Showing posts with label Oren Lieberman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oren Lieberman. Show all posts

Friday, 3 July 2026

Ceramics and Architecture : Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Outpost 100223

Spatial Bodies~Environments :  Matter(s) of Interference


Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

Circulating Objects : Lines/Holloways.

Making~Journeys.

The items shown in the image are ceramic sculptures by artist Russell Moreton. 

These pieces are part of his exploratory, architectural-themed work. 

They are characterized by a processual nature that focuses on the imprint of the artist and the material itself. 

The sculptures often feature a raw, distressed finish, incorporating white paint and visible construction marks. 

Moreton's practice in these ceramics investigates themes of silence, architectural space, and the interconnectedness of interior spaces. 











The image displays a workspace cluttered with various documents, papers, and art-related materials, suggesting an environment dedicated to research, archival work, or artistic preparation.

Workspace Setting: The desk is heavily organized with stacks of papers, binders, and printed documents, which is characteristic of an academic, curatorial, or creative office space.

Artistic Materials: A large, black-and-white print or photographic work is prominently displayed on a board in the background, surrounded by smaller reference materials pinned to the wall.

Documentation: The presence of extensive paperwork and what appears to be exhibition or research documentation suggests the space is used for managing art projects, publications, or historical research.

Professional Environment: The overall composition implies a professional or semi-professional setting, likely related to art history, gallery management, or creative practice, where the physical handling of documents and visual references is central to daily work.


The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.


Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.


Theoretical objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.


The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.


Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.


Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.





The objects in the image are slab-built ceramic sculptures created by the artist Russell Moreton. 

Artist: Russell Moreton.

Medium: Clay.

Technique: Hand-built using slab construction.

Style: The works are processual in nature, featuring raw, distressed finishes and architectural themes.

Inspiration: The artist's work often explores the interconnectedness of interior spaces, architectural settings, and the imprint of the maker.


Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.


Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.


Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity



If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.


Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.



The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.


Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.


Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies


The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.


Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.



Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013



Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.


Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.


Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.


Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.


Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance.

Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.


Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation.

London.


Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.


Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.


The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.


An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.


Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.


Time : Duration and Perception.


Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.


One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.


Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.


Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.


The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..


Steven Holl.


Hungate, Norwich. 



Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023


Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.



Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.

Sunday, 31 May 2026

Localities of experience and research : Making Entangled

Making Entangled : An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields

Potters Wheel/Studio Space/Reconstrution/Licie Rie/V & A London.

Mary Quant, V&A London.









Confronting Spatial Intelligence-tracing the use of spatial intelligence. 

What are we learning about in the concrete particularity of this space?

Leon van Schaik : Spatial Intelligence

‘Architecture is the product of our spatial intelligence, of its workings in establishing the mental spaces of every individual, and of the spatial values shared by groups.’

The Retreat, Upper Lawn Pavilion. 1959

This country retreat presents itself as a glass box but is grounded by its relationship to the pre-existing masonry of a walled garden. 

Leon van Schaik comments that the little glass house retreat built by Peter and Alison Smithson around a walled garden evokes for him memories(mental spaces) of being a schoolboy working in a conservatory in a walled garden at Cliveden, such that the notion of a retreat is this ideal of being built into the walls of an existing walled garden.

You rise up into its glazed upper storey with views over the rolling hills beyond and perch atop the wall on the edge of a threshold space carved out of the woods, or remove yourself from view sink down to the ground and sit with your back to the wall.

Kenneth Frampton subscribes to a general theory of architecture independent of any local articulation beyond adaptations to meet the needs of local climatic conditions.

Dalibor Vesely, an architectural theorist who spent his teaching life demonstrating that in the modern era the unity of time, place and culture that is essential to architectural reality has been fractured. Leon van Schaik comments as a consequence in architecture today our spatial knowledge is either buried deep within our unconscious, or it is surfaced in a highly simplified (adolescent) form.

Architecture as ‘a purveyor of esoteric spatial luxuries to domestic elites’ (Schaik, 2008:84)

It follows that this fractured reality is deeply problematical to architecture, to the increasing number of architectural practices that have no ready connection to the daily expectations of citizens, resulting in a brutal instrumental policing of space (and our mental spaces) via the architecture that underpins the politics of our corporate or governmental interests.

Mediators for spatial experiences.












Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

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 my practice. The Abbey, its buildings, and its grounds have provided a valuable source of the material evidence for thinking about hapticity and time in a pastoral setting.

The Scriptorium presents the “performativity of research” through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects, together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex interior design, 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 that have been developed through engaging with the site.

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.

Libraries with research conduits for immersive and interactive cognitive mappings, allowing a praxis to enter the practicability of the everyday, a crafted philosophical inquiry, building new livelihoods.






Colour Texture Surface Enclosures Voids

Sample Materials: Relationships through Localities/Mood Boards/Technical and Physical Details.

Erasure in drawing and architectural planning (space voids) as a methodology to superimpose multiplicities.

Erasing : Kirosan Observatory, Anti-Object, Kengo Kuma. 

Multiplicities and Memory, Peter Zumthor.




Learning Spaces as a performative spatial practice through a process of tuning and minimizing. Noh stage in the forest, Kego Kuma.

PLANNING DOCUMENT use GRAPHIC DESIGN, theories and applications to visualize, design and map out the nature/interior spaces and experiences of this proposal.

Natural Connections: Retreat and Awareness through Architecture (Architectural Experience).

Experiencing The Phenomenology of Place at Waverley Abbey

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE through a sensitive adaptation of place studies, and using materials and built spaces to form the container/scaffold/stage for an activity not its contents. Working spaces that can be given a multiplicity of tasks that can accommodate the humanities and the life sciences.

Architecture and landscape, together with the localised weather, and the sheltering buildings all contribute to finding the mental spaces for the retreat.

APPARATUSES DURATIONS EFFECTS

THINGS-MAKING-PEOPLE-IN THE WORLD

Heightening the experiential experiences of place. Ramps, stairs and passages as devices (movable) to examine and to create immediate architectural interventions. Notion of the observatory (part built/part still under development) (monuments as instruments, Japor). The camera obscura’s darken room becomes a stage and a cinema; a drawing black boarded room for making creative reciprocal social practices.

MAKING SPACES PARTIAL to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which IMAGES and OBJECTS reciprocally take shape/meaning.

The Body in Space: merging/mediating/climbing over architecture and its territory in the landscape.


Keywords,

Place Studies : Spatiality : Phenomenology of Place : Spatial Intelligence :

Relational Aesthetics:

Retreat, Sensing Spaces, Experiential, Pastoral, Architectural Fabric, Ruined Buildings, Historical Community/Order, Neo Romantic, Camera Obscura, Mortality, Consumption, Palimpsest, Remote Sensing, Architectural Interventions, Material, Massing, Body, Objects and Things, Craft, The Physical Body (Historical/Postmodern), Contemporary Art Practices, Tim Ingold

‘Making’ and the inter relationships of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

Assets of Site

Listed Historical Site, Tranquil (of road site in parkland), Otherness (ruination and romance), Water, Archaeology (building), anthropology (significant settlement Cistercian Abbey)

CREATING FORMS AND MESSAGES

The Way Things Are Connected (or the stickiness of dependence between things and humans)

Kengo Kuma. Anti-Object

Not Networks, but rather Entanglements or Meshworks/Mesh (implying infinite connections and infinitesimal differences) or Mess (resists neat compartmentalization and order). 

Mark Dion. Archaeology

The Work, its Shelter, the Collection and its Process and Furniture (Agency)

The Wunderkammer as a structural feature (De Waal, V&A )

The Mapping/Charting Table (conduit, meeting/passing place)

Tim Ingold. Making

Ian Hodder. Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things.

Peter Greenaway. The Physical Self.

The Self in a Spatial/Social/Corporeal Situation The Tactility/Closeness of Learning (Craft)


DESIGN CREATIVELY/COLLABORATIVELY AND STRATEGICALLY THINKING IN THE RUINS

THINKING IN THE FICTION OF RUINS

THE ABBEY AS A REMNANT OF ITS WORLD, IN WHICH WE HAVE COME TO LATE,

TO A WORLD THAT HAS SEEN TOO MUCH.

POLITICS OF PLACE, English Heritage/Listed Building, has been used as a filming locating in contemporary cinema ranging in genres from the historical to the dystopian. Recently use of the site as a film location allowed the building of a temporary tower structure situated in close proximity to the existing ruinous fabric of the site.

POETICS OF SPACE/Bachelard AETHETICS OF DECAY/Trigg

THE WAR OF DREAMS/Marc Auge 

The Theatre of Operations.








