Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity : Atmospheric ecologies/architecting through situated learning.

Working Collage : Marking the Line/Art, Architecture and Craft Narratives.

Walking into Emergent Landscapes : Covehithe Beach

Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?

— Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

Jana Sterbak

Remote Control 1989

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

A Hut of One's Own, Ann Cline

Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines.

 

Ecosophy : Social ecology, mental ecology, environmental ecology.

"Concerning the continuous development of its practice as much as its theoretical scaffolding."

The Three Ecologies, Guattari

Interactions of Colour and Bodies : Rothko/Neri/Kundera/Schiele, subjects alone in a moment of utter immobility.

Manuel Neri

Milan Kundera

Josef Albers

Mark Rothko

Egon Schiele

The use of the word 'immobility' recalls an article that Rothko wrote in the 1947

"For me the great achievements of the centuries in which the artist accepted the probable and familiar as his subjects were the pictures of the single human figure - alone in a moment of utter immobility."

p84, Possibilities , 1, New York, 1947

The world is overloaded/the nature of things : Peter Zumthor, Jean Baudrillard

The world is overloaded of signs and information, representative of things that nobody completely understands, because they are in turn nothing but signs representative of other signs.

The real thing remains hidden. Nobody can ever see it.

Peter Zumthor

The nature of things cannot be discovered by analyzing them according to their functions, by labeling or categorizing them but by understanding their relationship to people, their behavior and emotions which caused creation of these objects.

Jean Baudrillard

Radical Perspectives : Sky Watching /Outpost Studio Space

 Outpost 070922

Radical Perspectives.

Space-time Manifolds.

Intertwined cinemas within a bottle of light.

Fissure space reflection on underside of suspended cinemas.

Concept Studies/Diagrams.

Space was perceived by the body moving through time.

Parallax, Steven Holl.

Plastic Media

Performative Apparatuses.

The Observer and The Observed.

A return via the time exposures to the unexpected and a intricate order made up of  patterns, movements and constellations.

New thrilling metaphorical structures.

Beyond the purely visual, to get a flat surface to interact with physical phenomena, which would be recorded without any intervention or involvement. Photographic events in which some images recorded very determined fixed forms, and in other time-exposures the images became more about traces and about movement.

Susan Derges.

Infra-ordinary

Dust Breeding.

Giacometti's Cell/Studio.

A Species of Spaces.

Intra-acting

Contemporary Architectural Practices.

Spatial Practices/Visual Fine Art.

Quantum Superposition.

At the moment a measurement is made in Beijing, everything remains in quantum superposition with respect to Vienna. The equipment making the measurements, the scientists reading them, the notebooks in which they are written down, the messages in which the results of the measurements are conveyed, are all quantum objects themselves. 

Helgoland,Carlo Rovelli.

Quantum intra-acting

The concretization of  colour as substance/matter/movement/agency.

Beuy's brown and Klein's blue form a pair of opposites, according to the hermetic-alchemical world view, such opposites contain the arcane power of polar dissimilarity that seeks to be augmented and joined together.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue, Magdalena Broska.

Elective Affinities

Susan Derges/Garry Fabian Miller.

The direct use of physical materials, the interest in systematic experimentation and a preoccupation with the fluctuating perception of events depending on the position of the observer and the nature of the light.

Through the realm of perceptual experiences.

Both art and science alter our perceptions and knowledge, whether from philosophy, science or the arts it filters down into our general awareness to affect our world view.

Wondrous essences put back into existence, through re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world.

Plastic media, time based immateriality.

Surface interactions produced from physical phenomena made visible.

Metaphors for phenomena

Patterns as either/both particles and waves.

Unknowing Expectation.

Prints of a scientific exactness.

This reduction of process down to such a simple method.

He felt amazed by the clarity of the procedure, it seemed incredibly releasing and radical, and something to aspire to.

Working series that focusses on the immense through engagement with the specific. 

Homeland, the body gains access to the world as a way of living and working.

Making a garden after the making of the mornings pictures, feels like the right way to fill the hours which remain in the day.

Field Studies/Kilquhanity.

Building template for positioning of circulatory pathways.

