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.

Assemblages of Event : Visual Art+Spatial Practices/Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies

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The Everyday.

ANTONIO  He misses not much.

SEBASTIAN  No, he doth but mistake the truth totally.

The Tempest.

The Transparency Of The Morning.

One never sees what is always seen.

The immediate, just like the simple, the natural and the ordinary, does not perceive itself.

Substances : Artworks, rituals of purity and impurity.

Demarcations/Systems/Fields of order and contravention.

Material Margins/Transitional  Spatial Spaces.

Knowing that this clarity which has sprung up will soon dissipate.

Morning coincides with the emergence, giving back a possibility of springing up, of rising before the day has started to spread out.

For Jullien, it is possible to gain access to it only as we gain access to the immediacy of the day from the night. A world in which living is not right away (in which respect metaphysics is correct) it is necessary to cause it to rise. But without again being concealed by whatever has been entrusted with revealing it.

Life, is devoted from the outset to what its 'end' might be (telos) in the full sense of the Greek word.

Telos, at once a conclusion, aim, perfection, abandoning all the preceding 'between of life' to indifference.

The Way- Without demarcation, rather a way of viability by which the continuum of life is renewed.

The Philosophy of Living.

Francois Jullien.

Developing Open Subjectivities/BwO : Visual Art, Winchester. 2006.

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

Bodies are conditioned by architectural surrounds.

Architectural Body.

Reversible Destiny. 

Arakawa and Gins.

The transformative body, creates bodily interiors/relations that can open up to become productive alliances in which using spatial bodies, (other than the ideal types) they can be brought into new affiliations with systems outside of their boundaries. 

Creating an affective intensity.

Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies.

Relationscapes/Bodies/Events.

Organism-Person-Environment

Event-Space-Movement, superimposed over one another creates disjunction(Tschumi) and assemblages (Deleuze).

Drawing/Beginning a dialogue with matter/material between human bodies and spatial bodies.

Simple articulations (frottage) with the immensity and immediacy of the everyday.

Abstracted-Diagrammatic-Inhabitations.

Paintings/Drawings/Sculptures/Instalations.

Francis Bacon.

The Logic of Sensation. 1981, 2003.

Deleuze.

Reliquaries/Enclosures of Spatial Silences and of Light/Air.

A type of labyrinth with a momentary impossibility of escape (soul cages)  these are minoritarian architectures (Deleuze).

Real Spaces for Fictional Events.

A becoming architecture to provoke potentials to occur.

On the everyday, abjection of the human body.

The Clinic.

Bathrooms are spaces associated with the clean body and simultaneously with the dirty body. They are spaces that allow for hygienic evacuation of our excretions, they order our un-containment.

At the end of the day , the curtain is hung and there is a certain visceral repulsion to the damp curtain hanging in the window. To the drying of our bodily excretions and their gradual visual indiscernibility with the fabric. So no one knows what the fabric has absorbed.

All that remains is us, inhaling ourselves as air passes through the curtain and into our lungs. A re-absorption of our expulsions.

Zuzana Kovar.

The work of Deleuze and Guattari as a whole provides a way of approaching all bodies void of a dualistic framework. In particular for Kovar, Deleuze's work specifically touches on abject(ion) through his notion of an open and transformative or spasmodic body, which he discusses in the work of Francis Bacon.

Figure at a Washbasin. 1976

Francis Bacon.

Event-spaces in the paintings of Francis Bacon.

The Body-Figure/Figural-Event.

From the start, the figure has been a body and the body has a place within the enclosure of the painting from which the figure expels itself, gymnastically on the fields of colour. Is this the event of a body escaping itself into a figure, of the body in Deleuzean terms of trying to escape any notion of identity/form of repression?    

For Bacon, the body-figure exerts an intense motionless effort upon itself in order to escape down the blackness of the drain. This plexus (the body as plexus) its effort or waiting for a spasm, becomes for Bacon a painterly approximation of horror or abjection.

Paintings that create spasms that re-order the human organism, in order to escape it, by growing bodily organs as prostheses, or by allowing the enclosure of painterly space and contour to become an apparatus, an extension of the body-figure-figuration.  

The body waits to escape itself in a very precise manner, to escape itself via a spasm, the movement of the figure towards the material structure, towards the field of colour.

For Deleuze, the body repeatedly attempts to escape the organism, the particular organisation of organs that may be understood as constituting the subject the 'I', for Deleuze the body attempts to escape the 'I'. It is not 'I' who attempt to escape from my body, it is the body that attempts to escape from itself by means of, a spasm. But the body is not simply waiting for something from the structure (its place is an enclosure), it is waiting for something inside itself. It exerts an effort upon itself in order to become a figure now it is inside the body that something is happening, the body is the source of movement.

Athleticism, The Logic of Sensation. Deleuze.

Elliptical Circulations

Studio Wall Spaces/Artist's Books.

Between 'Devices'

Documentation/Research/Reading/Places/Images

Interpolation/Interpolation/Interstitial. 

Sculpting In Time.

Tarkovsky.

The Poetics of Space.

