Thinking Through Making~Design Anthropology~Materiality. Tim Ingold.

Thinking through Making.

Professor Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

31 October 2013.

Ever since Aristotle, it has been customary in the western tradition to think of making 

as a bringing together of a preconceived, ideal form, in the mind of the maker, with an 

initially formless mass of raw material. In this view, all the thinking has been done 

before the making begins. And for those who encounter the finished object, the thought 

can only be recovered by reading back from the work to an idea in the mind of the maker. 

Here I present an alternative account of making, as an inherently mindful activity in 

which the forms of things are ever-emergent from the correspondence of sensory awareness 

and material flows in a process of life. Artefacts and thoughts are the more or less 

ephemeral cast-offs of this process, strewn along the way. Rather than imposing form on 

matter, the maker -- operating within a field of forces that cut across any divisions 

between body and environment -- is caught between the anticipatory reach of the 

imagination and the frictional drag of materials.

Research Lines~Modes of Existence~Inquiry.

Ceramic Passages~Circulations~Volumes : Proposals for experience.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold challenges the traditional model of creation, proposing that genuine creativity arises from improvising with materials rather than imposing pre-existing ideas. 

This approach advocates for understanding knowledge as something that grows from within our active, sensory engagement with the world.

The act of making has increasingly been reframed within contemporary discourse not as a secondary stage of production, but as a primary mode of thinking and knowing. 

This shift recognizes "making" as an epistemological process—a way of creating knowledge, rather than just materializing a pre-existing idea. It moves from a model where thought precedes production to one where knowledge emerges through engagement with materials and tools. 

This paradigm, often referred to as "[Thinking Through Making]" or an "[Epistemology of Making]," is prevalent in design, architecture, and anthropology. 

Key Aspects of Making as Knowing

Embodied Cognition: Knowledge is generated through the body's interaction with materials, often described as "thinking with your hands" or "ping-ponging" between mind and material.

Emergent Process: Forms and knowledge emerge "from the inside" of the process rather than being imposed on materials.

Epistemic Objects: The objects created are not just final products, but active participants in the learning process, allowing makers to see, tinker with, and understand problems differently.

Materiality and Resistance: The constraints and friction encountered during making (e.g., in crafting, digital fabrication) force critical thinking and adaptation, which are essential to developing expertise. 

Context in Contemporary Discourse

Design Research & Pedagogy: Architectural pedagogy is shifting toward a process-oriented approach, where empirical making and experimentation are central to critical thinking.

Design Anthropology: "Making" is used to understand the world by actively participating in its creation, treating design as "world-making" rather than just problem-solving.

Social Constructionism: This perspective implies that knowledge is not static but created through ongoing social and material interactions. 

This reframing moves the maker from an "artisan" filling an intellectual blueprint to an "active thinker" whose understanding grows through engagement with the world. 

Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Inquiry/Materials/Objects/Things

Slow Philosophy/Discursive Attachments : Gathering Materials/Objects/Things

Research as a discursive activity gathering new forms of expression.

A practice gathers before it knows what it is gathering. Materials, images, readings, places and forces begin to form temporary attachments, crossing and touching without becoming a single thing. The boundary is less a wall than a membrane: something that holds while allowing exchange. Slow philosophy becomes a way of staying with these movements, allowing materials and ideas to remain unfinished, and therefore available to becoming otherwise.

Slow Philosophy

→ semi-permeable membranes

→ Wayfaring Forms

→ bodies opening to exchange

→ Restless Objects / Ickworth

→ sheltering spaces

→ Ceramic Bodies

→ surface / interior / aperture

→ Permeable Chambers

→ In~~Touching

Duration, Steven Holl

Time is only understood in relation to a process or a phenomenon.

The duration of human beings alive in one time and place is a relational notion.

The time of one's being is provisional; it is a circumstance with an adopted aim for the time being.

SPACE-and ARCHITECTURE-exceeds the provisional

The Enchantment of Modern Life.

Attachments, Crossing and Ethics

The performativity of social representations

When I gather together the animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, interpretations, sounds, people, and images of this study, one theme emerges. The modern story of disenchantment leaves out important things, and it neglects crucial sources of ethical generosity in doing so. Without modes of enchantment, we might not have the energy and inspiration to enact ecological projects, or to contest ugly and unjust modes of commercialization, or to respond generously to humans and nonhumans that challenge our settled identities. These enchantments are already in and around us.

Jane Bennett

Be not inhospitable to strangers

lest they be angels in disguise

Jackie Leven, The Dent In The Fender And The Wheel Of Fate

David Childers, Heart In My Soul

Collage Works : Architectural Studies. Outpost Studios, Norwich.

Studio Works : Praxis between theory and practice. Outpost 2020.

