Wayfaring Forms : Living Architectures beyond Function.

Outpost 030125

A wayfaring body does not move through a finished space. It participates in making the space through attention, movement and encounter. Architecture becomes less a fixed container than a living field of relations. Lines, bodies, materials and places cross one another, opening zones of proximity and exchange. To wayfare is therefore to remain unfinished—to move attentively through spaces that are continually being made and unmade.

Living Architectures/Wayfaring.

Environments formed/experienced through Movement and Attention.

Lines.

Tim Ingold.

Numinous Odyssey : Raveningham

Spectral Affinities : Architectural Constellation

Processual Bodies.

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

Art's Use of Architecture: Place, Site and Setting.

Artists in 'Psycho Buildings' explore architecture's psyche, through the production of places, sites and settings, sites and settings, which engender spatial experiences that connect the viewer psychically, as well as perceptually and conceptually, to broader social issues and cultural phenomena.

Art and architecture are frequently differentiated in terms of their relationship to 'function' or 'use'. Unlike architecture, art may not be useful in pragmatic terms, for example in responding directly to social needs, providing shelter or somewhere in which to perform open-heart surgery, but we could say that art provides a place for other kinds of function – self-reflection, critical thinking and social change. If we consider this expanded version of the term function in relation to architecture, we realise that architecture is seldom given the opportunity to consider the construction of critical concepts and spatial relations as its most important purpose.

Jane Rendell.

Processes/Processual Thinking that constitute entities.

Moving Attentively In The Field of Material Structure.

The Itinerant Library of Excessive Tendencies.

Heterogeneous matter driven by disparate parts and elements of assembly.

Bricoleur Performing Practices.

Discursive Inquiry/Reading/Making.

Abjection flows between bodies, it never solely concerns one body.

For Kovar, when abjection is one of those processes, a very particular assemblage manifests itself. Where boundaries are disrupted, connections made and zones of proximity that are otherwise absent, are reached. Abject(ion) causes an inherent schism on the physical and psychological levels.

It opens bodies, to one another.

It opens up bodies for 'exchange'.

Such that they are in a perpetual process of being made and unmade, unfinished bodies.

It is precisely because abject(ion) is not only psychological but also physiological that it straddles both genders and is not solely reducible to the feminine. Abject(ion) is both feminine and masculine.

This one feels very important.

It begins with Living Architectures / Wayfaring, environments formed through movement and attention, lines, Ingold, Raveningham, processual bodies, then moves through Jane Rendell and Kovar into the opening of bodies to one another.

That is already very close to your current proposition that spatial practice is not about spatial characteristics but about bodies continuing to enter relations.

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.

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.”

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

An Armada for Childhood : Proposal for Southampton Art Vaults 2008

Possible Worlds

The Sensual Reciprocity of This Enchanted Isle 

Peter Woodcock.

Installation using large paper boats (1.5m long) and mouldmakers plaster for a subterranean  space under the cities walls.

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

Erin Manning for Brian Massumi : Sylvian & Fripp - Every colour you are (live '93)

Relationscapes

Erin Manning

Movement/Art/Philosophy

For Brian Massumi

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Tarkovsky filming the Instant : Flux and Quality in Nature's Time

Reflective Narratives around The Instant.

Art and Aesthetic Patterns.

The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature. 

Filmic Modalities

An Ecology of Mind

We are so accustomed to thinking of aesthetic phenomena as a discursive or representational construct, that we often forget that without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information it contains

Bateson credits art with playing the role of confronting the quantitative limit built into consciousnesses

Art assists mind in recognizing that the potentiality of heightened consciousnesses exist and that it resides in you and in me

Flux and Quality in Nature's Time

Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

Tim Ingold

Each thing framed dwells in the world differently.

The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out.

The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies.

It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook.

On The Picture Frame, Simmel

Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world

The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body

Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand

The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused. 

Art and Agency, Alfred Gell

Nature as “Comfort Zone” in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky by Donato Totaro 
 

Volume 14, Issue 12 / December 2010  18 minutes (4324 words)

In this essay Totaro analyzes the unique thematic and aesthetic import of Tarkovsky’s use of nature.

Tarkovsky relies on nature and natural phenomena to underscore and often dictate the time-pressure (rhythm) of a shot. The movement of time, its flux and quality, flows from the life-process that is recorded in the shot. Even though the fires, downpours and gusts of wind are staged, re-shot or recreated there still remains the spontaneous element of “nature’s time” within the filmic time. Each of the natural events and elements (water, wind, fire, snow) have their own sustained rhythm. Tarkovsky uses these natural rhythms to express his own, that of his characters and the temporal shape of the film (23-24).

I would like to conclude this analysis of Tarkovsky’s unique use of nature as a ‘comfort zone’ by saying a few things about his two science-fiction films, Solaris and Stalker. Solaris is based on the great same-titled science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. The many philosophical and ethical differences between the novel and film can be summarized by the fact that, whereas the novel begins in space on the Solaris space station orbiting the planet Solaris, the film begins with a 45 minute prologue on earth, which establishes the importance of home, family, and ‘mother’ earth to the psychologist Kris Kelvin (and by extension all humans), who is soon to leave for outer space. The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature is established right from the opening, a (second) slow motion close-up shot of plant life swaying under a crystal clear stream that slowly pans right to reveal the hand of a man wearing brown trousers and a dark leather coat standing amidst waist high reeds.

http://offscreen.com/view/nature_as_comfort_zone




Waverley Abbey
Reflected ruins in flooded interior

Photogram formed from a design collage for The Reading Room, Waverley Abbey.

