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.

Tim Ingold 'Making'

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Camouflage offers  a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.

Camouflage may  therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging - the family, church and so on - has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.

Aesthetic  production should maintain the capacity  to operate as  a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully  controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively  mapping an individual within the environment. 

Design becomes  a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.

In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.

The thing contained is not the thing contained.

Manifesto for explorations of 'IN'

Steven Holl.

Politics of Architecture : Theorising through discursive spatial constructions (practices)/agency

Spatial Agency

Other Ways Of Doing Architecture

Nishat Awan, Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till.

As buildings become  matters of concern, they enter into socially embedded networks, in which the consequences of architecture are of much more significance than the objects of architecture.

Beyond Discourse : Notes on Spatial Agency

Tatjana Schneider, Jeremy Till.

If we take 'agency' in its transformative sense as action that effects social change, the architect becomes not the agent of change, but one among many agents to empower people and spaces.

Becoming our own agents of progressive politics.

Spatial Agency, a transformative combination of the discursive and the practical.

A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE

The discursive and the practical are by no means mutually exclusive as such, they allow the line between discursive and practical consciousness to become fluctuating and permeable. 

Anthony Giddens

ASSEMBLAGES : THINKING WITH TEMPORAL CONTINUITY

The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.

Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time.

Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000

The Scriptorium

Mutual Knowledge and Discursive Consciousness

Description of Work

The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop architectural and sociological inquires. The design processes of interiors have been employed as a tool to both critique and to create how we might further develop the contents of architecture. This Spatiality and its diffractions of differences and similarities, narratives and subjective experiences are what my interior spaces attempt to initiate.

Design as a interactive structure, an interlocutory interior in the making of space and spatial relations.

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

The Scriptorium brings together a varied and discursive set of objects, texts and interior architectures. This work seeks to understand how the virtual changes physical architecture and how this affects the space between people and buildings. The “performativity of research” is presented through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex design led inquiry a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research, structures and even symposia that have been developed through engaging with the site. The visualization of the research and the relational architectures rendered through montage and collage explores digital and analogue technologies. This hybridisation and the use of pinhole photography and film footage further explore interests in the field of performance as an immaterial architecture drawn in the presence of place.

The realisation of my interiors project consists of two separate but relational elements that are presented into a built environment. The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive experiences. In particular the apparatus of the Scriptorium and its materiality is attempting to promote a sensory intensification that is further underpinned by the cognitive processes of reading and perhaps other social dialogues. The sensory intensification of a hut like space promotes a haptic sensibility, allowing the nearness and intimacies of both the built space and the imaginative, virtual realm to become entangled. Ultimately the Scriptorium is trying to build on unique human subjectivities that are manifested through a kinaesthetic repertoire or script that helps to enact further spatial experiences. It might be useful to think of this constructed space as itself still under construction, a site that acts as its own vessel within the multiplicities of human perception itself. The influence of the Cistercian Order, the site of Waverly Abbey and its pastoral landscape, have all contributed to a sense of the design process, The Scriptorium like the ruins themselves is open to the elements. Waverley Abbey remains as a sensory site between the remains of architecture and its society and the effects of our own global culture in the information age.

In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

The Scriptorium began through a research of both architectural themed texts and documentation of the site, and creative practice involving photography (digital, analogue and film) art practices of collage and drawing. The many visits promoted my own subjectivities to the site and these were also frequently subjected to change by the intervention of others in unexpected ways, these social intrusions by other revealed the very boundaries that the historic site engenders, some playful other malicious. These extremities within the social order of the visitors became problematic in designing for the site itself. An earlier proposal to host a Symposium centred on the Arts and The Humanities, that would use the Abbey and its surrounding ground appeared to be a project of vast diversities and logistics better suited to a cultural project through arts management and funding. As the project developed certain creative methodologies around particularities of the site itself began to appear, the notion of palimpsest being one of them. This promoted the idea of a reading room, as an ephemeral interior space that gathers up the experiential values of ‘ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images. It became apparent that ‘palimpsest’ could be both a visual surface of erasures, earlier markings partially over written by newer ones ‘annotations’ and it could be a scaffold of developing ideas clearly visible merging as adaptations into the very usage of the site.

These re-imaginations through the notion of palimpsest seemed filmic and as such they would able to display a vast amount of diversities and subject matter, a library of recourses that would require users or an audience or both. The referencing of the reading room to the library, and the symposium to the cinema or theatre allowed me to realise that I was dealing with a number of spatial arrangements that needed to develop together, but which could be employed separately.

