Showing posts with label enchantment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label enchantment. Show all posts

Friday, 27 March 2026

Littoral Environments : Arts and Subjectivity (the making of things)

Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"

The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.

As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.
































The making of things and discovering relationships.

Constructing site and situation based methodologies.

Playing out in the public realm, exploring through spatial engagements the "virtues" of courage, caution, confidence and risk.

Wednesday, 5 November 2025

Enchantment and Sites of Sensual Engagement : Periphery/Boundaries and their limits.

Outpost 140323

Wonders On The Periphery Of living.







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


The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.


Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett.


The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind  that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.



The dialectical principle of the intertwining of the world and the self.


My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and confirms to itself.


The Intertwining-The Chiasm.

The Visible and the Invisible.

Merleau-Ponty.


The Concept Of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

Intervals/Sequences/Iterations : Between Drawings/Templates/Prototypes.



The Eyes Of The Skin.

Critics of Ocularcentrism.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ontology of the flesh as the ultimate conclusion of his initial phenomenology of perception. This ontology implies that meaning is both within and without, subjective and objective, spiritual and material.

Richard Kearney.





Sculptural Spacings/Bindings.

Creativity, materials/matters of concern caught around the creative act of a self amongst others.


Temporal Interrelations.

Adaptive Bridging Strategies.

Playing with materials, to bring forth the synergies of thinking/making/imagination.


Working so as to form or 'seed' gaps amongst the process of exploration.

The display of agency, of un-learning perspectives, discontents, alterity and literal landscapes.


Sites of sensual engagement through alternative forms of individual and social participation.


Energies, entropic to living things.

Natures/Intellectual Spaces.

Indexical Traces/Flows of Energy.

Artists/Makers on the process of material transformation, mobility, thought, body, through an embodied/subjective/multisensory experience. 


Raveningham, allows the thinking of the existential qualities of natures materials in an intimacy/nowness with the natural world. An enmeshed world, working on natures terms, of movement, change, life, growth, and decay.


For Olafur Eliasson, the practice sets out to examine the way an embodied sense of a place can be restructured as a function/site of a sculptural spacing that questions ideas around embodiment, perception, architectural programming. 


The landscape without objects/without hylomorphic thinking.

Tim Ingold.


The Periphery. 

Frontiers and their Disappearance.

Borders and Limits.

Wim Nijenhuis.


Individuation, the process of 'becoming something' and the 'being there' of 'something.'


Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay's molecular organisation.


Paul Virilio, distinguishes two orders around the frontier, that of place, characterised by a stability of form, and that of speed, characterised by the fading of form.


Primarily the city is formed and informed by heterogeneous speeds, by the difference between inertia and traffic, the form of the city is thus finally an unstable effect. The city exists through traffic in all its forms.



Keywords : Vectorisation, Distinctive Oppositions, Hylomorphic Schema, Form-Matter-Model,  Place, Speed, Inertia, Traffic, 


New Figure/Grounds.


Geometric marks, vectors across a surface that might suggest some opaque system of musical notation, of points/notes connected forming a constellation of lines and angles. Workings on and between that are synonymous with the field/environ of the canvas, in such a way as it is no longer possible to speak of the classical figure ground relationship.


The Luminescence of Space.

Towards a more delimited spatial conception, a loss of centre.

Charles Maussion.


Rethinking, gestural, expressionistic, lyrical abstractions, atmospheric figuration. 


Keywords : Colour Field Painting, Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Orhon Mubin, Spatial Conception, 


Wednesday, 19 June 2024

Enchantment/Embodied Knowledge : The Intertwining of Vision and Movement.

The Embodied Image.

Imagination and Imagery in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa. 2011


Drawing Studio/Life Room






Outpost 280122

Assemblage : Wire, Fabric, Fired Clay, Glass on drawing.


The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries

A spatial inquiry, a means of exploring agential cuts/spatial agency.


Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"


The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett 2001.


It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.


As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.



Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.


The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.


The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.


A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.


Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.


Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.


All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.


Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.


She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.


He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 


It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 


Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 


Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 


Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 


The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.


A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 


Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.


Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.


Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.


Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing,entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.


By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.



Monday, 27 February 2023

Pure Presence : Ethics/Aesthetics/Politics, Jane Bennett


Text Extract/Inclusion. "Pure Presence"


The enchantment of modern life: attachments, crossings, and ethics : Jane Bennett. 2001.


It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics.