A Troubling Spatial Study of Bodies, Atmospheres and Correspondence.

Reading Apparatus.

Speculative spatial inquiry / practice-based research.

This is not a study of interiority. It is an attempt to stay with the movements through which interiority becomes perceptible.

Permeable Hosting : Around Moreton’s Interiority is an exploratory spatial study emerging from a practice of clay, ceramics, drawing, photography, fieldwork and material inquiry. It considers interiority not as an enclosed place but as a movement between bodies, surfaces, atmospheres and materials. Through the ideas of permeable hosting, correspondence, ecological bodies and the Permeable Chamber, the text follows how spatial relations emerge through trace, immersion, material duration and withdrawal. It is deliberately unresolved: a spatial text~script intended to remain open to further encounters.

surface → trace → field → body → host → atmosphere → threshold → chamber → withdrawal → correspondence

Permeable Hosting : Around Moreton’s Interiority

Interiority becomes a movement rather than a place.

This proposition begins to gather something that has been moving through Russell Moreton’s spatial practice for some time: an understanding of interiority not as an enclosed condition, nor simply as the space within a body, but as something produced through the correspondence of bodies, materials, atmospheres and forces. Interior is not necessarily what lies behind a surface. It can emerge across a surface, within a field, through a trace, between bodies, or within the temporal unfolding of a material encounter.

Moreton’s fieldworks begin from this instability.

A troubling spatial study does not resolve the spatial. It makes the spatial capable of further correspondence.

Clay, charcoal, wax, cyanotype, paper, photographic residue, light, weather, dust, earth and other relatively simple matter(s) are brought into situations where their distinctions can become unsettled. These materials are not employed simply as means towards representation. They become active bodies within an expanded field of relations. A charcoal mark can register pressure and movement while simultaneously becoming atmosphere. Wax can act as a skin, receiving, obscuring and holding. Clay can become surface, field, trace or body. Cyanotype can receive light and weather over duration, allowing an atmospheric condition to emerge through its exposure.

The field is therefore not a neutral ground upon which things are placed.

The field becomes a body through the relations moving across it.

What appears as an indexical body can begin to dissolve into its surroundings. Figure and ground lose their certainty. Trace merges with material residue; drawn bodies become absorbed into atmospheric surfaces; photographic processes allow light, fluid and weather to become participants. The body is still perceptible, but its edges are troubled. It becomes difficult to say precisely where one body ends and another begins.

This troubling is important.

The work does not seek to resolve the body back into a stable form. Instead, it attends to what becomes possible when bodies remain partially merged, when their differences continue to act upon one another. The resulting field is immersive not because it surrounds the viewer with an effect, but because it proposes another spatial condition: a space in which bodies are already implicated in one another.

What happens when a body is understood as something capable of hosting what exceeds it?

Here, permeability becomes more than a physical quality. It becomes an activity of correspondence.

A permeable body receives. It is affected. It changes through what enters it, while also changing what it receives. Hosting is therefore never a neutral accommodation. There is no unchanged host. The hosted body is altered, the hosting body is altered, and the threshold between them becomes an active interval.

This is where Moreton’s interest in the simple matter(s) of the weather world becomes significant.

Weather is not treated as a subject to be represented. Light, moisture, atmosphere, temperature, duration and exposure become ecological participants. The cyanotype made through a pinhole intermediary over hours of sunlight is one such condition: an image emerging through the passage of light, weather and time. The photographic surface hosts forces that cannot themselves be held as objects. Something of the weather world becomes materially present through its effects.

The work becomes an emergent atmospheric condition.

It is an ecological body enacting its presence through its unfolding durational existence.

This is close to the piddock, but not the same. The piddock makes its presence through the removal of matter: boring, excavating, inhabiting, producing a chamber through its activity. The cyanotype works differently. Its presence accumulates through exposure, registration and duration. One leaves a cavity; the other leaves an atmospheric trace. One makes absence perceptible; the other makes an elusive presence perceptible.