Garden drawings and sculptural mappings of the passage of sunlight.

Shifting relationships of the real world have been assimilated into her imagery.

In particular her world view was affected by the ideas of contemporary physicists.

New possibilities for plastic media has been that phenomena are no longer seen as static entities in space and time, but as dynamic and interrelated with specific structured laws and principles.

The Darkroom as cell and workroom, a room apart from the world.

Science, Order and Creativity.

David Bohm.

The Implied Observer

Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.

Performativity is precisely a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real, performativity is actually a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve.

Thingification, the turning of relations into things, entities, relata, which infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.

In Posthumanist Performativity, Karen Barad advocates agential realism as an alternative to representationist ontologies that split semiotic from material reality.

Barad argues that matter is not a substance but an intra-activity, and that agency is not an exclusively human attribute, but rather the enactment of iterative changes across macro/microscopic levels of matter.

Matter is performative in that it reproduces itself through the effects of its own intra-active dynamic material relationships. Relata do not pre-exist these relationships, but emerge through them in the fluid, diffractive boundaries that crystalize phenomenon/matter into things/thingification that are positioned in a spatial-temporal affective relation.

The subject/object dichotomy is performatively enacted through the specific spatial temporal proximity between the two necessary for apprehension, in which the approximal relationship through which subject and object emerge. The cognitive split that constitues the I is a discursive practice called the agential cut which is a conception of separability between one thing and another that grants the illusion of agency.

For Barad, discursive practices are not only linguistic expressions of human language, but extend to other material specific practices of intra-action entangled with other intra-actions that produce material phenomena. The material apparati which constrain, but do not over determine these practices find within their own diffractive limits possible dynamic reconfigurations of the world.

Because being is not a static relationality but a doing, that always entails constituting exclusions, a posthumanist engagement with performative matter must not only account for the sites of human/non human cuts, but also challenge the ethical stakes of such cuts.

Summary Notes : Karen Barad, Posthuman Performativity, S.A. Colclough.

Intra-actions produce material phenomenon.

Assemblages/Architectural Prototyping : Formative Ideas.

 Outpost 220922

Architectural Prototyping.

Formative Ideas.

Setting things adrift in the direction of other assemblages.

The Refrain. 

Deleuze and Guattari.

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, a moment of pure presence.

The Wonder of Minor Experiences.

Jane Bennett.

Enchantment requires active engagement with objects of sensuous experience, it is a state of interactive fascination.

Capacitive Environments, a building that seeks to both communicate with its users and provide a spectacle for onlookers.

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 in its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

Constructional mock-ups used to determine the optimal installation of the ETFE cushions both to the substructure and between adjacent frames.

Asif Khan. Beatbox Pavilion, London 2012 Summer Olympics.

The Blueprint : Map 2, creative designations. 

Mapping hidden spaces between precision and indeterminacy.

Spatial Agency/Issues of Relational Spaces.

Collage/Cognitive Mappings.

Discursive spaces between agencies/representations.

The Stride of The Mind, Patti Smith.

Formal qualities/events between materials

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS : Performativity/Unbounded Outcomes

 

MATERIAL and AFFECT

EMOTIVE SPATIAL ENCOUNTERS

RUINS and SUBJECTIVITY

Encounter with place through transpositions/re-deployment of materials/technologies and design.

The rules followed by medieval cathedral builders could not and did not prescribe their practice in every detail, but instead allowed scope for action to be precisely fine-tuned in relation to the exigencies of the situation at hand. The cathedral and the laboratory, MAKING, Tim Ingold

PATHS alert us to how we are scattered as well as affirmed by the places through which we move. Edward Thomas.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF WHAT HAPPENS: SPACE, POLITICS and AFFECT.

Nigel Thrift

VISUAL FINE ART / TRANSACTIVE through Digital Technologies POETIC / EVERYDAY ABSTRACTIONS

MAKING / MANIFESTING FORMS / STRANGE TOOLS

INDEXICAL / ITERATION ( new version, repetition, closer approximation, scrutiny, observations, sequence, finding a solution/perception to a problem)

UNBOUNDED OUTCOMES / ITERATION becomes the starting point of the next iteration PROGRESSION through PERFORMATIVITY

AGAINST SPACE

Making : anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture.