Ruins, as a notion and a phenomena are slowly disappearing from our western cities, out of a lack of time (faute de temps) Marc Auge further comments that we are condemned to produce waste, not remnants of the past.

LOCATION, Streetfinder O/S. GPS Locality and access options/experiences.

World placing with solar and astronomical positioning. Scale and proximity

HISTORY, site, occupations, ruination, dereliction, reclamation into a garden feature. SITE SPECIFIC to GLOBAL CONCERNS

LOCALITIES and HISTORIES


HUMAN EXPERIENCE, Qualitative and Quantitative

DWELLING, LEARNING, RUINS, AND MEMORY> WHAT REMAINS? 

MAPPING/REMOTE SENSING using the palimpsest of this landscape/of its human occupation, of its demise to re-instate and re-imagine the cultural and anthropological shifts that have affected humanity.

RE-INSTATING a gathering with intellectual concerns in the humanities.








SPEAKERS/REASEARCH POSTERS/EXHIBITIONS and ART WORKS/SCREENINGS.

Oren Lieberman, Immediate Architectural Interventions/Intraventions. 

Mark Dion, Thames Dig, tents, taxonomies, teeth and texts.

Kate Whiteford, Land Drawings, installations and excavations

Colin Renfrew , Remote Sensing, aerial photography of sites (WW2) being used to re­ image specific archaeological notions of place.

Tim Ingold, MAKING, on the entanglements of Archaeology, Anthropology, Art and Architecture.

METHODOLOGIES

Temporary structures, blue screens, stage flats, projection, surfaces and skins, envelopes and membranes, optics and materials, programmes and debate, exhibition and research, global networking and virtual presentations, workshops around the phenomenology of place and its interrelationships with critical spatial practice. Presentations and Symposium, Curriculum and Practices, Site Specific Work and Performance.

Public Intimacy in Social Spaces. Architecture and The Contemporary Arts.

Learning through Making, (The Parallel of Life and Art) Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Visitor’s Centre, with interpretive exhibition (Stonehenge/Denton Corker Marshall) or an immersive intervention (Winchester Cathedral,Anima-Animus/Elferova and Wilson). A place where the interior space evokes a sense of place/a becoming (Existential, Historical, Social, Cultural) see ‘The Physical Self exhibition curated by Peter Greenaway. The Fate of Place/Human Sociology.

A contemplative space or spiritual/secular retreat featuring a series of interventions (Follies/Pavilions/Huts/Heidegger/Tschumi) that focuses the gaze on a particular view or detail, framing a distant reference (landmark or natural phenomenon, research into Lutyen’s ‘Thunder House’ for Gertrude Jekyll).

Museum of Wisdom. Kengo Kuma. 

Noh Stage In The Forest. Kengo Kuma. 

Hortus Conclusus. Peter Zumthor.

The Solar Pavilion. Alison and Peter Smithson.

The Secular Retreat, Living Architecture. Peter Zumthor. 

Heidegger’s Hut, Bachelard’s Poetics, Ingold’s making.

Spatial Apparatuses, Buildings and Social Devices/Agendas 

Events as Interventions producing Intraventions from Sociology, Architecture and the Humanities/Contemporary Arts.

USING the existing site to host concerns and education through a light footprint of temporary structures and intermediary arts based events.

THEMATIC SPACES in literature and the arts locate themselves within the ruins; become new creative points of departure, new narratives that add to the spatiality of the events experience.

CRITICAL SPATIAL PRACTICES (Architecture/Fine Art and Performance) as a methodology for engaging with the transformative processes now emerging is of vital scholarly concern for design practices and professionals.

Inclusions of observation and practice.

Experiential experiences from a place by the river, under the canopy of dappled sunlight; a secluded proximity of the monks dormitory through the pleasing decay that is aging beautifully.

Variegated and mutable veiling of transparencies through sunlight and a gentle breeze.

Shadow (voids) and Forms (layered movements) Permeable membrane (time passes through here)

The River (Jackie Leven/Kenneth Patchen, The Skaters) a corporeal presence on loss, memory/absence, subjectivity and flow.

Kengo Kuma. Complete Works, Kenneth Frampton.