Both, however, trouble the assumption that a body simply occupies a material world.

Bodies make worlds through their activities within matter.

This becomes increasingly important across Moreton’s fieldworks. The indexical body is not merely a record of where a body has been. It is a material event through which other bodies become perceptible. A rubbing carries something of the surface encountered. A photographic exposure carries something of the light that produced it. Charcoal carries pressure, movement and gesture. Wax receives and holds traces. Clay absorbs force, resistance, touch and time.

The trace therefore becomes more than evidence.

The trace becomes another body.

And when traces gather, they produce an atmosphere.

This is perhaps where the spatial practice moves beyond an understanding of interiority as architecture or enclosure. The interior can be produced without a conventional inside. It can occur within the density of a material field, within the interval between bodies, within an aperture, or through the atmospheric relations of a situation.

Could the interior begin before enclosure?

Could a chamber emerge through correspondence rather than construction?

The clay~ceramic body takes this question somewhere else.

Field clay remains immersed in the instability of making. It can be folded, scraped, pierced, smeared, layered, collapsed and reworked. Its interiority remains close to the movement of the hand and the contingencies of matter. Clay is open to intervention.

Firing changes the proposition.

What was fluid becomes materially persistent. What was provisional becomes a body that can no longer be entered through making in quite the same way. The ceramic withdraws from the hand while becoming available to other bodies. Its surface carries the pressures and traces of its making, but its interior is no longer simply recoverable. It becomes atmospheric, spatial and withdrawn.

The body withdraws, but correspondence continues.

This withdrawal is not closure. It is another form of hosting.

The ceramic body carries something of the immersive field into another material condition. Its apertures allow light and air to pass. Its surfaces receive atmosphere. Its chamber gathers shadow. Its material persistence holds something of what happened while making itself available to what has not yet happened.

The Permeable Chamber emerges here.

It is not simply the interior of a ceramic form. It is an interval between retention and release, surface and depth, immersion and withdrawal. It gathers without completely containing. It hosts without remaining unchanged. It becomes spatial through its capacity to encounter other bodies.

The chamber is produced through correspondence.

This also changes the meaning of touch.

Touch is not restricted to direct physical contact. Light touches a photographic surface. Weather touches paper. A piddock touches clay through excavation. Fire touches clay through transformation. Air touches a ceramic aperture. A viewer's body touches a withdrawn ceramic through perception, proximity and duration.

In~~Touching therefore becomes an expanded ecological condition.

It is an attentiveness to how bodies become perceptible through the forces by which they affect and are affected by other bodies. Touch can occur across an interval. Correspondence can happen without contact becoming literal. A body can be touched by something it cannot hold.

The spatial practice gathers around this possibility.

Fieldwork, drawing, photography, collage, walking, architecture, clay and ceramic are not separate activities so much as different material situations in which interiority can move. The field merges bodies. The trace carries an encounter. The atmosphere troubles the boundary. The aperture enables passage. The chamber gathers. The ceramic withdraws.

Field ~ trace ~ body ~ host ~ atmosphere ~ chamber ~ ceramic.

These are not stages towards a final form. They are active conditions within a larger ecology of making.

Perhaps this is where Moreton’s spatial practice now gathers most intensely: not around the production of spatial objects, but around the possibility that space is continually produced between bodies that remain capable of affecting one another.

Interiority is consequently not a place waiting to be entered.

It is something that happens.

It gathers across surfaces and within bodies. It moves through atmosphere. It becomes perceptible through traces, apertures, residues, pressure, light and duration. It can immerse, trouble, withdraw and return.

Interiority becomes a movement rather than a place.

And the spatial body becomes the body capable of hosting that movement—permeable, attentive, troubled and open to correspondence with other ecological bodies.

What is gathered is never simply contained.

It reverberates.

