Assemblages of movement : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies/Body Matters

Outpost 201124

Parables for the Virtual.

Brian Massumi. 1985

When we think of space as 'extensive' as being measurable, divisible and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in thought. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality.

If you know where you where you will end up when you begin, nothing happens tn the meantime.

Bergson redefined space in terms of movement, space is not a ground on which real motion is posited, rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself. Space comes into being through motion or event.

On Architectural Experience.

Architecture has the potential capacity on human/spatial bodies to affect or to be affected.

Relations of Movement and Rest.

The bodies capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest, to affect or to be affected.

Massumi/Spinoza/Deleuze.

Architecture still remains primarily as a discussion of distinct bodies, spatial and human with the two remaining physically and psychologically distinct.

Violated Bodies-Spaces.

Intense confrontations between body and space.

Tschumi allows for architecture to be considered as an assemblage, composed of a space and a bodily event, however, even his 'equation' retains a demarcation between spatial bodies and human bodies engaging in event and maintaining that the two function according to independent logics, but  serve to affect one another.

Bodies and spaces excrete out of themselves, they penetrate one another, contemporary architecture does not know what to do with such borderless entities. It has no mode of thinking about assemblages of this kind, where once discrete objects leak into one another creating indiscernible masses. There is a multiplicity of bodies, bodies that are forever being created and dismantled, forever in flux.

Architecture between Spectacle and Use.

Anthony Vidler. 2008

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

For Vidler this spectacle architecturre is one that embraces the ideas of image and iconomy.

In addition to carefully placing and posing lone figures within architectural photographs, architecture is also synonymous with casting idealised bodies, Le Corbusier's athelitic figures and his 'Modulor' of an ideal masculine body. And then there are the bodies available in computer models, and the physical little white plastic figurines. These are all ideal figures, doing proper things.

Disjunction.

Volatility-Violence.

Sets in motion a particular series of potentialities that otherwise lie dormant, which can alter architectures physical, social, cultural, ethical and at times political properties. 

Creating a schism between program and space, space and program, it does this so precisely because event-space and movement each follow a distinct logic, that when they are superimposed over one another they create disjunction.

For Tschumi there is an intense confrontation that occurs between body and space, bodies violate space and space violates bodies, the relationship between the two is symmetrical.

Indexical Trace/Drawing : Anthropocentrism/Hospitality.

Outpost 14082

Figurative Anthropocentrism in the Visual Arts/Humanities.

Organism-Person-Environment

Architectural Body.

A figure in congress with its environment.

Attunement is a living dynamic relation with another being, it doesn't stop.

De-constructivist Drawings.

Causal Matter Remains.

Reclaiming the papers reserve, its infinite space, through the reclamation of mark making.

Drawing/Veering towards things.

All lines as vectors of movement, situated to have immediate phenomenal values.

Seeking out, a line that searches for a corporeal congress.

Immediate primal territories of making/tuning differences.

Marks of attunement and adaption that we can own and explore.

Indexical Trace/Butades, definitive space/body of a boundary of sensation. 

Bodily inclusion, a drawing hidden yet revealing its presence intimately to the papers total surface. 

A lines movement, its attunement/demarcation to the body, of the body, creates the flow of sensation, simultaneous lines make explicit the absence of the matter into form.  

On the manner of attunement, since a thing cannot be known directly or totally, one can only attune to it with greater or lesser degrees of intimacy. Nor is this attunement a 'merely' aesthetic approach to a basically blank extensional substance. Since appearance can't be peeled decisively from the reality of a thing. 

In Art As In Life.

What would it look like if we allowed more and more things to have some kind of power over us?

There is an excessive intensity to the energy of things that can't be contained efficiently. This can produce a type of restricted economy, that is an economy in which the dominant theme is efficiency.

Living in a society based on principles of restriction and efficiency, a modern life that is tight and restrictive and full of all kinds of police and policing, of policing pleasure, of keeping lifeforms alive. In the end any style of efficiency is going to be stifling and uncreative, not allowing for malfunctions and accidents.

Art is a place where we get to see what it means to be human or whatever, which is why what I do is called humanities, which contains a lot of different temporal formats, realising this is what ecological awareness is all about. It's the equivalent to acknowledging in a deep way, the existence of things that aren't you with whom you coexist. Once you've done that you can't un-acknowledge it. There's no going back.

All Art Is Ecological/Tunings. Timothy Morton.