‘Our aim is to create architecture that confronts and fuses with the earth’

‘Architecture should not be cut off from the ground like a building designed and transported to the site’

Kema’s ‘anti-objective’ architecture is anti-perspectival in that it is categorically anti­ thetical to the subject/object split of the occidental tradition.

‘The asymmetrical projection of the Water/Glass volume, derived from the diagonal platform of the Noh stage, makes it explicit that there is no single ideal point from which this waterborne scene may be experienced.’ (Frampton, 2012:12)

Katsura Aesthetic.

Non Corporeal Architecture ( 2001 A Space Odyssey, the final room with its dematerialised phantom character of absence and voyeurism)

Japanesse Vernacular, Void/Ma space, Translucency, Sequence of Spaces,

Siddig El’Nigoumi’s pots hold an interior space that cannot itself be transposed only broken ; they are in effect testimonial silences to his humility and his agency working with clay. In my mental space on these inner spaces of Nigoumi’s ceramics I can reach a correspondence, a pitch with its distinctive mutual timbre that is still active. The existential trait left in the innerness of these vessels is irreducible to my own subjectivity.

Site drawings, archaeology of found objects, anthropological observations, time based media, architectural plans.

Interior Spaces/Making and the adaptation of existing.

Photographic drawings, collage, montage, interventions through designed walls/pathways/interactions.

“Hut” Sensing Spaces/Building.

Materials, aesthetics, volumes, dwelling, social, light and dark, place.

Localities of experience and research.

Negative Capability Exhibition (art works in response to archaeological sites),Winchester University.




Monday, 27 April 2026

Silent Interiors : Anthropocene Aesthetics : Ceramics and Environmental Engagement.

Ceramics and  Architecture : Making Things, Perception/Thought/Action

Urbanism : Fossil Futures~Anthropocene

Ceramics Following Resonances : Interiors in fired clay.


Ruins · Jozef van Wissem · Zola Jesus

When Shall This Bright Day Begin

℗ 2016 Jozef van Wissem and Zola Jesus

Released on: 2016-02-05


Mixer: Jozef van Wissem

Producer: Jozef van Wissem

Composer: Jozef van Wissem

Music  Publisher: Wissem Music

Lyricist: Zola Jesus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UR-Kx7ehxCQ&t=21s

















Architecting and its ecologies/matters of concern.

The body's participation in explorations, engagements and its care in attending to the values of immediacy, vulnerability, fragility, improvisation, performance, movement, multiplicity and becoming.


Apparatuses and their ecologies for learning.

The choreographic object/agent.

The role of the body is scored through a shifting agency and the power of techniques of things.


Theorial objects of things which do theory without us imposing it, on them.

Oren Lieberman. 2013.


The Production of The Unexpected.

The Joy of Speculative Play.


Perception/Thought/Action

A caring curiosity that wants to know and understand and explore relations.


Projective Speculations.

Ecologies/Locations.

Questioning/Research.


Processual learning occurs in movements, gestures, postures, expressions and exchanges with other bodies and things.


Landscapes Of Actions.

Modalities Of Intravention

Constitutive Qualities Of Dance.


Ephemerality

Corporeality

Precariousness

Scoring

Performativity



If we start by moving, by thinking through moving, and by living through moving. We'll arrive to that disturbing vision : that the predicament of dance is to be an art of erasure. Dance always vanishes in front of our eyes in order to create a new past. The dance exists ultimately as a mnemonic ghost of what had just lived there.

Lepecki. 1996.


Bodily interactions highlight the entanglement of material through a process/processual understanding and situated analysis.



The Archive.

Matters of Concern.

Terms of Engagement.

Interrogate with descriptors and new issues of practice.


Bringing Things to Life.

Starting conditions for responsible and curiosity driven engagements with the world.


Place-Refreshed.

New-Agencies


The Interconnectedness of Places.

For Ingold, congealed places become relationships/connections for lines of occupation.


Curriculum making/experience as the enactment of dwelling in places.

Landscape Constructions/Observatory/Garden.

Raveningham, drawing,mapping, landmarking paths, wayfinding, territories.



Ceramics and  Architecture

Marking The Line.

In response to Sir John Soane.

Joanna Bird. 2013

Arranging the physical space/circulation to receive forms/intraventions.

Christie Brown, her practice engages with mythology and narrative and the parellels between psychoanalysis and archaeology through figurative work, which references archaic collections and the significance of inanimate objects in human lives.