Spatial Practice; Interiority; Permeable Hosting; Spatial Bodies; Correspondence; Atmosphere; Ecological Bodies; Materiality; Permeability; Clay~Ceramic; Indexical Bodies; Thresholds; In~~Touching; Futurity, Weather~World; Fieldwork; Material Reciprocity; Immersion; Withdrawal; Permeable Chamber; Trace; Duration; Ecological Practice, 

It reverberates.

It troubles.

So the text itself becomes a small Permeable Chamber.

It gathers fieldworks, indexical bodies, weather, clay, charcoal, wax, cyanotype, piddock, atmosphere, firing and ceramic withdrawal — but doesn't close them into a system.

That makes “troubling spatial study” more than a subtitle. It describes the mode of inquiry:

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.

Becoming Propositional/The Human Neuron.: Each Proposition/Activates Contrast/The Dialectic of Duration.

Outpost 100823

The Dialectic Of Duration, Gaston Bachelard. 1950

Bachelard argues for a discontinuous time, made of instants out of which we construct new durations and deconstruct old ossified ones. A time experienced as durations that addresses the nature of time in its irreducibly fractured and interrupted state, and within which Bachelard urges us to launch projects and lead lives of creative rhythms. 

Becoming Propositional.

Developing in the Incipiency of Relations/Ecologies between Things/Phenomena.

One has to realize what restraint it needs to express oneself with such brevity. Every glance can be expanded into a poem, every sigh into a novel. But to express a novel in a single gesture, joy in a single breath: such concentration can only be found where self-pity is lacking in equal measure. These pieces can only be understood by those who believe that sound can say things which can only be expressed through sound.

Arnold Schoenberg, from the introduction to the Six Bagatellies for string quartet, Opus 9, by Anton Webern, a Viennese friend and contemporary of Egon Schiele's.

Rachel's, Music for Egon Schiele. 1996.  

Individuations Dance/Relationscapes

There is no time to return to the line, the line must draw the movement, the gesture itself must become line. One pass with the paint and that's all, move the canvas. The result a vastness of localized movement, a movement across that is at once microscopic and macroscopic.

Erin Manning.

The Swimming Pool Drawings

Michael Grimshaw, Winchester School of Art.

We land into the focus of an awareness that becomes us.

Whitehead. 1929.

The architecting of spacetimes of experience co emergent with bodies in the making.

Choreographic Propositions/Mobile Architectures, Erin Manning.

The choreographic proposition  serves not to delineate positions or forms from one another in a normative practice of movement notation, but to create a diagram that captures in a fleeting moment the qualities of movement expressibility, such that their force of form can be felt.

Deleuze defines the diagram via Francis Bacon as the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones, line-strokes and colour patches, whose function is to be suggestive. He  speaks of the diagram capable of unlocking areas of sensation, suggesting that the diagram is chaos, catastrophe, but also a germ of order or rhythm.  

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

In Closing.

OURSELVES

Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

I believe that our species will not last long. It does not seem to be made of the stuff that has allowed  the turtle, for example, to continue to exist more or less unchanged for hundreds of millions of years; for hundreds of times longer, that is, than we have been in existence. We belong to a short lived genus of species. All of our cousins are already extinct. What's more, we do damage. The brutal climate and environmental changes which we have triggered are unlikely to spare us.

For the Earth they may turn out to be a small irrelevant blip, but I do not think we will outlast them unscathed – especially since public and political opinion prefers to ignore the dangers which we are running, hiding our heads in the sand. We are perhaps the only species on Earth to be conscious of the inevitability of our individual mortality. I fear that soon we shall also have to become the only species that will knowingly watch the coming of its own collective demise, or at least the demise of its civilization.

Carlo Rovelli. 2016.

It could be said that the most fantastic material is the human neuron. It dominates most materials around it, it is a prime agent of change and determines many forms on the planet.

For Cragg, ninety-nine percent of those forms are solely utilitarian, driven by survival and economics. The result is an impoverished material world. Utilitarianism censors the possibilities of form, this not only applies to designed objects and architecture the world over, it also applies to forms of education and society in general.