Painting adds perspectives of emotions through colour.

An idea for a painting is a way of seeing inquiry/nurturing it/gathering an idea for exploration between interior-exterior. 

 

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

Procedural Architecture

Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Working Notes/Holding in Place

Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research

Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements

Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive 

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry

Camouflage

Neil Leach

For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.

Mimesis, 19.

New Concepts of Architecture

Existence, Space and Architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.

A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson

Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains.

Heraclitus

Rethinking Architecture

Neil Leach

Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343

Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360

Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition,annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.

Tracing Eisaenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences

Robert Mangold

Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.

Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.

Space Between People

Degrees of virtualization

Mario Gerosa

Adaptive Architectural Design

Device-Apparatus

Place

Function

Adaptation

The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 69

Building The Drawing

The Illegal Architect

Immaterial Architecture

Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures

Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.

The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity.

Speculative architecture

On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron

Without opposition nothing is revealed,

no image appears in a clear mirror

if one side is not darkened

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619)

Reflections on a photographic medium

Memorial to the Unknown Photographer

Thomas Ruff's Newspaper Photos

Valeria Liebermann

Working Collages

Karl Blossfeldt

Anti Object

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called architecture, gardens, technology is not important. 

Kengo Kuma

Life Drawing : An Emotional History of The Performative/Rhizomatic Body

Humanity : An Emotional History
Stuart Walton. 2004

Fear
Anger
Disgust
Sadness
Jealousy
Contempt
Shame
Embarrassment
Surprise
Happiness

Oxford Dictionary of Geography: spatiality

 

The effect that space has on actions, interactions, entities, concepts, and theories. Physical spatiality can also be metaphorical. It is used to show social power—thrones are higher than the seats of commoners, and ‘high tables’ for university teachers in most Oxbridge colleges physically elevate the teachers over the taught. People use proximity to show how intimate they want to be with others (See personal space), or orientation; we may face someone or turn away from them. Institutions and governments have used large architectural spaces to invoke awe, while restaurateurs may create ‘cosiness’ in small spaces.

LIFE DRAWING : Phenomenological Reductions

The body is not an object, but the condition and context through which I am able to have relations with others. 

Merleau-Ponty

A study of one body in front of another body.

Our body is our connection with the world and all its phenomena, it is fundamental in our communication and interactions.

The body is a force of creative action and a site of resistance.

An exploration in various forms of physical dialogue between performing bodies.

Energetic flows from others, what energy and phenomena will these relationships bring about on these bodies and the space they inhabit.

Personal and public boundaries of others, a being towards things through the intermediality of the body.

For Deleuze and Gauttari the body is rhizomatic (containing multiplicities, intensities and flows) and in active connection and interaction with its becomings, surroundings and situatedness.

What a body can do, what a body is capable of

The body without organs (BwO) is an attempt by Deleuze and Gauttari to denaturalize 'human bodies' and place the body in direct relation and connection to flows and particles of other bodies and things, creating constellations from its modes of organization of disparate substances.

"Spatial turn" The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

The origin of "True Humanity" : Tim Ingold

Photography/A Fragmentary Whole : The Temporal Flow of Things

Postmodern : Ever Changing, Fleeting, Positive, Nihilistic,

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.
It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity
is conceptual...
Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin
with the same concept,
they do not have the same concept of beginning...
Every concept has an irregular
contour defined by the sum of its components,
which is why,
from Plato to Bergson,
we find
the idea of the concept being a
matter of articulation,
of cutting and
cross-cutting.
The concept is a whole because it totalizes
its components, but it is
a fragmentary whole.
Only on this condition can it escape the
mental chaos
constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."


-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

“Philosophy is really homesickness,” says Novalis: “it is the urge to be at home everywhere.”

Literary cartography is not a literal form of mapmaking, after all; rather, it involves the ways and means by which a given work of literature functions as a figurative map, serving as an orientating or sense-making form.

Lukács’s Literary Cartography:

Spatiality, Cognitive Mapping, and The Theory of the Novel

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Path : Circular, Stonehenge

Transparency,time and matter #2

Camera Obscura : Kilquhanity 2011. #4

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".

Blue Spaces : White Absences #2
https://visualartpractices.wordpress.com/

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach
Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,
Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

London/Millennium Bridge : Architectural Abstracts/Drawing Traces

" Under the protective dome "

" Under the protective dome ", a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.