Tim Ingold

Immaterial architecture creation and contemplation artist and architect

The contemplation of art is primarily a form of visual awareness, of a single object by a single viewer, in which sound, smell and touch are as far as possible eradicated. Placed in a hermetic enclosure and protected against decay, the artwork is seen and not used. The viewer leaves no trace or mark because touch would undermine the artwork’s status as an idea and connect it to the material world.

To translate the drawing into the building requires an intimate knowledge of the techniques and materials of drawing and building.

ATMOSPHERES

THE EPIPHANY OF ARCHITECTURE

CIRCULATION, ENCLOSURES and their LIGHT

TOTAL ARCHITECTURE, Walter Gropius

TOTAL ART, Theo van Doesburg/DE STIJL

GESAMTKUNSTWERK, all embracing aesthetic, where art becomes architecture and architecture art. A synthesis, and revolving intersection where each medium exists at the service of formal innovation; a kind of essentialist discourse or tradition that might be buried in the past.

Brian Clarke, Nerves of Ecstasy by Robert C. Morgan, PACE 2013.

ARCHITECTURAL FORMS OF ENCOUNTER/DEBATE

HISTORIES, PHILOSOPHIES, AESTHETICS

Katsura Detached Palace. Kenzo Tange, Walter Gropius. 1960

(extended in a modular fashion and adapted to changing royal needs over the centuries)

Katsura consolidates all qualities in history but not in a creative way. Since it lacks in the strength of its unifying all members, its impression is lyricism but lacking unifying tension. KenzoTange

Ise : Prototype of Japanese Architecture. Kenzo Tange, Noboru Kawazoe. 1961

(Ise Shrine rebuilt every 20 years with new materials)

Ise Shrine manifests primate yet powerful, simple yet noble, and serene yet ecliptic qualities, which cannot help moving us. Tange

THE PRIMATIVE

JOMON POT, 2000 BCE, (Jomon period 14,000 BCE-300 BCE)

Jomon, (means Rope pattern) wildly decorated pottery, idols, and thatched pit dwellings. The style comes to stand for the savage and dynamic.

Jomon appeals to us with the flooding energy of the fundamental life of the people. It has a resilient strength and a sense of mass, which comes out of through their wild battles with nature: it also has a free and agile sensitivity. Kenzo Tange

THE ARISTOCRATIC

YAYOI EARTHENWARE, 350 AD, (Yayoi period 300 BCE-250 BCE)

In the Yayoi period, earthenware becomes more refined, and structures like granaries are raised on stilts, building developments reflect the emergence of social hierarchies.

In Yayoi, man and nature are synthesized to create a calm lyricism, acknowledging nature’s blessings. A passive attitude, submitting to the surroundings prevails. A flat equilibrium and quiet balance with no dynamism are left in a transient mood.

Kenzo Tange is originally drawn to the Yayoi style, but starts to oscillate with the Jomon style in the late ‘50s’ For Tange and the future Metabolists there is no conflict in their simultaneous study of tradition and modernism. Tange insists on exploiting tradition as a means of innovation, while building prolifically in a modern mode and strategizing the high-tech avant-garde of Metabolism.

There’s more truth about a camp than a house. Planning laws need not worry the improvised builder because temporary structures are more beautiful anyway, and you don’t need permission for them. There’s more truth about a camp because that is the position we are in. The house represents what we ourselves would like to be on earth: permanent, rooted, here for eternity. But a camp represents the true reality of things: we’re just passing through.

Wildwood, A Journey Through Trees. Roger Deakin.2007

PAO, a structure that you can repeatedly put up and dismantle. Because of occupant’s nomadic life, it needed to be lightweight, and be able to be built very quickly and have the ability to be taken apart and re-built many times. Even materials that have already been used can be reused so long as they are disassembled correctly and preserved properly.

To maximize the reuse of components one needs to standardize them so they can be pre-fabricated. The order of construction becomes important as it influences the disassembling of the structure; the technical features of joints, assemblages of materials and their localities can become both conceptual to the experience of the space and its architectonics and to the actual innovative building process.