In an era in which architecture is once more learning its potential as a form of inquiry, rather than as a service- as a producer of knowledge, and not merely of ‘projects’

Brett Steele. Atlas-Tectonics in Barkow Leibininger.

Bricoleur Bricolage. AA. 2013

Inquiry is essentially the way of learning

J Krishnamurti. The Cultivation of a Good Mind

Brockwood. 1963

The theatre of research became the vehicle in which to see if this collaboration might be possible.

The use of the image and text in my architectural collages allowed me to visualize associations, to create the possibilities of interior spaces that might be manifested into the built environment. The use of the collage in Architecture is widely acknowledged, architects from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas.

The ability of the collage process to juxtaposition fragments, images and texts from irreconcilable origins into an experience, that is visual, tactile and time-based makes it an interesting tool into the realms of architectural design. Collage begins to visualise not only the structure of spaces but also there content and circulation. The theatre of research is interested in how to promote collage and its use as a cognitive and perceptive tool in architecture.

Collage and montage are quintessentially techniques in modern and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity, which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa. The World is a Collage

Jennifer A. H. Shields. Collage and Architecture

Reflective Analysis

Both the Scriptorium and The Theatre Of Research exist only in the form of the exhibition presentation. What they singularly of together propose can only be imagined through their manifested form as static objects placed within a built structure that loosely references architectural concerns and materials. They appear diminished and assigned to the voyeuristic gaze of the visitor that is equally curios and dismissive. These objects and the interior spaces they promoted seem stilled and stalled, as much they appear beyond reach as if the authenticity of their materials and construction have some how been subsumed by their stature and scale. The issues and qualities of which they are attempting to speak of seem reduced by the hegemony of vision, there is little hapicity and time to encounter, only it seems by investing narratives can we begin to re-enact the spatial encounter.

The question I ask is do these objects and their interior spaces cause me to think beyond mere representation and recognition, or rather do they create enough of an encounter to force me to engage with them, even if I or the viewer are un-certain as to their meaning or possible outcome. Deleuze comments that something forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter. Something that challenges us. Have these miniature architectures of objects become relational, do we start to use them in perhaps a heuristic manner, a hands-on approach to learning or inquiring, something that we can discover for ourselves. This heuristic finding-out could be made informative through collective collaborations and exhibition through the theatre of research. Is design stripping us of our qualitative spaces as the digital tooling removes the makers trace.

The model object has served as a thinking place in the development of the idea of the Scriptorium. The materials used and their proportions echo interests in Minimalist Sculpture, the intervals between things in the work of Donald Judd and the architectural languages of memory and tectonics of the craftman turned architect Peter Zumthor. This open sided hut seems cut away almost anatomical as if we were looking into the internal workings of an environment and resident. The structure would have to be made relational to its surroundings if it were to be placed in the landscape. Adaptations to weather the structure, to make it serviceable for use. The Scriptorium has analogues to the notion of a fire-place and its chimney stack. It is a the heart of a building the place of warmth, of dialogues and under the influence through fire of the imagination. The incompleteness that surrounds the scriptorium creatively asks for further design proposals that are even more site specific. The Solar Pavilion built by the Smithsons utilised the old fire place and chimney from the demolished cottage. Around this central element they developed the beginnings of their Modernist (Brutalism) pavilion, an architecture clad with glass, wood and zinc and contained by a walled garden and situated in the pastoral landscape of Wiltshire. Furthering the themes of being in the landscape the Scriptorium could become an observatory, as place from both to look out from and also to look in. The mobility or need to be re-assembled from site to site could promote innovative design solutions as well as interesting detailing or use of materials and surfaces that would facilitate interactions between visitors.

The notion of the Scriptorium becoming clad by an exterior skin, an ephemeral membrane which would then render the differences between the interior and the exterior into the realms of an almost immaterial architectural experience; in as much as the usual distinction between the unpredictable forces of nature outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside. This prompt further investigation into an architecture that blurs the boundaries of both architecture and nature, this could be further explored through the notion of quixotic gestures, art and performance that can capture the experience and the experiential engagement with the natural elements. The Scriptorium becomes the centred structure of remnant that is surrounded by an architecture that can create imprecise boundaries through inconsistent materials. This spatial arrangement will create its own qualitative responses, dialogues and subsequent movements. Architecture in this context becomes purely a sensorial response.

The body as the vector for active mediation with the world of the spirit. The body is the instrument of a qualitative evaluation, the measure of intensity, which alone is capable of giving space extension and modifying it. Space is no objective parameter; it must be ‘excavated’ related to the mobile living parametrics of the body.

