The Social : Catching The Light/Architectural Apparatuses/Spatial Methodologies

It would probably not be wrong to define the ex­treme phase of capitalist development in which we live as a massive accumulation and proliferation of apparatuses.

To recapitulate, we have then two great classes: liv­ing beings (or substances) and apparatuses. And, be­ tween these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a sub­ject that which results from the relation and, so to speak, from the relentless fight between living beings and apparatuses. Naturally, the substances and the subjects, as in ancient metaphysics, seem to over­ lap, but not completely. In this sense, for example, the same individual, the same substance, can be the place of multiple processes of subjectification.­

 I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of liv­ing beings.

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Alternative Photography : Photography and Architectural Space.

Photogram, a numinous construction, spaces amongst and within other spaces

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

PROXIMITY OF SPACE 

INTIMACIES IN SOCIAL SPACES 

SCRIPTORIUM

THREE STAGE METHODOLOGY (Kikutake) Mitsuo Taketani 

KA ‘ESSENCE’

KATA ‘SUBSTANCE’ 

KATACHI ‘PHENOMENON’ 

Characteristics of an architect

CHI ‘BLOOD’

TACHI ‘TEMPERAMENT’ 

KATACHI ‘EMBODIMENT’

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language. 

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that (their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012 

Relativity/Relationality through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg 

Immaterial Architecture : The Glass Observatory

Photograph (132) Cyanotype Alternative Photography

Documents from research archive

Tracing Light: Petworth House, West Sussex 2000 David Alan Mellor, Garry Fabian Miller.

Light And The Genius Loci

For Derrida, the sun not only marks the beginning of metaphoricity but it is also an inescapable reminder of the solar system and oscillations, hidings and occultrations, inherent in 'a certain history of the relationships; earth/sun in the system of perception'.

Mutations Of Light

Petworth Window, 6 July 1999 Light's Windows And Rooms

Passing towards the Invisible.

The prospect of some metaphysical realm beyond the blue end of the spectrum and beyond material things illuminated to carnal sight, was a recurrent theme in William Henry Fox Talbot's early speculations.

CATCHING THE LIGHT

The entangled history of light and mind Arthur Zajonc

BROUGHT TO LIGHT

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE INVISIBLE 1840-1900 Sight Unseen

Picturing The Universe Corey Keller

Invisible objects, penciled by nature's own hand.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, the historian of science Bruno Latour argues that scientific pictures are powerfully affective because they more than mere images; they are, as he puts it, the 'world itself.

The Social Photographic Eye Jennifer Tucker

Nineteenth century science was characterized by both the appeal to visual evidence and the need for confirmation by the testimony of eyewitnesses. The latter explains why scientists pursued public viewings of their photographs by means of illustrated slide lectures, exhibitions, and reproduction in newspapers and magazines.

An understanding of the social boundaries of nineteenth century science helps make sense of a certain paradox within contemporary attitudes towards photography of the invisible. The ideal of mechanical objectivity in documenting visual knowledge demanded the elimination of the artist-observer and all of the subjectivity implicit in drawing by hand.

Invisible Worlds Visible Media

Tom Gunning

William Henry Fox Talbot, Slice of horse chestnut, seen through the solar microscope, 1840, salt print 18.6x22.5 cm.

Techniques Of The Observer

On Vision And Modernity In The Nineteenth Century Jonathan Crary

The Camera Obscura and its Subject

Above all it indicates the appearance of a new model of subjectivity, the hegemony of a new subject­ effect. First of all the camera obscura performs an operation of individuation; that is, it necessarily defines an observer as isolated, enclosed, and autonomous within its dark confines. It impels a kind of askesis, or withdrawal from the world, in order to regulate and purify one's relation to the manifold contents of the now 'exterior' world.

UNDER THE SUN

By The Light Of The Fertile Observer

Metaphors of illumination in the photography of Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Garry Fabian Miller, and Adam Fuss.

An Epiphany Of Light

David Alan Mellor

Christopher Bucklow, Guests Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Matter is provisional and that includes me. If the physics is correct then we are neither alive or dead as we commonly understand it, but in different states of potentiality.