Gaston Bachelard.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience

Spatial Practices/An Affective Intensity~Agencement : Thinking Matter : Between Human/Spatial Relations

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An Affective Intensity.

The juxtaposing volatility of abjecting spatial and human bodies.

Spatial Agency/Assemblages~Agencement in constant relational movement.

Abstracted-Diagrammatic-Inhabitations.

Expulsions from/for relational bodies.

A Provisional/Speculative Framework.

Tuschimi's Equation : A framework that sets out a logical outcome, but where the insertion of event introduces a deviation, a slippage from the planned/programmed outcome. Such that the 'architecture' is indeterminate.

Event=Space-Movement.

Creating Disjunction, superimposing assemblages of event/space/movement over(entangling) one another.

A Becoming Architecture.

To provoke potentials to occur.

Contracts (Architectural Transcripts), scripting spatial relations that utilise fictional scenarios in real spaces, are used as a way of working with temporal events.

Here architecture is pushed towards and over its limits to the point where it is no longer 'architecture' as we know it. But rather an architecture, an anticipation of an architecture (social construct) to come.

Immediate Architectural Intraventions.

Spatial Practice.

Thinking Matter : Between Human/Spatial Relations

WSA 2007-Outpost 2024

Real Space + Fictional 'Event'

The architectural origin of each 'episode' is found within a specific reality, and not in an abstract geometrical figure.

Tschumi.

Minoritarian Architecture/Deleuze.

They produce a type of labyrinth, with a momentary impossibility of escape.

They are architectures in a constant state of change, perpetually agitating the discipline's established norms.

Abject (ion) facilitates an affective intensity.

Art works (workings) made from an expelling human body in relations with spatial bodies.

Waiting Rooms

Soul Cages.

Black Books

Installations

Ceramic/Architectural Propositions

Zuzana Kovar.

Abject(ion) is a discussion of bodies of assemblages.

Abject events render a particular indeterminacy. There is an aim here through abject(ion) to re-purpose architectural methodologies in order to contemplate abject(ion) and specifically contemplate its dilution of boundaries between bodies. It is critical to reiterate that abject(ion) through its volatile and leaky nature inevitably comes to encompass more than one body.  

Material Markings/Inhabitation.

Life Drawings/Frottage/Graphite/Charcoal/Concrete.

Winchester Weeke Centre 2006.

Architectural Body/Architecture In Abjection : Bodies/Spaces and their Relations.

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Studio Works/Architectural Surround.

Art practice explores relations between organism-person-environment.

Architecture In Abjection.

Bodies, Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

This book marks a turning point in architectural theory by using philosophy to examine the field anew. Breaking from the traditional dualism (space-body) within architecture – which presents the body as subject and space as object – it examines how such rigid boundaries can be softened. Zuzana Kovar thus engages with complementary and complex ideas from architecture, philosophy, feminist theory and other subjects, demonstrating how both bodies and bodily functions relate deeply to architecture. 

Architecture: A dualistic paradigm.

On the breath of approaches to subjectivity.

Eisenman,Tschumi, Derrida.

Deconstructivism challenged the notion of wholes, order, rationality and stability of space/object. Hence it questioned much of modernism, which was seen as purist, and attempted to map out an in-between. In the late 1980s, Eisenman wrote that 'traditional oppositions between structure and decoration, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground, form and function  could be dissolved.

Architecture could begin an exploration of the 'between' within these categories. Explorations of the in-between can be seen in play in Eisenman's Wexner Centre (1989) in Columbus, a building split in two by a 'scaffold structure', which is not temporary but permanent. As such, the centre apparently 'falls somewhere between process and product, past and present, shelter and non-shelter, structure and form, structure and ornament, building and non-building, exterior and interior. In an almost identical sense, Tschumi has written much the same in his Manhatten Transcripts (1994). 

What emerged from Derrida and his deconstructive form of criticism was a particular way of thinking about and practising architecture beyond dualism. Yet, despite this apparent shift from a dualist mode of thought to one that engaged with the in-between, and despite the complexity and promise of thought revealed in the respective theories of Eisenman and Tschumi, if one interrogates the built works, what is revealed is that the subject remains very much intact, and so too does the dualism of subject-object.

Deconstructive architectural theory and its built works have been funnelled into a formalism, which is preoccupied with deconstructing platonic solids and the notion of the object/space as a whole and discrete entity.

For Kovar, what is necessary, is to reconfigure the dualism of subject-object/body-space, to deconstruct the hierarchy and distinction between the two and to map out an in-between between these, rather than within space itself. It is the distinction between body and space that forms the crux of dualistic thought within the architectural discipline, which unless probed, will  allow this mode of thought to prevail.

Tschumi's theory of 'event' introduces a relational conception of the body within architectural discipline. In so doing he mobilises the subject and further shifts the focus from a body to the movements of that body. For Kovar, this setting of the body in motion (although again we are dealing with just one side of the equation) is a lot more productive in the context of questioning dualistic paradigms than formally deconstructing space. Thinking in terms of event allows for not only a volatile conception of the body, but a volatile conception of architecture, given that for Tschumi architecture is constituted by spaces and events.