Carina Ciscato, relocated to London in 1999, where she worked in the studio of Julian Stair and Edmund de Waal. The move, the contrast in culture and in attitudes to ceramics, has seen her work grow in confidence and move in exciting new architectural directions.

Nicholas Rena, his art is concerned with reconciling the domestic and the sacred, through the medium of the vessel, a form that reveals in a single look an exterior, the figure- and an interior – the inner life. Rena's strong , expressionist forms make explicit this duality, this communion and tension between our inner and outer life. His intensity and feeling for interior space imbues his work with immense presence and stillness.

Clare Twomey is an advocate for craft as commensurable to the wider visual arts. Her practice can be understood as 'post studio ceramics' as her work engages with clay yet often at a critical distance. Twomey's work negotiates the realms of performance, serial production, and transience, and often involves site-specific installations. She is especially concerned with the affective relations that bind people with things, and how objects can enable a dialogue with a viewer.


Joanna Bird Pottery

Director of the Joanna Bird Foundation. London.


Ceramic Forms and Paintings.

Materials/Substances on a drawn and constructed surface.

Drawings, wax and yellow ochre on layered canvas and paper.


Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

The transformative properties of the substance.


The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces', three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.


An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions.


Imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them- for when he does not understand he- becomes them by transformation himself into/with them.

 

Refraction/Reflection/Spatial Reversal Phenomena.


Time : Duration and Perception.

Duration as a multiplicity of secession, fusion, and organisation.

Henri Bergson.


One's perception modifies consciousness, attention is broadened, time is distended, just as in the density of language.

Thus when I measure time, I measure impressions, modifications of consciousness.

Saint Augustin.


Time conceived as the analog between architecture and cinema, passing time was measured and observed in a precise strip of sunlight which slowly formed different reflections as it passed across the glossy lack floor.

The physical and perceptual experience of architecture is not a scattering or dispersion, but a concentration of energy. This physically experienced 'lived time' is measured in the memory and the soul in contrast to the dismemberment of fragmented messages of media..

Steven Holl.





Outpost 100223

Hungate, Norwich. 

Anglian Potters

Undercroft, Norwich. 2023


Helgate Proposal

Exploratory Ceramic Practice.



Clay Making. 

Plaster Work.

Commissioning of Gas Kiln for large scale works.

Glass Tech Kiln.


Sunday, 1 February 2026

Spatial/Diffractive Bodies Situated in Place : Matters of Fidelity and Precariousness.

 

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative entanglements in a world of materials. 

The Environment Without Objects.

Tim Ingold. 2008


Intermediaries within the cyanotype process.

Trace drawings on paper with organic and material from the built environment.

Drawing/Making Processes.

Architectural Body : Organism, Person, Environment. Arakawa and Gins. 







 "[...] the body [...] continually transforms itself and is already not, at the moment when I speak of it, what it was a few seconds ago." (Laplantine, 2015:13)

Laplantine, F. 2015 [2005]. The Life of the Senses: Introduction to a Modal Anthropology. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic.

Through the choreographing of our learning processes we create the conditions for engagement/entanglement and production/transformation, which are all modalities of movement and action. So we see pedagogical, architectural and professional practices as potential practices of transformation and co-learning. Dance – somehow both connected to and different than choreography – brings with it a whole set of values which we consider significant for the architectural pedagogy we enact. 
Lepeki lists the 'constitutive qualities' of dance as 
"ephemerality, corporeality, precariousness, scoring and performativity" (Lepecki 2012:15) 

He goes on to say that "[t]hese qualities are responsible for dance's capacity to harness and activate critical and compositional elements crucial to the fusion of politics and aesthetics …"(Lepecki 2012:16)

His 'compositional' and 'critical' elements echo the event/discourse relationships within our pedagogy and in our use of choreography as dance/writing. These qualities allude to specific modes of engagement and making, and state particular values. We will use them to underscore our pedagogical modes, and develop them as necessary in a teaching practice which desires students' engagement, empowerment, and caring.