From The Adamantine Land

Variations on the art of Christopher Bucklow David Alan Mellor

Etienne-Jules Marey

A Passion For The Trace Francois Dagognet

Painting, Photography, Film Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

A Bauhaus Book

L. MOHOLY-NAGY:

DYNAMIC OF THE METROPOLIS SKETCH FOR A FILM

ALSO TYPOPHOTO OSKAR SCHLEMMER

MAN

Interaction of Color Josef Albers

The Elements of Color Johannes Itten

Pedagogical Sketchbook Paul Klee

The New Landscape in art and science Gyorgy Kepes

The Colour of Time Garry Fabian Miller

The Majesty of Darkness Adam Nicolson

The Unmade

The Pregnant

The Half Erotically Unmade

Camera Obscura of Ideology Sarah Kofman

An optical instrument, which used in drawing, allows one to see at the same time the objects being drawn and the paper.

I Am Not This Body 

Barbara Ess

Working Collages

Ann Wilde, Ulrike Meyer-Stump

A German Tradition of Photographic Typology

Collages made from contact prints from Blossfeldt's negatives, showing the isolation of particular motifs. The working collages were an archive, not for the negatives but for motifs.

The viewer is less interested in the subjects of the pictures, than in the effect created by the formal system subsuming them.

His photographic archive of plant forms is not a finished work, but material awaiting processing.

 

Enchantments and Crossings : Somatic Effects

Spatial Methodologies. Worlds and Thresholds.

The Fanciful and The Scientific.

The Playful and The Reverent.

The Material and The Metaphysical.

Tensions in built spaces.

Between Evanescence and Substance.

Between Illusion and Specificity.

Between Slickness and Tactility.

Today there is not even a single instant in which the life of individuals is not modeled, contaminated, or controlled by some apparatus, In what way, then, can we confront this situation, what strategy must we follow in our everyday hand-to-hand struggle with ap­paratuses?

What Is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben 2009.

Making Places where times and tastes, human fabrications and accidents of nature, all collide; in these situations under the shelter of a forming/becoming architecture these ‘spatial texts’ or ‘visual conversations’ of one sort or another are suggested and are manifested and explored through a praxis of inquiry and making.

Facility and retreat for cross-disciplinary inquiry (Humanities and the Social Sciences).

Repository and archive of artefacts, texts and objects.

Exhibition and making spaces, workshops and residential living spaces. Walled garden complex containing a reading pavilion and library.

Philosophy of Solitude, thresholds/spaces of serenity, a poetics of dwelling.

Relationships between Art, Photography, Craft and Building. Expanded through Exhibition, Performance, Teaching and Making.

Realized as a dialogue/delivery (Built Work) into Architectural Terms between Sites of Collection and Sites of Construction.

Art as Spatial Practice.

Catalyst Events/Situations to engender the experience of learning.

West Dean, Singleton. Residential courses in the arts, both the grounds and the house are fully utilised in the social activity of learning.

Kilquhanity,Scotland. Free School in country setting, used as a site for exploratory fine art practices(converted a pottery into a camera obscura and drew a garden from the movements of the sun across a specific terrain).

Brockwood Park School, Bramdean. Re-imagining learning, conducted a walk across a landscape with clay, and hidden curriculum in the library with objects and texts centred around philosophy and architecture.

Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,

(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Posted 2018

Corpus/Borderlands : A Society in Excess, Marc Auge.

Corpus : Photographic drawings from human outlines

Borderlines : Cley 19, speculative submission for exhibition

ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS.

CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES, between the concrete and the spatial.

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies. 

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge. My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events. 

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. 

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

Submission Guidelines

All proposals must be for new work that addresses the brief, artists are encouraged to experiment, be playful and push the boundaries of their practice.

BORDERLINES

Artists translate cultural moments and offer responses to their environment, whether geographical, political or spiritual. Inviting artist's to respond to the theme Borderlines as it requires an inquisitive approach to the site that surrounds them and to the climate in which we live.