In the Mesopotamia city of Ur, they bricked over houses buried in the mud and built new houses in the same spot over and over. Its been learned that they repeated this eight times. There was apparently a very strong impulse to create an eternal building.

Kiyonori Kikutake

Rem Koolhaas

SO THE MUD HOUSE BECAME THE RENAISSANCE AND THE TENT BECAME METABOLOLISM?

Kiyonori Kikutake

YES, IT BECAME A METABOLIST STRUCTURE MADE OF WOOD. AND I THINK THE NOTION OF ATTAINING ETERNITY WITH A MUD HOUSE-OR ATTEMPTING TO-IS REALLY FASCINATING.

In The Making : Hollowing out Space through Innerness and Difference. 

Quietus : Interiors of Silence and Space.

Innerness : A (sensorial) space or even a place interior to its environment. 

Sensing Spaces : Through displacements and hidden volumes.

Defined Interiors : By material, agency and social and private architectures. 

Interiors of Pots : Analogies with the Hut as both being dwelling places made from the inquiry of form and the need for a reflective solitude. Fragment as a broken shard, from notebook March 2014.

Innerness

The light of reflection and our immediacy moves from light to dark and from dark to light; from surface to interior and interior to surface. The pot becomes a cyclical vessel reflecting our geocentric origins.

The Hut is a vessel in the making for reflective dwelling.

The Pot with its interior underpins its fidelity, its completeness.

Some pots are tuned and balanced for their “innerness”; others promote their surfaces (noise) at the expense of their interior integrity (quietness).

Vessels of Defined Spaces : Creatures of Light and Dark

In sensing a pots interior from its surface, we are as it were in some intimate tacit correspondence with its spatial sensing centre. We become known to it through its maker’s creative gesture of innerness. This anthropological inner space linking us to the potter is both sensual and distant; its vacancy allows us dwell in the maker’s absence.

Reflections on Heidegger,

We traverse from light to dark many times as we gather in the pots (thingness) as it were unfolding in our presence (nearness).

Vessels as Spatial Metaphors around Innerness and Difference. 

The Jar

Heidegger as a pouring and gathering social metaphor. Anecdote of the Jar.

Dominion over the Unmade.

Wallace Stevens, poem cited by Edmund de Waal.

WORKING at the transitional surface/stage in the HUMANITIES as it re-boots itself into THE POSTMODERN.

A SOMATIC ARCHIVE, of subjectivities whose perceptions and environments are going to change forever; like the particularities of the analogue trace in photography that is now becoming a distant experiential condition, an orphan extinct from the subjectivities of its originating culture/organism.

The imagination and process aesthetic of the Posthuman Condition 

A Theoretical and Semantic search amongst Ruins and Archetypes 

Historical Perspectives

Dwelling/Poetics Heidegger Archetypes/Symbols Jung

Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett

Flesh and The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze/Bacon 

Feminist Geographies The Posthuman

Posthuman thought inscribes the contemporary subject in the conditions of its own historicity.

Posthuman Subjectivity : Rosi Braidotti 

LIGHT into SOMANTIC SPACES

Continuum and Chora (light and the shadow of chora)

Life expresses itself in a multiplicity of empirical act: there is nothing to say, but everything to do. Life, simply by being life, expresses itself by actualiizing flows of energies, through codes of vital information across complex somatic, cultural and technologically networked systems. (Braidotti, 2013:190)

De Architectura, Vitruvius

Architecture consists of order, arrangement, proportion or eurythmy, symmetry and decor, and distribution.

Arrangement as an “Idea” refers to the Aristotelian notion of “Image­ representation” as phaantasia a precondition to drawing, effectively occupying and revealing a space between Being and becoming.

INTERIOR DESIGN UCA FARNHAM

DESIGN AND RESEARCH PROJECT 2015 SPACE BETWEEN PEOPLE.

SITE-PLACE-DIALOGUES

THE RUINED ABBEY, stands as architectural remnants of a pastoral community now set in parkland and open to the public as a site for recreation.