In that sense, ephemerality can be related to immediacy and an engagement with the here- and-now which cares about effects and duration. Corporeality speaks of a body, but if we ask whose body or what body, then we can expand it to be any-body, in order to speak of matter or, more precisely, of mattering and bodying. Other names for precariousness can be fragility or vulnerability, somehow always already a condition of our impossibly immediate interventions. Scoring, which can be both a ‘writing’ and an unfolding, creates spaces and times and modes for and of improvisation. And performativity always returns us anew to movement, multiplicity, effects and life.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care: Choreographing Values
OREN LIEBERMAN
ALBERTO ALTÉS

Abstract

Thinking through choreography as dance/writing – both the doing and the score for that doing, the event and the discourse - we propose to shift the focus of architectural practices and pedagogies from an emphasis in the attainment of competencies and  static  knowledge,  to  a  privileging  of  processes  and modalities of learning that nurture the values of engagement, empowerment and  caring  responsibility.  Choreography  situates  our  work  in  the  realm  of performative action and transformation, and it does so with and through our bodies; also, it helps us frame the power of our intraventions, which aim at transforming the world through immediate, responsible and often fragile acts of engagement with matter, movement and life.

Keywords: 

Intravention, matters of care, choreography, architectural pedagogies, modalities of learning.

More on ’intraventions’ can be found in:
Altés, A. and Lieberman, O. 2013. Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes 
of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures. Baunach: Spurbuch Verlag.

2023




Friday, 13 June 2025

Drawing as Diffractive Research : Mind/Hand/Media/Wayfaring, all in the thick of material existence.

Diffractive Research.

Tim Ingold's concept of "diffractive research" emphasizes a dynamic and iterative approach to inquiry, where researchers move between different lenses and perspectives, exploring the interplay between diverse elements. This method, rather than seeking a definitive conclusion, aims to enrich understanding by embracing the "emergent difference" and "variation in commoning" found within the research object. 

Elaboration:

"Diffractive" as a Metaphor:

Ingold's use of "diffraction" draws an analogy to the physical process of light being bent and spread when it encounters an obstacle. This process reveals the nature of the obstacle and the light itself, highlighting the complexity of their interaction. 

Iterative and Relational:

Diffractive research is not a one-time process but a continuous engagement with the research subject, moving between different perspectives and interpretations. This iterative approach emphasizes the relational nature of knowledge, recognizing that understanding emerges from the interplay between the researcher and the object of study. 

Embracing "Emergent Difference" and "Variation in Commoning":

Instead of seeking to define or reduce difference, diffractive research celebrates the "emergent difference" that arises from the interactions between diverse elements. It also emphasizes "variation in commoning," recognizing that individuals and things can contribute to a shared understanding even when they have nothing in common. 

"Wayfaring" as a Method:

Ingold's concept of "wayfaring" (a way of traversing the world, constantly engaging with its details) is closely linked to diffractive research. Wayfaring involves actively engaging with the world, paying attention to the details and nuances that emerge along the way. 

Examples in Practice:

This approach can be seen in research that explores:

Materiality and Agency: How materials shape human action and how humans, in turn, reshape materials. 

Knowledge and Memory: How knowledge is not simply transmitted but actively generated and shaped through experience and interaction. 

Social and Cultural Practices: How social and cultural practices are constantly being re-interpreted and re-created through interaction. 

Beyond Objectivity:

Diffractive research challenges traditional notions of objectivity by embracing the inherent subjectivity of research. It recognizes that knowledge is always produced within specific contexts and through particular relations. 

In essence, Tim Ingold's concept of diffractive research offers a powerful framework for understanding how knowledge is generated and how we can engage with the world in a more dynamic and nuanced way. 

AI Overview/Google


Outpost 180424

The Body of Drawing/Butades.

Thinking Matter : Cosmologies/Constellations/Assemblages/Apparatuses. 

Matter (as interlacing interplay that is dynamic and mutually defining) has its own nature.






In the thick of material existence.

Merleau-Ponty.





On The Hospitality/Intertwining of Lines


Making/Moving Matter/Theoretical Objects for Spatial Practises.

In and Out of Material/Matter/Matters of Concern/Sculpture

Tony Cragg.


Situated Practices/Architectures of Care/Concern.

Oren Lieberman.


The searching line proposes/launches visual observations/haptic responses, and conversely what is seen determines how the next line is to continue in a perpetual and recursive interaction that unfolds in ongoing time. 


Relationscapes of/with/for Drawing.

What is drawing?

What is the nature of the drawn line?


Un-Learning Drawing.

The drawn line is raw, on permanent view of its emergence into the world, an open zone that operates in real time. Corrections to the line, challenge perceptions and build intimate relationscapes with the mind, body, media and surface.