Geographical Environmental Landscape

Terrain

Migration (Wildlife/Humans) Transmigration

Socio Political Departure

Borderlands

Borderlines

Borders

Lines

Spiritual Embodied Walking

Wandering 

Wanderlust 

Movement

Borderlines, simultaneously both boundary and threshold.

Visible, Existential, Imaginative, Porous, Contingent, Reflexive, Nowness, Un-Knowing, Awkwardness, Liminality, Territory, Subjectivity,

Concrete Collage : Raku fragment, clay form/photograph, drawing, handwriting and painted surfaces.

 Ancient Lights : Abstract Painting and Constructional Drawing for Architectural Glass. 

Anthropological Landscape : Drawing from archaeological dig, liquid light, field chalk, charcoal. 

Cley, St Margaret's South Entrance : Collage, Sketchbook, working ideas for small glass panels. 

Cell, Court, Domain, Field : Layered paper, paint, and absent objects.

Architectural Concerns : Collage ,drawing, installation, blue prints, historical building plans. Scriptorium : Architectural model for a reading space within a pastoral landscape or community.

Working Notes/Extracts and Fragments from site visit. St Margaret's Church

Silence and stillness, social/historical shelter from/within the landscape

A place acting through our sensate/spiritual world, a space crafted by the specificity of its making/usage. 

An interior sensing space of a protected and defended/fortified silence, affirming beliefs and community.

Subtle and muted, stillness, embodiment from the patina of use. Bleached woodwork, lightness, dryness and the humidity of absences.

Empty and eroded stone mullion windows/ancient lights, architecture framing its un-making worn, broken and repaired flooring surfaces, ceramic and stone.

What does Borderlines mean to you? Boundary and Threshold

Visible, existential, imaginative, porous, contingent, reflexive, nowness, un-knowing, awkwardness, liminal, territory,

Material Process/Inquiry, Praxis, Content, Context

Form, Existential Qualities/Values AGENCY

Mindfullness of the brief to discover things through the inquiry and engagement with the site. 

Develop Inquiry

Documentation, Artist Book, and other media mixed media painting

Small series of glass panels ceramic tiles/facades

Photographic material/photograms, drawings/hangings on Chinese paper

Melancholy Landscapes : The Plague/Vermilion Sands

Film Collages, hybrid processes and temporal states Liminality: Literature/Philosophy/Visual Art

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819) Existential Gestures : Looking away from the sea

Ballard : Vermilion Sands : Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices Albert Camus : The Plague, 1947. (Penguin Fiction)

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus's magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

'Camus represents a particularly modem type of temperament, a mystic soul in a Godless universe, thirsty for the absolute, forever rebellious against the essential injustice of the human condition'

Shusha Guppy, Sunday Times

Walking into Emergent Landscapes 

Walking/Thinking/Physical Entanglements in the Landscape

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

The OLD WAYS, a JOURNEY ON FOOT, Robert Macfarlane

“ Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings:

 Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

“To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses- between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal-occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events. He imagined himself in topographical terms.”

Drawing Rooms/Slow Philosophy/Arte Povera : Cyanotypes/Collages/Photography/Installations

Slow Philosophy. 2017
Reading against the institution
Michelle Boulous Walker

Saturnian Form : Lead and Library Dates
Russell Moreton

Emilio Prini
The filter and welcome to the angel, 1967
Environment with participants, doves, artificial green grass, socks, ultra-violet light.
Dimensions variable,
Installation, Studio Bentivoglio, Bologna.

Artist-run exhibition space

Emilio Prini well illustrates the spirit of Arte Povera: the artist is not the creator of artefacts, nor even of a documented 'happening'. In the transferral of energy and subjectivity into matter or an event, the work exists in the instant it comes into being and is simultaneously received.

To document his work in photographs and present these as a record of it contradicts the very basis of Prini's art.
Arte Povera, Themes and Movements
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Intermedia Chart
Dick Higgins
Molvena, Italy. 1993

Spatial Agents/Local Materials : Kilquhanity Free School/The Yard and Link Gallery, Winchester.