The Abbey and its experiential values and feelings have been employed as both a reality of a lived experience and as a virtual diffractive site for thinking through contemporary issues in arts (relational aesthetics), and architectural design through exploratory spatial inquires with the specifics of place studies.

What this project is not

Gift Shop and Visitors Centre What this project might become

Proposal for a symposium,

Personal Structures, artists and writers talk about “Time, Space and Existence”. Setting for an exhibition that can promote the symposium.

A room containing a virtual work of design that challenges and opens up the physical architecture.

A design for a interactive (mobile) component, a structure that can act as an interlocutory apparatus in the transposition of the phenomena of place.

Building Partitioning of Space.

Architectures as atmospheres that promote the contents and support the interaction of things including humans.

Design as a tool of transposition, of layering and collaging different spatial values both cultural and experiential.

Painting Subjectivities, matter drawn and crafted from site inquiry.

LIGHT VALUES

The Transmission of Light,

Instantaneous psychological effect that stimulates the senses. The Specificity of Colour

Synergistically working with place and symbolizing abstract concepts and thoughts.

Humans use colour in their surroundings for decorative purposes or to chronicle their every day lives and other important events.

Earthy, Corporeal, Spiritual, Pastoral. Capricious.

Colour has always been used symbolically, whether pained directly on the body or worn in garments to announce the wearers’ social status, their tribe or country’ or other significant group.

The Abbey, On-Site (qualitative research with stained glass samples) Analogous Colour Fields with Monochromatic Features, utilise complementary colours or forms to focus the difference and diversity of the design installation.

Red, Flashed Ruby glass.

Brown is the ultimate earth colour associated with a “durability” of terra-cotta, clay.

Amber, Light, Medium and Dark. Yellow, Orange, Imagination/Enlightenment, Intensity, Sunlight.

Purple, Red/Blue, Spirituality, New Age, Cutting Edge Technologies. Diversity, Complexity, Artistry, Uniqueness.

THE ABBEY AND THE CISTERCIAN ORDER

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION : Caruso St John

HISTORY IS THE RAW MATERIAL OF ARCHITECTURE. Aldo Rossi

TRADITION AND MODERNISM

CONTINUITY-LEGACY-TOWARDS AN ONTOLOGY OF CONSTRUCTION

Today the nuances of language that make up these architectures only exist as an intellectual discourse and do not operate at the emotional level that would have engaged the original inhabitants, or audiences of these buildings. And yet we are still emotionally affected by these structures. Denied access to the specific culture of their iconography. We respond, at a more visceral level, to the more general culture of their construction.

Adam Caruso on the medieval ruins of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire.

Towards an Ontology of Construction, Knitting Weaving Pressing. 2002

Thinking with Walking/Paths/Huts

WALKING was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings; Edward Thomas not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.

The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot. Robert Macfarlene

ON REFLECTION

What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?

What does this place know of me that I cannot know of myself?

For Edward Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led out-wards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inward to the self. These traverses-between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events.

HE IMAGINED HIMSELF IN TOPOGRAPHICAL TERMS

HEIDEGGER’S HUT

A TOPOLOGY OF BEING, PLACE, WORLD. Jeff Malpas

METHODOLOGIES OF DESIGN

GESALT, GRISAILLE, LEITMOTIF, MATRIX, FORMAL PATTERN, SURFACE

VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio

MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM

THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche

SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR

A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN

THE RECIPROCAL GAZE :

The screen is gazing at us; we are framed by our own looking. A direct relationship (what the image tells me); a singularity held by the vivacity of the image, through the activity of perception and introspection.

THE SPECTATOR MAKES THE JOURNEY into the PREMORDIAL IMAGINATION OF THE CAMERA.

CONCRETE PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTOGRAMS, IMPRESSIONS, TRACES

THE SENSATE AND THE CONCEPTUAL

PAINTING, Robert Mangold.