Our super-thinking material the human neuron with that prime position in the hierarchy of material, has a responsibility for all other material within its grasp whether mineral, plant or animal. 

Tony Cragg, Sculptures and Drawings. 2011.

Each Proposition

Activates Contrast.

Architectures based on a full recognition of the embodied human condition and of the multitude of instinctual reactions hidden in the human unconscious. A piece of furniture sets up a proposition for a event, the encounter with itself and the body of the user.

Alvar Aalto's buildings are not based on a single dominant concept or gestalt; rather they are sensory agglomerations. They sometimes even appear clumsy and unresolved as drawings, but they are conceived to be appreciated in their actual physical and spatial encounter, 'in the flesh' of the lived world, not as constructions of idealised vision.

Juhani Pallasmaa, Alvar Aalto.

Choreography As Propositional/Relations/Generative Practice.

Choreography starts from any point, it cleaves an occasion activating its relational potential. It makes time, beginning its process anew, always from the middle of the event. Choreography is thus a proposition to the event. Choreography asks/inquires into the event, how its ecology might best generate and organize the force of movement-moving.

William Forsythe, Erin Manning.

Choreography, a self generating act proposed into a movement/potential motion/event of a milieu/gathering.

Making/generating/organizing as a proposition/task/technique to the material.

Developing in the incipiency of a choreography creative ecologies of the force of movement/making/movement. 

Tony Cragg/In and Out of Material.

Carlo Rovelli/Seven Brief Lessons On Physics.

Intertwining Thinking and Making.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa/The Eyes Of The Skin.

Bayfield Hall.

Making and deploying theoretical objects/installations/workshops.

Exploratory Clay/Ceramic based inquiry.

Creative entanglements in a world of/with materials/others.

CLAY.

Ceramic Components/Composite Sculptures.

Templates/Painted Cardboard. 

Extruded/Sledged/Moulded. 

Julian Stair/Art, Death and the Afterlife.

Sainsbury Centre.

As proposition to the event, choreography does so not by abstracting itself from the event but always as part of the event, it can never be separated out from its coming-into-itself-as-event. 

Choreography/unfolding-as-event is the fielding of a multiplying ecology in a co;constitutive environment, it develops in the incipiency of the in-between, spurred on by tendencies that waver between  the rekindling of habit and the tweaking of a contrast that beckons the new. 

For an event to tune itself choreographically many techniques are necessary. Techniques can be generated as tasks, or they can be self generated. 

Chorepgraphy as a generative practice must ask, how the tasks become propositional, how the coalescing ecology becomes more than the enabling constraints that set it into motion.

Erin Manning.

On The Body of Drawing/Demarcations

Localized/Relational/Choreographic.

Transparency/Translucency/Erasure 

  

What Remains/Of The Other Sister

Dead on Arrival.

The life drawing separated from its corporeal event is now just a representation marooned in its media.

The Life Room, a space where an individuals mental reality meets cultural narratives.

Refractive Phenomena : Site Circumstances, Water/Glass/Film.

 Outpost 141022

Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

Refractive Phenomena.

Void Space Water Gardens.

Steven Holl.

The haptic realm of architecture is defined by the sense of touch.

When the materiality of the details forming an architectural space become evident, the haptic realm is opened up. Sensory experience is intensified; psychological dimensions are engaged.

The psychological power of reflections overcomes the science of refraction.

As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when he does not understand he, becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Vico, New Science.

One of the tragedies of modern urban life is that a complex of urban constructions often puts us out of touch with the poetry and unpredictability of the everyday change in the weather.

Patti Smith

Baptised by the New World 

Site : Circumstance and Idea.

Phenomenal zones function life a manifold of parts, presenting the question of a whole more substantial than any of its components. 

Each challenge in architecture is unique; each has a particular site and circumstance or program, and for each to fuse sit, circumstance, and a multiplicity of phenomena, an organizing idea .. a driving concept is required.