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011

Dark Session's : Shadowy speculations in the pottery. Kilquhanity 2011

Silver gelatin prints from a "room obscura" set up at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011 as part of "Back to Free school, Drawing out the Archive."

Site drawing from "a pathway between sunrise and sunset" staged at Kilquhanity, Scotland 2011. This research has led to notions of architectural "interventions" and " footprints" through the direct observational mapping of celestial alignments and movements as they pass over the landscape.

Thoughts relating to Spatial Practice as a site of operation in which to locate my practice. Use of spatial correspondences (place, identity gesture and resonances) as a means of mapping the diversity of human presence and passage into architectural space. 

Possibilities of using methodologies and aptitudes gained from visual fine art and experience with glass and ceramics as architectural interfaces to instigate situations and promote a sense of an interactive spatiality through the role of the viewer becoming an active interlocutor into the dynamics of the site.

Artist Statement, re Galloway/Kilquhanity excursion Easter 2010.

My work utilises simple scientific phenomena and by appropriated registering apparatuses ( chambers to act to become placed in relations to place, this placement is in effect an act of intervention and place becomes site, a proposal is delivered through this action. This proposal is in the form of a relational device/threshold that attempts to fold into the place, a site of creative intervention around a paradoxical inquiry, into objectivity and abstractions, between embodied knowledge’s and findings. These

“working Sites” attempt to engage the interlocutor on their own theoretical and subjective relations and to reveal and form their own singularities from the experience of becoming placed. This immersion into the objective, the philosophical, and the poetic, could be seen as trying to create a “metaphor around dwelling/becoming." A subjectivity enlightened by theorising around issues of the production of space and the notion that time is both a structure and an event. The interlocutor (the

view/relation of others present) becomes brought into “place” becoming as it were a ’’guest” of place through this placing inquiry, place can become ones own familiarity of space.

The Yard Studios, Winchester.

Multi-disciplinary practice, drawing on a long association with Art, Craft and the Building/Construction industry. Working mainly on drawing/mapping with local materials ( Arte Provera), alternative photographic processes and architectural interventions/installations that explore our sense and experience of place. Interested in the intimacy and mobility of “Artists” books and journals as a device to accompany the experience of place. My work commands and demands a need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences, that have themselves been transposed into another physicality. Interested in using drawing and materiality as a site of exchanges, traces formed into inclusions within its own experimental field of experience. The practice is continually informed by contemporary practitioners such as Roni Horn, Melanie Counsell, Christopher Bucklow. My work sets out to contains its own sense of a consolidation of time through ephemeral processes and reflection. The use of elemental mobile photographic devices is being investigated as a means of “registering” durations of human occupation continually superimposed amongst the agencies of “Place” and “Time”. The use of the human body as a trace allows my drawings a direct spatial encounter of absence. This method of working directly with the body is a direct result of earlier sculptural works in concrete and clay.

Artists Information & Material For

Interfaith-Group-Show: STRONG VOICES part of Hyde 900/2010

Co-organised & curated by Stephen Cooper & Arielle Klobusiczky

Russell Moreton

Process  &  Materiality:  mirror  arcane  symbols  ranging  from  science  - humanity spiritual -pagan mythology & Christianity

Symbol & Vision: 3 Layers containing a portable space of vision/ thought 

Binding Factor : Layers & Locality (Non places)

Layer I

Lyrical  intervention  with/&/or  of  Space  particular  Non  spaces 

Tracing activity contain in suspended materiality placed in space

Layer II Consolidation of Time

Capturing  notion  of  time  bound  process,  performance  and  procedure 

Documentation of resulting absence from ephemeral activity

Layer  III 

Surface & Traces

Sense  of  Equilibrium  between  matter  and  process  material  &  activity  paused 

Haptic Tactile resonance

Locality

Site Specific

response to space, architecture and surroundings including work 

of others issues of frontality versus experiencing 3d work over come by designing samples/glimpses of concepts II!