Intuition of the Instant : Gaston Bachelard

Diffracted Bodies~Matter(s) in Movement : Speculative~Performative Space~Time Drawings

Evidencing Atmospheres/A Calling To Think.

Reading diffractively through reimagined patterns/atmospheres that penetrate the body-text-space-time compositions. 

Spatial blueprints/propositional and emergent diagrams on speculative readings from The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli.

Apparatuses and Intermediaries.

Everyday Practices, Harleston. 2022

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

From Naked to Nude : Drawing from Life/Luminosity/Movement/Corporeality.

 

From Naked to Nude.

Life Drawing.

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

Drawing as an inquiry of seeing/being/feeling

Bodies in an abstracted atmosphere of absence

Luminosity/Movement/Corporeality.

The blurring/dissolution of the conventional distinction/relationships between the figure and the ground.

The luminescent dematerialization of the subject. 

The nude, mediated by the mechanical effects of photography/blurring/fragmentation and the distance/blindness of drawing/memory.

Photographic Spatialities : Geographies of Art and Architecture.

 Images/Energies/Collages : Core, Periphery and Semiperiphery : 

Processual Drawing : Bioscleave/Blue Particle Cloud/Diagram.

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

ARCHITECTURAL Body

An ORGANISM that PERSONS

Gins and Arakawa 2002

Although the human condition is a crisis condition if ever there was one, few individuals and societies act with the dispatch a state of emergency requires. The fact that the human condition is a crises condition gets routinely covered up, with culture invariably functioning to obscure how dire the condition is and to float it as bearable

If organisms form themselves as persons by uptaking the environment, then they involve not only bodies but domains, spheres of activity and influence 

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

Procedural Architure/Architectural Body 

Gins and Arakawa

The role of architecture as a tool for researching the body-environment towards the implementation of these considerations is paramount

The goal of an experimental teaching and learning space based on architectural procedures would be that the process of design and construction would allow students/staff to rethink, re-imagine and enact the curriculum

An Arakawa and Gins Experimental Teaching Space/A Feasibility Study 2013

Jondi Keane

An Architecture of Viability

To help to sustain one throughout life/ to stay tentative

Bioscleave House as an inter-active laboratory of everyday life 

Wayfinding (unpacking discourse/meaning) through Landing Sites and Architectural Bodies

What is the metachallenge that bioscleave demands of us? Is it, I propose, wayfinding, a wayfinding defined at many scales from finding one's way as a person to finding one's way in a strange physical or social environment

Exploring the Roles of Trajectoriness, Affectivatoriness, and Imaging Along 2013

Reuben M. Baron

Figure/Ground : Double Occupations of Discourses and Events (relationships/co-existances)

So as a diagram (performative agent), the figure/ground does not function to represent even something real. But rather constructs a real that is yet to come (theoretical object/apparatus) as a new type of reality

Situated Field/Constructed Site of People, Institutions, Apparatuses, Events, Discourses

We see intraventions as heuristic devices, as apparatuses that are imbued with a will to transform.

The intravention is not autonomous but contingent and relational and dependent on many other things

The intravention is made as it happens, and it makes us at the same time

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects

Oren Lieberman, Alberto Altes

AEffect initiating Heuristic Life

Procedural architecture, developed in both their written and buillt discourse, providing a process by which to connect theory to practice, disciplinary inquiry to knowledge and art to life

Research should be conducted , not in a library or laboratory but where living happens, enabling the complexity of relationships to be studied within and across the organism-person-environment 

Jondi Keane

Carnal Knowledge

Towards a New Materialism through the Arts

Estelle Barrett, Barbara Bolt

To provide observational heuristic devices so that persons may devise transformational and reconfigurative opportunities

Heuristic tools whether built hypothesis or discursive sequences, are of no use if they do not provide a way forward, a way of learning

This house is a tool, a procedural one

A functional tool, whether it be a hammer, a telephone, or a telescope, extends the senses, but a procedural tool examines and reorders the sensorium

Interlude : Cornering a Beginning

An object becomes the threshold for thinking feeling

Relationscapes : Movement, Art, Philosopy

Erin Manning 

Born into a new territory, and that territory is myself as organism. There is no place to go but here. Each organism that persons finds the new territory that is itself, and having found it, adjusts it

Ellipsis,(gaps in everyday narratives) 

The Construction of Representation of Identity

Using their bodies and immediate surroundings and environment as both subject and context

An Organism-Person-Environment

You cannot see me from where I look at myself

Francesca Woodman

An organism-person-environment has given birth to an organism-person-environment

Bioscleave

Chaos, Territory, Art

Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Elizabeth Grosz

Body, Personal Relations, Spatial Values

Upright Human Body : Space and Time

Yi Fu Tuan

Figuring It Out

The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists

Colin Renfrew

The act of relating is analysed as a constitutive feature of human agency. Relating is viewed as the continuous work of connecting and disconnecting in a fluctuating network of existential events

Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality but they also hide its underlying complexities

Relationality 2005

Robert Cooper

Aesthetics and Subjectivity : Experiential Spaces/The feeling of what happens

Tides of Being/Becoming


Antonio Damasio
The Feeling of What Happens
Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie.

Nick Cave, The Lyre of Orpheus.

Hildur Gudnadottir, Saman.

Landscape/Slow Motion : A Porous Atmosphere of Light/Experience

River Waveney, Mendham Marshes













The Experience of Landscape

Landscape, Memory and Desire

An Anthropology of Landscape

Up, Across and Along

Slow Motion

Tim Ingold