Outpost Studios Norwich, collage, textual, intermedia, 

spatial practice, resource, project space, art practice, research, book works

Architectural Inquiry : Metaphysical Surfaces

Blue Spaces Of Everyday Enchantments : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

Slow Philosophy : Materials/Objects/Things

Few boundaries are impenetrable.

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce.

In a world of materials, nothing is ever finished : 'everything may be something, but being something is always on the way to becoming something else'

Tim Ingold 2011

Materials, Tim Ingold, slow philosophy, studio works, textile, clay, painting, yellow ochre

New works around fired clay, painting, wrapping forms, metal, textiles and stones.

Architectural research for a library within a studio.

clay, textile, wrapping, painting, natural objects, 

photographic surface, asperity, poetics of process, studio

Palimpsest/Surface Sprays : Spaces Between Objects

Site based inquiry for sculpture trail at Raveningham

collage, research, spatiality, art practice, alternative photography, 

drawing, architectural, intervention, visual fine art, craft.

I wouldn't put this under Ceramic Bodies, even though clay is present. Its real importance is gathering.

It gathers animals, arguments, molecules, suggestions, forces, sounds, people and images; then moves through architecture, studio work, clay, textiles, painting, natural objects, surface and Raveningham. The idea of the semi-permeable membrane is especially close to your present vocabulary.

The original Ceramic Bodies constellation was:

matter → movement → energy → iteration → interiority

These five introduce another set of movements:

shelter → permeability → gathering → process → wayfaring

And the two sets begin to touch.

“Few boundaries are impenetrable / They are rather, semi-permeable membranes...”

is remarkably close to where Permeable Chambers has subsequently arrived.

The archive is not proving the present practice.

It is becoming capable of corresponding with it.

And Slow Philosophy may be one of the clearest examples so far: the 2021 material already contains semi-permeability, unfinished becoming, gathering, clay, surface, studio, architecture and material reciprocity.

That is much more interesting than simply saying, “this old post is relevant to my current work.”

studio, metaphysical space, collage, Palimpsest, Cristina Iglesias, Steven Holl, Jackie Leven, Tim Ingold, Julian Stair, drawing, sprays, Jane Bennett, Russell Moreton, Lucio Fontana,

The Ceramics Reader : Brickyard Ceramics~Complexity grounded in basic things/movements

A sanctuary for promise.

Clay carries more than form. It carries energy, scale, repetition, accident and the histories of those who have worked with it. The brickyard becomes a field of material possibilities: abundance, excess, misfiring, construction and movement. Fired clay remains marked by these conditions. What appears as a ceramic body is therefore also a body of accumulated encounters, carrying making beyond the moment in which it was formed.

Clay+Ceramic : Complexity grounded in basic things.

A source of energy, intense and exuberant in the early days, more subtle in later decades, but always leaving its mark on so many artists' work.

The Archie Bray Foundation : A Legacy Reframed.

Patricia Failing.

But the Bray energy field left its mark on ceramics history did not emanate from the early production pottery alone. The Foundation provided unique opportunities in the early 1950s, and not all were associated with celebrity visitors. LaMar Harrington remarked on one of the most significant contributions the Bray made to Peter Voulkos's artistic development:

It was the sheer abundance of material. He could be as prolific as he could be and throw the biggest pots he could throw in part because he had carloads of clay-enough clay to absorb his tremendous energy. I don't think he would have become the artist he did without that opportunity. I also think the look of the brickyard-the slag heaps and misfired bricks-had some effect on the style of his later work. As for Rudy Autio, the slab constructions he made for architectural commissions at the Bray gave him some of the insights that came together in those large figurative pieces of the 1960s.

The Ceramics Reader.

Fired Clay : Markings and Volumes.

russellmoreton.com

This is a very different body.

“Clay+Ceramic : Complexity grounded in basic things.”

And then the remarkable movement through abundance of material → energy → clay → Voulkos → brickyard → misfired bricks → slab construction → architectural commissions.

That makes it extremely relevant to your current thinking about the material persistence of ceramic.

 

First constellation — Ceramic Bodies

Making Matter(s)~Truth

Overspilling Forms

The Ceramics Reader / Brickyard Ceramics

Making Iterations / Procedures

Working Notes : Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark

Visual~Art~Materialisms : Exploring Materiality and Connectivity.

Dissolutions and Structures. 2013

Sun based temporal documentations. 

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

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

 Outpost 130524

The Primal Scene of Drawing.

Drawing as Gesture.

Coda : Coded Imprints/Mediality

Contemporary drawing tending towards graphism, illegible writing, that can be seen as a regression from image and coded sign to what could be described as states of the 'pre-sign', of moments of inscription and the emergence of the signifier from the gesture or act of making a mark.

Drawing Is An Immediate Art/of presence and transparency/phenomena 'unfolding'.

A fusion between the artist's mind, the artist,s hand and the beholder's gaze.