The unity of the whole emerges from the thread that runs through the variety of parts; whether it be one discrete idea or the interrelation of several concepts.

To find a balance between the science of water and the exhilarating qualities of experience, consider the many states and transformative properties of the substance. We might consider water a 'phenomenal lens' with powers of reflection, spatial reversal, refraction, and the transformation of rays of light.

The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces' containing 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.

Hungate Medieval Art.

Water, Working Title.

Exhibition, St Peter Hungate, Norwich. 2023.

Sculpture, Installation, Sonic Art, Performance and Film Screenings.

The live reflection of echo and re-echo within a stone cathedral increases our awareness of the vastness, geometry and material of its space.

Water, its use in Christian rituals, baptism, confirmation, confession, ordination, matrimony and anointing of the sick.

Responding to the physicality of stone fonts as objects to hold holy water.

Objects produced according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church before the Reformation.

An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions. Refraction phenomena produce a particular magic in architecture that is adjacent to or incorporates water.

Of Sound.

Quieting the mind

deep in the forest

water drips down

Hosha.

The brevity of a Japanese haiku poem isolates the 'thing-in-itself' of experience and perception of material and detail.

Space brings the resonance of the acoustic near to life.

John Cage.

In some European cities, the regular sound of the church bell's community call creates a psychological space. Its perceptual associations are tied to the materiality of the bell, its resonant tower, and the adjacent square. This kind of 'sound space' cannot be accurately recreated with electronic speakers.

Sound is absorbed and perceived by the entire body. A sequence of sounds can have a mesmerizing effect on the psyche.

John Cage went into an anechoic chamber over sixty years ago in order to 'hear sounds' and found that experience gave his life direction. Cage's radical and poetic experiments with sound bridged the conventional gap between musical phenomena and the physical and psychological effects of sound.

Electronic music has increased the ranges available to composers and changes in thinking have reframed sound and time.

Scripting Aural Phenomena.

The architecture of music, the structure of aural phenomena might have a graphic parallel in architectural notations; plans sections, axonometrics, etc. Many composers have used time-space notations in order to compose with irregular rhythms. Notations which allow for accidental chromatic notes, microtones, clusters of vertical bands between marked pitches all appear different from conventional notation.

Accordingly we consider a re-framing of space, light and time in architecture.

Paul Valery suggested the closeness of music and architecture, that sculpture and painting one can turn way from, but music surrounds us as does the space of architecture.

Detail : The Haptic Realm.

Today the industrial and commercial forces at work on the 'products' for architecture tend towards the synthetic; wooden casement windows are delivered with waterproof plastic vinyl coatings, metals are 'anodized' or coated with a synthetic outer finish, tiles are glazed with coloured synthetic coatings, stone is simulated as is wood grain. 

The sense of touch is dulle or canceled with these commercial industrial methods, as is the texture and essence of material and detail displaced. 

The total perception of architectural spaces depends much on the material and detail found and experienced through the haptic realm.

The texture of a silk drape, the sharp corners of cut steel, the mottled shade and shadow of rough sprayed plaster or the sound of a spoon striking a concave wooden bowl, all reveal an authentic essence which stimulates the senses.

Fields.

Diagrams of Field Conditions.

All grids are fields, but not all fields are grids. 

On of the potentials of the field is to redefine the relation between figure and ground. If  we think of the figure not as a demarcated object read against a stable field, but as an effect emerging from the field itself- as moments of intensity, as peaks or valley within a continuous field, as the figure and field become more enmeshed.

Rather than considering photography as a means to capture an instant, some artists subverted this practice to express duration in time. Sometimes through collages, sequences and superimpositions, in some cases through a single long exposure.

Photographers are exploring different methods to synthesize the fourth dimension within the bidimensional range of the frame. The results provide a wide variety of unexpected solutions, some extremely synthetic while others very fragmented, pushing further the boundaries of the practice.

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM : Kairos~an attention to the moment in which something becomes possible.