Frederic Migayrou. Architectures of the Intensive Body.

Yves Klein. Guggenheim. 2005

Mark Prizeman. Intensity.

Ephemeral, Portable Architecture.

Time, space and existence are amongst the greatest of themes-so great that we could never be so presumptuous to think we could do them justice, and too close that we could ever escape them, whether with our thoughts or actions, in life or in art.

Peter Lodermeyer. Personal Structures

Time. Space. Existence. 2009

My design project has attempted to produce spaces and their interiors together with the apparatus of the Scriptorium that qualitatively seek to inquiry into the world we inhabit. The Theatre of Research attempts to establish some sense of a community that can do field work that invigorates the perception of the environment. My own interests are centred through experientially and mindfully exploring voids, cavities, and spaces between things, together with use of clay, glass and other vernacular materials. As an interior designer/artist I have become experiential to the agency of spaces. The theatre of research becomes a meeting place for furthering my programme initially proposed as a symposium at Waverley Abbey.

Through experiencing familiar images, smells, sounds, and textures, but also through making certain familiar movements and gestures, we achieve a certain symbolic stability. Disrupt that familiar world, and our psychic equilibrium is disturbed. From this we can surmise that home, and the operations performed at home, are linked intimately with human identity. Architecture, it would seem, plays a vital role in the forging of personal identities.

Neil Leach. Camouflage

Analysing the desire to blend-in with our surroundings.

Reflective Critique/Appraisal.

How might I start again?

The Scriptorium would need to collect up and question considerable more qualitative data. Some sort of portable shelter, lightweight and offering some protection from the elements; would have allowed longer periods of stay and the possibility of experiencing different times of day. The activity of walking to the site, of having to incorporate it into a journey would help to create a stronger sense of place and routine. I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of this place, its influence and how its influence might be transposed into a methodology of reading, theorising and making. I am reminded of the Peter Brook who deliberately demolished his avant-garde theatre building Bouffes du Nord in Paris so as he could create a more emotionally responsive space for theatre. It is this under the influence of the Abbey, which I wish to explore as a creative catalyst, a tool that picks up on its differences as qualitative readings. The ruin by its very nature has re-defined its own architecture from one of form into that of experience, this sense of liminality or immateriality that constitutes itself as the architectural experience.

A good space cannot be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food to the imagination. The Bouffes has the magic and poetry of a ruin, and anyone who allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin knows strongly how the imagination is let loose.

Peter Brook. The Open Circle

Andrew Todd. Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments. 2003

How might the performartivity of research be staged, and into what contexts might it be appropriated?

As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes, we live in a culture of meaning, not in a culture of presence. We constantly produce effects of meaning and multiply them with mass media. This applies not only to the humanities but also to a large degree to our wholly normal everyday lives. And in this respect, our experience of presence is getting drastically lost.

Art works may never completely be explained by theory or meaning. The sensual, material makeup of the work in its presence is not the cinders, slag, and ashes, the undigested remains of theory, but remains of an intensified moment.

Peter Lodermeyer.Time, Symposium Amsterdam 2007.

Personal Structures, Time, Space, Existence.

SENSORY THEATRE

EX MACHINA, Robert Lepage

While Legage continues to pioneer the use of technology, his work is imbued with an intimacy and humanity that few can match. Edinburgh festival 2015

ABBATOIR FERME, Jan Fabre (Troubleyn, Performing Arts)

A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.

The Waverley Inquiry

A Theoretical and Somantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes

Historical Perspectives

Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger

Archetypes/Symbols Jung

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon

Contemporary Spatial Practices

Feminist Geographies

The Posthuman

Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.

Posthuman Subjectivity ,Rosi Braidotti

LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES

Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)

Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)

De Architectura, Vitruvius

Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and décor, and distribution.

Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image-representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between Being and becoming.

Contents List from a folder in the Theatre of Research

Chora Body and Building

Space as Membrane

Chora (Exhibition) 1999

Lessons of a dream. Karsten Harries

Concrete Blonde: Joanna Merwood

A probe into the negative spaces where mysteries are created.

Surrealist Paris : Dagmar Motycka Watson

The non-perspectival space of the lived city

Body and Building : George Dodds

Essays on the changing relation of body and architecture.

