Studio Workings : Outpost/Drawing/Architectural Body~Bioscleave

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Sensing Peripheries/Gestures and Acts. 

Trace Drawing

Body Outline/Material Flows.

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A sudden quantum like jump between a thing and its parts, between its different scales, its ontological gap. In a way a whole is really another specific, not a generalization about a specific thing, this means that there is a 'weird gap' between the whole and the parts, an ontological gap.

Timothy Morton.

Architecture in the Space of Flows, 2012.

Andrew Ballantyne, Chris Smith explain that everything can be understood as functioning in terms of flows – flow of various kinds and scales make up architecture and connect it with the world. Here, a volatile mode of thought begins to proliferate architecture as a whole, rather than developing the thought in relation to the body or space in isolation.

The Extracorporeal Space.

Architecture in Abjection.

A visceral assault, an affect that passes through the subject. 

An architecture that gets distilled down to experience and the chemical exchanges between body and space that begins to function within a similar realm to abject(ion).

The basic unit of study is body coupled with architectural surround. 

Arakawa and Gins.

You shouldn't force the memories. Just try to untangle them slowly.

I would suddenly have the feeling that a story was coming back to me and I would reach out instinctively to seize it. But there was nothing for me to hold. When I could no longer stand to stare at the blank page, I would type a, i, u, e, o, and then, imagining that I would now be able to write something, I would erase them again. But of course nothing came to me, and I would return to a, i, u, e, o. And the process would repeat itself. In the end, all that was left was a torn page, from the many times I'd erased what I'd written.

The Burning Library.

It may take a long time for every word to disappear, we held our breath as though fearful of disturbing this beautiful scene. 

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Ceramic Objects/Monumental vessels that explore contemporary society's relationship to death and ritual.

Abstractive figurative forms invite the viewer to meditate on the intimate relationship between the clay vessel and the human body.

Stair's exhibition explores humanity's reliance on art as a means to transcend the unknown.

Themes of Containment/Embodiment.

Julian Stair : Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre, 2023.

Developing explorations in which material culture and artistic practice can engender 'a new , expressive language to both mediate loss and celebrate life, Julian Stair'.

Francesca Woodman.

Gagosian, 2024.

Putri Tan: In those pictures the objects bisect the space and also consume it. Counter to that , as you said, is the body. I'm never wholly convinced of the idea that she is part of the architecture when she's holding on to a column or contorting her body to fit into the environment or to disappear into it.

Corey Keller: There's both a brutality and a monumentality about the bodies she depicts, you don't quite know whether they're trapped or liberated. I think what's interesting about the work is it's never quiet only about the space and it's never quite only about the body, but it's about the psychological spark (tension) that ignites when those things intersect.

Architectural Body

Arakawa and Gins.

The architectural body is a body that can and cannot be found. Boundaries for an architectural body can only be suggested, never determined.

A bioscleave is an event-fabric within which all exists only tentatively, within which all is perpetually shifting, and within which architectural bodies form and collapse, here distinctions between body and space, subject and object are diluted. This results in a certain indeterminacy of boundaries, as body and surround are collapsed into one, and as they are constantly shifting in relation to one another.

I found it terribly difficult to come to terms with the old man's death. I had lost many people who were important to me in the past, but somehow my parting with them had been different from what I experienced now.

But the laws of the island are not softened by death. Memories do not change the law. No matter how precious the person I may be losing, the disappearances that surround me will remain unchanged.. But this time I had the impression that something was different. In addition to the sadness, I was overcome by a mysterious and menacing anxiety, as though the old man's death had suddenly transformed the very ground under my feet into a soft, unreliable mass.

The materials of the world that surrounded R and me were simply too different-as though I were trying to glue a pebble I'd found in the garden to an origami figure. And the old man, who always reassured me at such moments, who promised we could find a different type of glue, was no longer here.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

Artworks : Living on the macroscopic description/analysis of what happens.

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Art, suggests that there are other ways of conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality. 

An intermediate period of free energy in motion from one system to another.

Living on the macroscopic description of what happens.

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Architectures, processes of thought that are analogically driven and developed into further recombinations, poetics.

The disequilibrium of the world we live in. 

We reread the notes we had made in the ferry logbook in order to commit everything to memory. Then, to be rid of the evidence, the old man tore out the page and tossed it in the stove. Engulfed in flames, the paper shrivelled and dissolved. We stood in silence for a moment, staring into the fire.

The work began the next day. I divided the research materials from the storeroom into small batches and burned them in the garden incinerator as though disposing of old magazines.

The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in aches. Why would I keep them when I don't think I will be able to recall the meaning of the word 'photograph' much longer. Nothing comes back now when I see a photograph. No memories, no response. They're nothing more than pieces of paper. A new hole has opened in my heart, and there's no way to fill it up again. That's how it is when something disappears.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa 

Art works through the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning. What happens when we react to  a work of art is not down to the art object in itself, rather it lies in the complexity of our brain  in the kaleidoscopic networks of analogical relationships with which our neurons weave, for what we call meaning.

We are involved, engaged, being into art, takes us out of our habitual, sleepwalking, reconnecting us instead with the joy of seeing something anew in the world. 

Carlo Rovelli.

The disequilibrium/entropic nature for traces and memory. 

Men feel free because they are aware of their choices and their wishes. But they ignore the causes that lead them to will and to choose, and do not give the slightest attention to theses causes.

Spinoza.

Moments/Marks/Gestures differ because of their fecundity.

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The Rehabilitation Of The Imagination.

Correspondences between humankind and the world.

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In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

Gaston Bachelard 

Imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create 'metaphors of metaphors'.

Reverie, reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication.

Gaston Bachelard.