'In drawing' we are perceiving the evolving process of thought and perception.

Avis Newman.


Praesentia, being present, a presence that is close at hand to the present moment or time.

The phenomena and its nowness/nearness in the light of day. 

Drawing is driven from the outside.

The agent/agency of drawing admits that the process leads, the mind follows.

First the material signifier, marks on paper, then afterwards the signified, the depicted scene and its nominal referent. For Cozens the random application of splashes and patches of ink would at first appear a chaos, yet with a little skill, out of that chaos forms could be encouraged to appear. Blots might become clouds or the silhouette of hills. For Bryson, Cozens 'anti method' clarifies what the official ideology of drawing-as-transparency habitually mystifies. That the relation between subject matter and line is not at all a question of before or after.

Though far from being a work of philosophy Cozen's method/manual anticipates the broad outlines of Merleau-Ponty's description of the intending consciousness as always already in the world, in the thick of material existence.

Drawing the line involves an interlacing of outside and inside, a permanent cross-over between interior (the artist's mind, sensations,sensibilities) and exterior (paper, pigment,stylus).

A Walk For Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.


Studio Silences of  Space-Time Phenomena/Phenomenology.

Existential becomings in the thick of our material existence.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.


The Primal Scene of Drawing/The Trace of Butades.

Is all about preserving loss/the blankness of paper and a hand that is about to make its first trace on the surface. Drawing enacts the very moments of trepidation when a new image is about to enter the world. 

Drawing is an art of presence and transparency of phenomena unfolding, a fusion between the artist's mind, the artist's hand, and the beholder's gaze.





On Drawing.

The work of observation is necessarily shaped by the line it leaves behind.

The drawn line conditions or models the selections from the field of observation. It launches observation along a particular direction or path.


Sunlight enters into architecture and sensations of bodily presence/perception.

Vessels unfolding through durations of light and dark.


Flesh/Sensation/Paint/Francis Bacon.

An Unconditional Body from Social Objectivity to the Extremes of Subjectivity.


Acts of both presence and transparency.

Mapping Subjectivity/Gathering Matter.


Organism-Person-Environment.

Architectural Body.

Art works and artists, all manifests themselves at the social interaction and reading/rendering of subjectivity.





The Stage of Drawing.

Gesture and Acts.

Like the drawings themselves, the exhibitions loyalty is to the immediate experience of the individual image rather than to the totalizing logic of art history complete with its grand narratives of social and cultural change. The exhibition reveals the convergence of real time operations (realities) the artist's visual idea in the time of its coming into the world, and the always ongoing work of viewing.

Pathways of difference, of the brush and pencil as they move through their respective spaces.

For The Brush.

Before it can touch the surface of the canvas, the bush has to orient itself according to the four sides of the frame, and then according to the total sum of the marks that have already appeared on the surface of the picture. It has to hover, to hesitate, to sense as though by dowsing where a channel in space may now open up, a groove in the total surface that the brush may now enter.

For The Pencil.

In drawing the presence of the 'reserve' frees the pencil from this complex calculus of the totality, reducing the scope to an area that can be taken in at once. A local area, that lies where the hand is now in praesentia. For Bryson this introduces the possibility that the drawn line, maybe closer to the immediacy of the artist's thought and perception than the line made on canvas. 




Sunday, 7 April 2024

Architectural Abstracts/The Works Subject/Conceptual Resonance







 


Outpost 070723


On The Plane of Feeling.

The Aesthetic Dimension of Individual Human Experience. 

We Are Moved To Think.

Incipient Expressions.


Feeling-with is a force for thought.



A work creates a force for rethinking as much as a force for the experience of sensation's relays towards prearticulation.


One work can have many dynamic forms, many concepts, many feelings or thoughts.


The artist is not the subject, rather prearticulation is.


The Work's Subject

Is Its Dynamic Form

Its Valuation

Its Conceptual Resonance

Its Diagram.


Activating new parameters for thought.

The force of feeling-things becoming into existence.


To posit a subject for feeling means, engaging with the creative from the outside. This taking form is less the formation of a concrete identity than the culmination and residue of a process.


The Work creates its own subject, its subject is the force of becoming it proposes.


Feeling is power's compulsion of composition.

Whitehead 1929/1978.