Even in the most fragmented of forms there is a recognition of our sense of self and our history as we mark. It is not only the functioning of perception that interests me, but also the activity of sensation.

Avis Newman.

The raw drawn line at its emergence into the world.

Line can no more escape the present tense of its entry into the world than it can escape into oil paints secret hiding places of erasure and concealment. This fundamental condition can bring it therefore much closer to the viewer's own situation than can the image in paint.

The drawn line in real time with its own momentum, its own trajectory.

A walk for a walk's sake, the mobile agent is a point shifting its position-forward.

Paul Klee.

The present of viewing and the present of the drawn line, hook onto each other, mesh together like interlocking temporal gears. They co-inhabit an irreversible permanently open and exposed field of becoming, whose moment of closure will never arrive.

Though it is impossible to reconstruct with any real accuracy the precise sequence whereby drawn lines on paper finally come together as a completed image. The permanent visibility of each unit of production, of each individual line on its own, means that there is no escaping the sense of the line as emerging from an initial state, blank paper to the state we eventually see.

The drawn line in a sense always exists bin the present tense, in the time of its own unfolding. The ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.

The blankness of the paper exerts a pressure that cannot be reduced or done away with, relentless its blankness forces everything into the open into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time.

If painting presents being.

The drawn line presents becoming.

Line gives you the image, together with the whole history of its becoming-image.

However definitive, perfect, unalterable the drawn line may be, each of its lines, even the last line that was drawn is permanently open, to the present of a time that is always unfolding. Even that final line, the line that closed the image is in itself open to a present that bars the act of closure.

A Walk for a Walk's Sake.

Norman Bryson.

Cy Twombly.

Works on Paper. 1979.

Such gestures do not ask to be interpreted.

Making marks that open-up a space where in which the distinction between human and non-human is undecidable. How are we to respond to gestures that do not ask to be interpreted since they are meaningless, or more precisely they are gestures in meaningless.

If drawing is to be taken as just such a gesture, how are we to respond to it?

It it is not directed to meaning or interpretation, what does it demand of us?

Instead of considering what its meaning is, we could place the emphasis on the fact that a gesture has been made, the fact that something has been left for us. A mark inscribed on a piece of paper, perhaps by someone. We would thus receive the gestural mark as the trace of the other without any need for that mark to be meaningful. We may well do so without reverting to the 'what' and interpreting the gesture as an expression.

We need to say nothing more than the other has left this mark.

The Marks, Traces and Gestures of Drawing.

Michael Newman.

The gesture is communication of a communicability.

Means Without Ends.

Giorgio Agamben. 2000

The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality. It allows the emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings and thus it opens the ethical dimension for them. What is relayed to human beings in gestures is not the sphere of an end in itself, but rather the sphere of a pure and endless mediality. It has precisely nothing to say because what it shows is the being-in-language of human beings as pure mediality. However because being-in-language is not something that could be said in sentences, the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language. It is always a gag in the proper meaning of the term.

For Michael Newman, the drawn mark could be taken as a 'gag' in precisely the way Agamben outlines. Its relation to language lies not in language as a goal, but precisely in its turning back on itself to expose its mediality, which is the condition of language.

Materiality and Mediality

Materiality and Mediality takes as its focus the reciprocal relationship between the facture of objects and the making of meaning. The questions addressed in this focus build upon ongoing research on textility. Material observations of textiles from Gottfried Semper onward have played a special role in the historiography of our field, and the study of textiles demands both new economic, social, and material approaches to the history of art, from canvas painting to tapestry, while also emphasizing global movements of materials, techniques, and makers.

More broadly, the study of materials encompasses both the complex negotiation of human makers with material resistances, and the way materials change physically and in terms of their reception over time. From the extraction and procurement of raw materials to the sensual qualities of finished products, the study of an object’s materiality brings forth histories of labor, trade, technology, and the environment that have been traditionally considered beyond the remit of art history. Concomitantly, media theory is a useful tool to examine how medium shapes the behavior of works of art, which becomes especially pronounced when new media emerge and spread. Both materiality and mediality impact the aesthetic, social, and ritual understanding of works of art. The study of materials and media invite approaches to the history of art that span geographies and chronologies in new and challenging ways. Materiality and Mediality serves as a broad framework to examine visual culture using sets of methodological tools that can shed new light on canonical works of art while simultaneously integrating overlooked objects into larger art historical narratives.

https://www.biblhertz.it/en/dept-weddigen/materiality-mediality

We are thus left with the question of how the mark received as trace of the other relates to the mark as gesture, even if the trace necessarily withdraws from the mark. How does the mark-as-gesture not reduce the trace to its mediation to expression in a medium and thus reduce the other to being a figment of my world, an actor on the stage that I project. The other is reduced to the same if the medium is conceived as a common substance, a kind of thing that joins two entities, communication as exposure breaks with this ontology.