Time here is not a line along which the work travels. It becomes a material of movement: the not yet meeting what has already gone, traces returning through new situations, images reversing, spaces carrying different temporalities at once. The diagram does not simply describe this movement; it participates in it. Kairos opens another sense of spatial practice—an attention to the moment in which something becomes possible. The current ceramic body enters this temporal field differently. Clay gathers duration through making; fire interrupts it; ceramic carries it forward. The body becomes a proposition waiting for another time, another atmosphere, another encounter.

Speculative inquiry 190926

The important movement here could be:

Can the ceramic body become a form of Kairos?

Not an object that represents time, but a body in which different temporalities become available to encounter.

That gives you a very strong correspondence with:

archive → trace → clay → firing → ceramic → futurity

The fired ceramic has a peculiar temporal condition. It contains a history of actions that cannot be repeated in quite the same way, while simultaneously becoming available to encounters that have not happened yet.

The trace looks backwards.

The proposition leans forwards.

The ceramic occupies the interval between them.

Outpost 290722

TIME/ACTION/DIAGRAM.

Maya Deren's 1948 film, Meditation on Violence.

Two parabolic arcs describe three types of Chinese boxing in a single continuous movement. 

The last portion of the film is printed in reverse motion.

DURATION

The not yet meets the already gone.

A fluid, flowing time is interwined with an experience of being where past, present and future merge. If one extreme of time is the experiential time of individual being, the other extreme is the abstract, anonymous, measured time of science.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

The Great Hall of Ascension can receive 10,000 people; its floor and ceiling are made of glass. It is intersected by the glass cages of nine elevators, each rising to its respective destination, traversing the other interiors with a discreet hiss. On the elevator shafts, electronic billboards announce different libraries. With fragments of texts, titles, names, songs descending in a continuous movement, the entire building seems supported by signs in a perpetual countdown to takeoff.

Rem Koolhaas.

Into The Frame Enters

The foreignness of the intimate or the violence and charity of perception.

R. Bruce Elder.

Kairos

The Movement and its Moment

Being Alive

Tim Ingold

Jannis Kounellis

At Castelvecchio, Sparpa embarked on a much more far-reaching idea of not only cleaning the building but attempting to clarify and expose the layers of history by selective excavation and creative demolition.

An Attitude to History, Carlo Scarpa.

It cannot be, it has gone!

They believe that we can do the same sort of work in the same spirit as our forefathers whereas for good or evil we are completely changed and we cannot do the work they did.

William Morris.

There is no stage at which human beings do not demarcate, beacon or sign their space, leaving traces that are both symbolic and practical.

The Production of Space, Lefebvre.

Autopoises and Cognition

The Realization of the Living

Humberto R. Maturana

Francisco J. Varela

We become observers through recursively generating representations of our interactions, and by interacting with several representations simultaneously we generate relations with the representations of which we can then interact and repeat this process recursively, thus remaining in a domain of interactions always larger than that of the representations.

We become self-conscious through self-observation, by making descriptions of ourselves (representations), and by interacting with our descriptions we can describe ourselves describing ourselves, in an endless recursive process. 

For colour and against line and drawing.

Works identified as Expanded Cinema often open up questions surrounding the spectator's construction of time/space relations, activating the spaces of cinema and narrative as well as other contexts of media reception. In doing so it offers an alternative and challenging perspective on film-making, visual arts practices and the narratives of social space, everyday life and cultural communication.

The concept of pure colour in a monochrome.

I seek to put the spectator in front of the fact that the colour is an individual, a character, a personality. I solicit a receptivity from the observer placed before my works.

This permits him to consider everything that effectively surrounds the monochrome painting.

Thus he can impregnate himself with colour and colour impregnates itself in him.

Thus, perhaps, he can enter into the world of colour.

Yves Klein.

Colourspace that is not visible but within which one is impregnated.

Parallax and the free movement of the landscape through physical forms.

To resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Presenting Pure Pigment.