Sphere and Cross : Karsten Harries

Vitruvian refections on the Pantheon Type

Body and Building : Marcia f. Feuerstein

Inside the Bauhaus’s Darker Side

Desiring Landscapes/Landscapes of Desire. George Dodds

A Tradition of Architectural Figures: Marco Frascari

Interwining Metamorphoses : Germano Celant

On the work of Guiseppe Penone

Space as a Membrane : Siegried Ebeling

Unlike a Library the Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities. The possible linking with other establishments could be investigated. The working space becomes operational as a studio or laboratory that is engaged with full-time research led activities . Separate yet collaborative spaces and activities promote an environment for inquiry and personal development. The Theatre for research becomes a space that allows for the Post Production of ideas into new forms of social interaction. The theoretical merging with the practical into a relational narrative or methodology that enriches the practices of others, forming both new creative environments that can contain innovative ecologies that can question global perspectives.  

The Scriptorium

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24476300236/in/datepost

Camouflage/Concept and Design : Re-Working Aesthetics/The Everyday

Everyday Aesthetics : Ordinary Lives

If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume's version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.

Ben Highmore

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Camouflage offers  a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.

Camouflage may  therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging - the family, church and so on - has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.

In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.

Here we might cite the work of more positive thinkers, such as Fredric Jameson who looks to the realm of representation for a mechanism of reinserting the individual within society. Jameson has  developed a notion of  ‘cognitive mapping', which serves  to overcome the lack of spatial co-ordinates within a society of late capitalism. He sees the potential of such mapping within the aesthetic  domain. What we need today, Jameson seems to be saying, is a viable form of aesthetic expression that reinserts the individual into society. The aesthetic  domain can therefore be seen to be somewhat Janus-faced. It is  both the source of many  of our problems, in a culture in which everything is co-opted into images and commodities, and potentially the way out.

Aesthetic  production should maintain the capacity  to operate as  a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully  controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively  mapping an individual within the environment. 

Design becomes  a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.

Design plays a crucial social role in offering a form of connectivity, a mode of symbolisation, that allows  people to relate to their environment. Exquisitely designed works such as S, M, L, XL can therefore be interpreted not simply as highly aesthetic publications that could be accused of a process of ‘glossification’ — of turning the world into a designer representation of itself. 

Rather they  can be seen to be operating in the very space of contemporary culture, a space that is highly visual.

The concept of ‘Camouflage’ can therefore also respond to some of the questions that Koolhaas himself raises. In his essay on the Generic City, for example, Koolhaas offers a critique of the placelessness of the contemporary cityscape, where each city is virtually indistinguishable from the next. The theory  of camouflage, however, would seem to suggest that design itself can overcome this  condition by  providing a mechanism for relating the individual to the environment. 

Design here must be contrasted to junk. If the junk  city  has  become the placeless  generic  city, the exquisitely  designed city  can become the city  of a new form of spatial mapping. This  theory  of camouflage is therefore presented not only  as  a retroactive manifesto through which to appreciate Koolhaas’s work, but also as a contribution to the debates which he initiates.

The concept of ‘Camouflage’ will allow us, at least, to move beyond the often simplistic denigration of the aesthetic realm within recent critiques of postmodern culture, and to grasp the complexities involved in our negotiation with the world afforded through that realm. Above all, it will allow us  to recognise the important strategic  significance of aesthetics in contemporary culture in general and in Rem Koolhaas’s work in particular.

The Architectural Plan

An Anthropology of Architecture

Embodiment and Architectural Form
Process-Relational Philosophy

Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.
Immaterial Architecture
The Illegal Architect
Jonathan Hill

Oak Tree
Oil
Paper
Plaster
Rust
Sgratfito
Silence
Sound
Steel
Television
Weather

Frosted Light
Index of immaterial architectures

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL
Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body
Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson
Interactive Abstract  Body (Square)
The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman
Stan Allen
Indexical Characters

FABRIC=MASS+ FORM
Alan Chandler
The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.


ANTI OBJECT
Kengo Kuma
We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to  renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects.
What that form is called- ARCHITECTURE, GARDENS< TECHNOLOGY is not important.

ReThinking Matereriality
The engagement of mind with the material world
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things
Towards a  Theory of Material Engagement
Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions
Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency
We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things
Material Engagement and the Extended Mind
Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality
Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective
Carl Knappett

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments
Architectures for Perception
Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts
Charles Goodwin

Leach Pottery, Studio and Museum
A Potter's Book
Bernard Leach

Adventures of the Fire, Vessels Through Time
Ceramic Pavilion
People make space, and space contains people
Ceramic space and life

Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape
David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they  need to be experienced.
Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from  the message they convey.

MATERIAL MATTERS
ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE
Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER, GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY
Peg Rawes

ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE  OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space
Creativity in the Shadow of Modern Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture

The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it

Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being
Architecture as Making Frames
Space and Structure