The compulsion to compose is an aesthetic drive, a will towards sensation, a will to power-feeling.


Becoming-Bodies Feel-With The World.


Amanda Baggs feels-the-world. Watch her reading a book, she touches it, puts her face into it, listens to the pages rustling, smells it, looks at it. Through her the book becomes conjunctive, valued within a complex responsive environment. By culling the bookness from the book, Baggs makes the field of its musicality felt, its texture, its force of becoming not only as an object to be read but as a relation to be lived.


By feeling the book, Baggs brings the book into relation with a force of prearticulation that exceeds the book-as object.


Erin Manning.



Concepts appear/manifest-themselves as forces of expression in its incipiency.


The Multiple Sense Of Concepts.


There is no event,

No phenomena,

Word,

or Thought 

Which Does Not Have Multiple Sense.


A thing has many senses as there are forces capable of taking possession of it.

Deleuze. 1993.


Concepts value the rhythmic pressure of feeling/thinking with the work/world.


The concept is a gear-shift mechanism that acts on blocks of sensation, oscillating between thought and articulation, it pulsates between the actual and virtual realms. On the virtual stratum concepts propel the becoming event of thought, they feel its force of creation. On the plane of composition concepts articulate the dynamic form of prearticulation, they express the feeling of force.


The theoretical object as a concept to express the force and feeling of inquiry.

The Stick Thing, Canterbury School of Architecture/Spatial Practice/Oren Lieberman. 2009.



Robert Irwin

Notes Towards A Conditional Art.

2011/2017.


Editor's Note to the Reader.

Beatrice Hohenegger.


The fact that so many manuscripts have until now remained unpublished reinforces Irwin's characterization of his writing as motivated not by communication or publication, but rather by a desire to examine and clarify core questions that he was pursuing at key moments in his career.


Introduction 

Irwin's Writing.

Matthew Simms.


In a statement published in 1998, Robert Irwin emphasized that his essays, were not written in order to communicate, I am a visual artist, not a writer, or to refute criticism, writing was for me a means to examine the questions that were turning in my head concerning the 'why' of art, with the intention of clarifying the process of making. Together, they reflect relatively well the development of my thinking and the guiding idea of my work: the potential of each person to perceive the surrounding world from a unique aesthetic perspective. 


Notes toward a Conditional Art brings together for the first time Irwin's published and unpublished writings. While the texts span a wide range from letters to project proposals, the vast majority are personal ruminations, sometimes set down in draft form and other times worked up into fully developed essays. They cover a diverse conceptual terrain including, among other things, Irwin's philosophy of teaching, the lessons of modern art, and the artist's understanding of art as a form of pure inquiry. Above all, this book makes clear that starting in the 1960s and continuing up to the present, writing has been and remains an integral element of Irwin's multifaceted art practice.




White Washed Spaces:

Hungate/Water.


Provisional Objects/Architectures.

Porous Fired Clay-Drawings as Spaces.

Thinned Gesso, Sanded/Abraded Surfaces.

Lead  Sheet/Glaze/Slip/Batt Wash/Opal Glass.

Compositional Tilt-up Pieces/Vessels.


Figural Body/Water on Chinese Paper.

Hybrid Body-Trace Drawing.

Indian Ink/Cyanotype Process.

Mounted/Inter-hanging/Canvas/Screen Mesh.

White Conduit/Nylon Line.


Re-Visiting The Human Outline.

Chinese Paper/Thinned Gesso/Wax/Lime


On The Plane Of Feeling.

We are moved to think through a conceptual unfolding a reaching towards-expression.

Through feeling, thought begins to take form as a conceptual force.


The complex interplay of the transversal passage between thought-concept-articulation-


For Whitehead, feeling is the pulsion that transduces thoughts into becoming concepts.


Feeling is a pulsion to think, a sensitivity that situates thought in the world. Through feeling, thought's affective tonality is foregrounded.


Affective tone is an environmental resonance of a  feeling-in-action, as a vibrantile force that makes a resonant milieu felt. (The Hungate, Norwich, Propositional Workings)


Feeling Is Affect Bleeding Into Thought.

Activating complexities on the verge of expression. At the threshold of thought as creation, feeling provokes an aperture for that which has not been thought.


Thought is a lure for feeling that prearcticulates the virtual inflections of its incipient expression.


Feeling-with is not without thought, it is a force for thought.