I did not like colours ground with oil. They seemed to be dead. 

What pleased me above all was pure pigments in powder like the ones I often saw at the wholesale colour dealers.

They had a burst of natural and extraordinarily autonomous life.

Living and tangible colour material.  

Magdalena Broska

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Fire Pictures

Rain Sculptures

Air Architecture

Cosmogonies

Although it was a room painted totally in white, the artist spoke of an extraordinarily intense experience of blue: it was a true blue, the blue of the blue depths of space.

The demonstration of nothingness, the void of a white space.

Klein wanted to demonstrate the idea of a development from blue, a visible, tangible colour, via white to immaterialised blue.

There is an imaginary beyond, a pure beyond, one without a within, in which Bachelard's beautiful sentence resides: First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then a blue depth.

Blue blood of sensibility

Bachelard/Shelley.

A wide variety of different expressions for the process of progressive dematerialisation.

The release of colour from the binding agent.

Work with dematerialised materials such as the elements fire, water, air and dust.

The term Expanded Cinema identifies a film and video practice which activates the live context of watching, transforming cinema's historical and cultural architectures of reception into sites of cinematic experience that are heterogeneous, performative and non-determined.

Narrative Exploration in Expanded Cinema, seeks to explore the various histories of expanded cinema and their impact on the question of narrative, space and time in experimental film and art practices.

Film/Expanded Cinema. 

Temporal Spaces/Surfaces.

Transparency/Translucency, littoral and Phenomenal.

Mark Burry and Jane Burry

Prototyping for Architects.

Steven Holl 

Parallax.

Designing buildings as serial prototypes.

Spatial Clocks/Theoretical Objects/Entanglements.

Materials imbue the wind-permeable wall with rich textile qualities.

The whole house acted as a prototype, not only showcasing the latest developments in green technology but also exploring at full scale, the performance of the house and the way in which people interacted with it.

The artists wanted to make the same gesture that many cultures make when marking the land through which they have passed, the placing  of one stone on top of another to signal a route back.

The deeper speculative proposition

What I think is emerging from these four posts is that the current spatial practice may not simply be about making ceramic bodies spatial.

It may be about something more particular:

Spatiality is being discovered as a condition of correspondence between bodies.

The earlier work repeatedly approaches this through different media:

cyanotype allows material to seep beyond the traced body;

collage and montage allow fragments to occupy a shared field;

diagram allows temporal and spatial relations to remain in movement;

the vessel allows surface and interior to sense one another;

walking allows place and body to continually alter one another.

Clay now becomes a particularly intense site for all of these propositions because it can receive, resist, absorb, register, perforate, enclose, open and transform.

Then firing changes the proposition again.

The archive gathers the activities through which spatiality was already becoming perceptible: trace, movement, multiplicity, innerness, atmosphere and encounter. Clay does not resolve these bodies into form. It troubles them into correspondence.

The spatial practice was already there, dispersed across bodies. Clay became the place where they could touch.

That last sentence feels particularly close to what you are now calling In~~Touching.

The Instant/The Scent of Magnolia : Process/Projection : Tarkovsky/Chadwick/Bachelard/Smith/Sylvian

The Instant is already solitude.

It is solitude in its barest metaphysical value, a creative violence:

Gaston Bachelard. Intuition of the Instant
Maria Popova, brainpickings
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/01/18/intuition-of-the-instant-gaston-bachelard/



The Sacrifice/Tarkovsky  1986
Screen Capture

Speculative Fields/Spatial Practices
Site Writing/Place Making
Collage/Enumeration of photographic elements

DSCN7548 : Process/Projection
Piss Flowers/Helen Chadwick
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-chadwick-2253

The Scent of Magnolia

The Blinding Light of Heaven

Brilliant Trees

Everything and Nothing, David Sylvian.

The Coral Sea

Patti Smith, Kevin Shields.

Russell Moreton DSC_0023 The Abbey re-invested through the Photographic Process