TRANSFORMATION AND PROPHECY

BEUYS-KLEIN-ROTHKO

ARCHITECTURAL LEXICON OF STRUCTURES AND SYMBOLS

WORKING NOTES 20 August 2018

Fragments/Thoughts CONSTELLATIONS NIGHT DRAWINGS

OUTPOST URBAN FROTTAGES/ Drawing Strategies

SCULPTURE TRAIL/ Minimalist, Post Modem, elements, assemblage, collage REFLEXIVITITY / AGENCY / POST STUDIO

Mobius Strip, experiential feedback into REAL LIFE / NOWNESS SEARCHING for creative anthropologies from the landscape.

ACTIVE and creative engagements. PERFORMATIVITY LANDSCAPES

SENSORY WALKS

USING the topology close to hand, the unique geographies of the rivers from source to sea.

 Outpost 150922

Drawing Space.

The Material Discursive. 

Figurative Configurations/Bodies and Landscapes.

Jenny Saville.

Intimate Drawings

Wall Scratchings

Situatedness of intra-activities.

A matrix and an archive.

It was the crucible of his art, and one of the most hauntingly eloquent spaces an artist has ever surrounded himself with.

In Giacometti's Studio.

The hermit's cave.

The alchemist's cell.

The chemist's laboratory.

Correlations do not become real, relational until the signals arrive.

Becoming Real.

The Exchange of Signals.

Framing Entanglements.

The Concretization of the Colour.

Nothing travels instantaneously and an exchange of signals is an interaction, where new elements of reality come about.

The joint properties of two objects exist only in relation to a third.

Everything that manifests itself does so in relation to something, a correlation between two objects is a property of the two objects and like all properties it exists it exists, is existential only in relation to a further third object.

Entanglement is not a dance for two partners, it is a dance for three.

Entanglement is none other than the external perspective on the very relations that weave reality.

The manifestation of one object to another in the course of an interaction in which properties of the object become actual.

Working notes/fragments.

Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli.

Lead label reads/stamped with “dwelling is always dwelling in nearness, Heidegger”.

Counterpoints/Contrapuntal Movements. 

ENMESHED EXPERIENCES

WORKING WITH DOUBT

DURATION

THE FLUX OF A VECTOR FIELD

PARALLAX.

The existence/trace/invisibility/of a third object that interacts with both the systems is necessary to give reality to the correlations.

Resultants that incorporate the friction/asperities of their trajectories through medium/material.

Building as a body, a battleground of invisible forces. 

The spine is the central elevator. The structure is a tube of concrete covered with insulation and tarred black wood boards.

Steven Holl.

Knut Hamsun Museum, Hamarey, Norway. 1996

Monumental sculptures take the form of vast, spectral structures built from corroded, sinewy metals and disintegrating found objects.

He seeks inspiration from sources that speak to the expansive, cyclical nature of the universe. 

Kiefer looks to Norse mythology, Hebrew folklore, alchemy and theoretical physics to build dense imagery that is too often interpreted as simply apocalyptic.

While some might see wastelands and abject destruction, Kiefer sees vitality and resurrection. This attitude extends to the physical properties of his paintings and sculptures.

He embraces the ravages of time, while others might strive to suspend it in an effort to preserve a moment of imperceptible genius. Instead, his art buckles and shifts, constantly evolving and reforming under the burden of its own existence.

Artists on art, Holly Black. 2021

Sky Correlations

Cloud Space.

Particle Speculations

Seed Dispersal

Panspermia 

Granular Gardens

Third Spaces

Spatial Vectors/Constellations.

Observational Blueprints/Apparatuses.

Pierced Constellations.

Vectors for Entanglements.

Spatial Agency.

Sunlight Circulations.

Daylight Drawings/New Worlds.

The Spab Magazine

Autumn 2022.

The Living and the Dead, 2017-18.

I am not interested in conservation.

If something falls down, it has meaning.

Anselm Kiefer.

Organism, Person, Environment.

Bioscleave, Architectural Body, Gins, Arakawa.

Time as experienced duration is relative to an individual and to a space.

Constantin Brancusi's studio and Endless Column, fabricated as a timepiece, where the finite time of place and culture is counterposed to infinity.