Developing architectural thought beyond relations to a body or space in isolation.

Event/Assemblages/Bodies/Space-Flows.

Using the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattati and the notions of event, movements, defined in terms of vectors and field relations, time (or the idea that all things change) and scale (an awareness and importance of the similarities in relations across any number of scales)

Architectural Body.

Architectural Surround

Bioscleave.

Arakawa and Gins map out a relational understanding of bodies and spaces, and hence a relational understanding of architecture.

Thinkers, theories conducted in spaces inhabited through experimental projects that illuminate theory at its core.

Sanford Kwinter, Arakawa + Gins, Brian Massumi, Gilles Deleuze.

Being Ecological.

Part of our growing ecological awareness is a feeling of disgust that we are literally covered in and penetrated by nonhuman beings, not just by accident but in an irreducible way. A way that is crucial to our very existence. Maybe this feeling of disgust will diminish if we become used to our immersion in the biosphere. Just like our neurotic feelings diminish as we become friendlier with our thoughts.

Timothy Morton.

Circulating Objects/Assemblages : Making Spaces/Creative Strategies

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Occupant Spatial Relations 

Sites centred around interactions of creative practice and architectural theories of making spaces.

Architecture understood as a collection of collective parts.

A diagrammatic art of lived abstraction and lived-in abstraction.

A space for inhabiting experience.

Attention to material : Architecture as the excitement of building/dwelling/becoming

An inhabiting event is the medium of architecture.

Garden : Spatial Markers/Bodies/Paths.

Spatial Practices : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies. Tate Modern. #7

Zuzana Kovar, notes that the shortcoming of Tschumi's event is that while it introduces a processional understanding of architecture and mobilizes the body in space, space it self remains static.

Equation becomes a spatial assemblage for occurrences.

For Deleuze, an 'assemblage' extends the understanding between bodies and spaces.

Program is determinate.

Event is indeterminate.

A program gives a fixed outcome, a fixed spatial experience. An event does not, critically the 'notion of event' is that it activates potentialities. Each space, may be thought of as composed of multiple singular potentialities that lay dormant, unless activated. 

All spaces contain multiple potentialities.

Event Is Not Program.

There is no architecture without actions, no architecture without events, no architecture without program.

Architecture=Space + Event.

Tschumi.

Program is to be distinguished from 'event', a program is a determinate set of expected occurrences, a list of required utilities often based on social behavior, habit or custom. In contrast events occur as an indeterminate set of outcomes, revealing hidden potentialities or contradictions in a program and relating them to a particularly appropriate (or possibly exceptional) spatial configuration that may create conditions for unexpected events to occur.

Generating uncommon or unpredictable events through particular spatial configurations of the in-between.

Abject(ion) Studio Space.

Subjectivity/Spatial Bodies.

Discursive Objects/Architectural Occurrences/Resonances.

Assemblages, fired, raw pigments, paint, chalk, wax, plaster. 

The Enabling Constraint.

Objects become relational in conjunction with the ways in which the environment proposes its own constitutive limits.

Erin Manning.

Ceramics Speculative/Exploratory Practices.

New Ceramic Forms of Research/Theoretical Objects.

Disjunction and Event/Processual Research : Collage/Constrained Spaces/Spatial Body

Processual Making/Messy Entanglements : Creating sustained flows of engagement resulting in some connections that can occur but not others, working practices that can create a pattern or field of relations/resistance or constraint.

Movement is Material.

Mobility/New Social Assemblages

Ingold/Thrift

Movement creates differences, it resists and perpetuates between human bodies/spatial bodies.

Constrained spaces shaped by the tensions of the environment.

Combined works/conceptual frameworks with research as an integral part of the practice to produce ways of sensing/making ecologies of  knowledge.

Ecology-as-Assemblage

An assemblage is able to retroactively affect its parts.

Human identities and bodies are inherently multiple, relational and dependant on more-than-human presences. 

On Landscape Ontology, Bryant. 2011

The co-existence of such heterogeneous dimensions and demands makes up the 'event.' The event is a sudden intensity generated by the juxtaposition and superimposition of differences. The event tends to exacerbate differences rather than making everything similar.

Disjunction and Event.

Bernard Tschumi.

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

Matter-Feels-Converses-Suffers-Desires-Yearns and Remembers.

New Materialism/Interviews and Cartographies.

Ann Arbor, Karen Barad, Dolphijn and Tuin. 2012

Agency is about an ability to respond, to change things, about the possibilities of worldly reconfigurations, in this way it enlists non-humans as well as humans.

Human capacity becomes distributed rather than situated in a hegemonic subject-object relationship. Rather it is a result of complex heterogenous entanglements, networks, imbroglio's, assemblages and ecologies. In this perspective, agency is not something possessed solely by humans or for that matter, non-humans.

Choreography of existence : Holloways and making of landscapes.

Dimitrij Mlekuz.

• Russell Moreton
• visual art
• visual fine art
• spatial practice
• research creation
• ecology of experience