Material & Process: all include water/moisture/ and light 

Blue, Cyanotype ( Blue Print)

Off White, China Clay & /or Chalk 

Negative Image, Pin Hole Camera 

Orange/Brown, Rust

INTERFAITH GROUP SHOW AT THE LINK GALLERY 2010 

Artist Statement

Spatial Practitioner using a multi-disciplinary art practice to explore relations in Architecture, Fine Art and Performance. Interested in the production of spaces that are relational and collaborative to both the practitioner and the visitor/interlocutor. My work utilizes simple indexical strategies to engender interest and perhaps a con spiritual enchantment for the everyday. These resultant correspondences “trace strategies” are open, active and present in-situ; they become “placed geographies around human relations.” Previous workings have used the agencies of natural light in both photographic apparatuses and projection through transparency and clay both as a material from which to retain impressions of mobility through its material memory and its analogy to the “Promethean myth" and its use of clay to fashion mortal man. This particular event invokes for me the notion of a shared humanity, a mutuality that could be understood as reflexive through simple material relations and collaborative gestures. Art space can promote these working intimations that are in the realms of beliefs.

Working Notes for Proposal

Notion of a shared hospitality/threshold that excepts diversities through a simple gesture. Explorative/relational surface or device to register and contextualize spatial relations produced by the participation of this event and its reception.

Artist Statement, re proposal for “Strong Voices”.

It is my intension to utilise the ambiguous and strangely intimate nature of a continuous line around a human being to act as a site for the viewer to inhabit an engagement with the work. I am interested in utilizing the “open space” the territory within the traced outline as a sort of vessel for the temporary thoughts and reflections of others. This space hopes to set up a condition, a place that allows a dispassionate observer or thinker time to find and form their own thoughts. The use of material residues left from enactments seems to concur a metaphysical presence to that of the inner trace. The use of simple materiality (clay, chalk, rust) invokes a notion of a shared simple relation, to the human form; these sensibilities are reflected in artists like Giuseppe Penone and other Arte Povera artists. The use of light sensitive materials, liquid light and cyanotype brings the representation of worlds into proximity of a human absence. Photographic processes also bring with them a surface of compressed and superimposed time, an event through which time has left behind, like the trace we are left thinking and reflecting a loss that creates equilibrium in the present. To add a presence of temporality and nowness, water vapour has been sprayed onto the chalk creating moisture a breath around absences.

The Link Gallery , Winchester. Strong Voices, part of Hyde 900

Untitled 2010

Wax, field chalk and pencil on paper 230x150 cm

This work utilises the ambiguous and strangely intimate nature of a continuous line performed around a human being to act as a site for the viewer to inhabit an engagement within the work. I am interested in the performativity of this “open space” the territory within the staged trace, creates an outline as a sort of absent vessel for the temporary thoughts and reflections of others. This space hopes to set up a residency, a place that allows a dispassionate observer or thinker time to find and form their own thoughts.

Wax, Field Chalk and Pencil on Paper, focuses our attention on the vulnerability and finitude of the human condition through a representation of its absence given only in the traces of past gestures. Inviting meditation, the simplicity of the materials and their use, directly evokes an emotional register and aesthetic sensibility tied to the human form. In the open space performed by a continuous line, the work seeks to offer us a temporary haven for reflection, a quiet space of respite, shielded from the incessant press of events.

What is the aspect of Faith/Belief in this work? 

Personal Statement.

The work allows for me a space for reflection, however awkward its present location engenders. This drawing its manufacture and its materiality for me speak of the intimate space of a domicile, a domesticity and a sense of a proximity to material and geographical relations. For me there exists within its presence a space to ponder issues, some relevant to ones own intimate beliefs and observations. The poetics engendered by the materiality seek a sense of encounter harboured by territory of a human gesture. This encountered materiality is explicitly subtle, yet it is for me raw, open, unclothed and perpetually awkward. For me the confrontation of this awkwardness reveals the trace as being both vital and mortal. It is into this state of the vital and mortal I can begin to harbour my sensitivities and those of others.

Russell Moreton : Research Journal. 2013

https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/24370355922/