Moments differ because of their fecundity.

The Intuition Of The Instant.

The imagination is not a state, it is the human existence itself.

William Blake. 

For Bachelard, Blake's poetics, presents a complex around the dialectics of rock and cloud. A dynamic imagination, he is a poet of absolute imagination for whom the unreal directs the real.

The Reverberation of Images.

In a word, the phenomenological approach is a description of the immediate relationship of phenomena with a particular consciousness. It allows Bachelard to renew his warnings against the temptation to study images as things. Images are lived, experienced, re-imagined in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness.

Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality.

From phenomenology Bachelard retains above all the admonition to return to 'phenomena themselves' this requires putting aside naïve belief in the reality of things and approaching phenomena through consciousness which is always intentional, always consciousness of something.

I realized then we were thinking the same thing. As we looked into each other's eyes, I felt, once again, the anxiety that had taken root in our hearts a long time ago. The light reflecting from the spray of the fountain lit R's face.

The boy was fiddling with a nondescript stone as though it were a toy with some elaborate hidden mechanism. His plain light blue gloves had obviously been knit by hand. They were connected to each other with a strand of yarn, to keep them from becoming separated. I remembered wearing the same kind, long ago, and, in this basement so full of anxiety, they seemed like the lone sign of innocence and peace.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

The Immaterial Body.

Proposals through transparency and trans-illumination.

Sensate Inscriptions. 

The Mechanized Image.

Thresholds and projections of creative perception.

Drawing into the visual field.

Paint, pigments, lines, bought to light. 

Gestures, lines from sensations and its seeing.

Life Drawing/Corporeal Social Bodies.

Drawing/Sensations into the memory and anxieties of physical things.

Drawing attention to the relations of the body.

Social and sexual politics.

The Modernist Offence.

Schiele And The Naked Female Body.

Gemma Blackshaw.

Feminist art historians have developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and spectatorship.

As Abigail Soloman-Godeau has claimed in her exploration of photography and female subjectivity in the Second French Empire, the barriers between what is deeped licit and illicit, acceptably seductive or wantonly salacious, aesthetic or prurient, are never solid because contingent, never steadfast because they traffic with each other – are indeed dependant upon each other.

How might such an engagement with difference, with the binary system, shift not only our understanding but also our appreciation of Schiele's representation of the naked female body, of what continues to be described and displayed as 'the nude'? 

Egon Schiele.

The Radical Nude.

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

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The cell of myself fills with wonder.

The white-washed wall of my secret.

Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.

Bachelard comments, once we have been touched by the grace of super-imagination, we feel in the presence of the simpler images through which the exterior world deposits virtual elements of highly-coloured space in the heart of our being. The image with which Pierre Jean Jouve constitutes his secret being is one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell.

An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.

Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.

The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as this is probably not 'white-washed.' But this room in which he is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name, which is, the 'solitary room! It is inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is 'in the imagination.'

Here the poet inhabits the cellular image. This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous, in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does not lend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid framework for secret being. And secret being feels that it is guarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls.

The cell of the secret is white. A single value suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And it is always like that, the poetic image is under the domination of a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls, alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It  is stronger than all geometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.

The Dialectics of Outside and Inside.

Gaston Bachelard.

The Poetics of Space demonstrates Gaston Bachelard's ability to bridge scientific logic with poetic analysis. As a phenomenological reading of the poetic image, it probes the geometrical divide between inside and outside through an analysis of the imagination of matter. It resists simplification, engaging with both physical and psychological body-space relations, and describes an exchange between interior and exterior in which the latter might be 'an old intimacy'. The dialectical condition of 'interior immensity' and the 'immeasurable outside', attests to the spatiality of being as a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination.

INTIMUS

Interior Design Reader.

Unlearning Conceptual Frameworks/The Inconceivable.

Dante, like any traveller who knows that the first step, that of abandoning the familiar paths is the most difficult.

White Holes

Inside The Horizon

Carlo Rovell. 2023

Every place in the universe has its own time, different places can send each other signals, like the 'hiss' sent to us from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. But time passes at unequal rates in different places, and no single one of these times is 'truer' than any other.

There is no universal time, rather there is 'temporality' which is the network formed by many local times and the possibility of exchanging signals.

The Distortion of Time.

Bringing into doubt something that seemed self-evident to us.

Einstein, General Relativity.

Rovelli asks, how did an idea as bizarre as the relativity of time come to be devised and accepted?

In order to digest new ideas there lies a difficulty, not so much with the new concept, as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem so obviously to be true. To bring them into doubt seems inconceivable. We  are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more. The difficulty lies not in learning, but in unlearning.

Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.

Practices that are all about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning.

Art/Science/Philosophy, all have within them the capacity to change the organization of our thoughts , that allows us to leap forward. To produce singularities by re-conceptualizing reality. Our conceptual structures are neither  the definitive ones, nor the only one possible, rather they are the ones that  evolution has led us to cobble together in order to negotiate our daily needs, and often they do not work beyond that.

Making clay+ceramics, taking liberties, playing with and through a creative analogical reasoning.

Situated Practices/Theoretical Objects that develop a conceptual structure through analogy and recombination.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa. 1994

English translation, Steven Snyder. 2019

I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first, among all the things that have vanished from the island.

In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time-but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant. The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had disappeared from their heads.

It doesn't matter, she said. To you, this is no more than a few drops of water. But it can't be helped. It's all but impossible to recall the things we've lost on the island once they're gone.

It seems strange that you can still create something totally new like this-just from words-on an island where everything else is disappearing, he said, brushing a bit of dirt from one of the pages as though he were caressing something precious. I realized then that we were thinking the same thing. And what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.