Visual substance, causal doing, investigating, agency, matter, phenomena, material discursive, iterative, creative, apparatuses, intra-activity, performativity, bodies that matter, 

Visual Substance : Inter-Subjective Encounters

 Outpost 090222

Architectural Body/Procedural Architecture

Organism/Person/Environment

Earth, House, Hold, Dwelling Places.

Unlike the sense of sight or hearing, only the sense of touch can discern space and time at once.

The skin as the harbourer of a subjects sense of touch.

Skin/Subjectivity becomes as flesh a connective tissue which both unites and divides.

The skin can judge time less well than the ear, and space less well than the eye, but it is skin alone that combines the spatial and temporal dimensions.

Maternal Skin/Subject Formation, Anzieu.

A Field in England : On the nature of Photography.

Between Art and Information.

Brought to Light : Photography and the Invisible.

The Visible/Invisibility between the potential of  things.

The Photograph and The Lacanian Mirror.

In which identity is constantly shored up and broken down, but also as a persistent space invested with the paradoxical qualities of intimacy and alienation, of proximity and utter detachment all through which an offer of an encounter is held out in invitation.

Inter-Subjective Encounters, a space in which the subjectivities of the artist and the spectator might meet and mingle.

The skin is the surface through which self and other are mediated.

The mutuality of touch itself is echoed by the skins structure, it both touches and is touched and this duality is reflected in the way the skins surface is exposed to the outside world, whilst also protecting and containing the unseen interiority of the body.

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

Light and Spaces of Intersubjectivity.

Tactile Light.

The photograph holds out the promise of an encounter through its carnal medium.

For Riches, the self-representational photograph becomes a kind of veil or mask, a displaced surface whose skin-like relationship to the subject is always suspended, and perpetually deferred. It frames a space of contact and a fantasy of union with the original subject, the photograph's skin-like quality also enables it to be imagined as an inter-subjective space of exchange.

Light creates the spatiality/transitions that passes beyond subject/object relationships.

Skin/Surface/Subjectivity : Movements in thinking through Spatial Agency

Skin becomes a site of symbolic acts of aggression/gesture.

Surfaces of suggested pain/experience through which subjectivity is created.

Conduits of colour specificities and counterpoints

Relationscapes : Movements, created through colour temperature and spatial contact.

The phenomena of things being brought into perception/focus.

Through a body every colour creates movement and has its own/creates its own perspective/its mapping/layering/extension of spatial temporal material.

Analogies/Difference : Spaces created through mimesis,wavelengths intermingling with the spatial.

Glass/Lead/Filtered Light.

Glass Slide/Subjectivities brought into the light

Colour Subjectivities, the appearance/experience of mattering material.

Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.

 Outpost 020922

Perceptual Experience.

On The Nature of Things.

The notion of specific agential intra-actions in architectural practice.

Thingification, the turning of relations into things,  entities, relata, all infects much of the way we understand the world and our relationship to it.

Karen Barad sees reality composed of intra-acting elements which together make up a phenomena.

Making Use of Useful Correlations/Meaningful Information.

The actor of this process is not a subject distinct from phenomenal reality outside it, nor any transcendent point of view, rather it is a portion of that reality itself.

Our discourse on reality is itself part of that reality.

The radical questioning of our mental maps of reality.

Lines of thought that take inspiration from, or rooted in quantum physics.

Karen Barad's utilization of the ideas of Niels Bohr.

Physics seemed to me the place where the weave between the structure of reality and the structure of thought was closest, the place where this intertwinement was subject to the incandescent test of continuous evolution.

Helgoland.

Carlo Rovelli.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explores being as it resides in the perceptual situatedness of the body-subject into the world.

When the body-subject gains access into the world through perception, the world becomes what we perceive.

Perception is considered as the fundamental act that enables human beings to inhabit space and time.

Reality is not composed of things in themselves or things behind phenomena, 

but things in phenomena. 

For Steven Holl, the intertwining of idea and phenomena occurs with the realization of a building as the means for materialization of the idea-force.

For Merleau-Ponty idea is the invisible of this world which inhabits this world, sustains it and renders it visible.

Holl is interested in the phenomenal nature of the idea, in his search for connecting the phenomenal properties with conceptual strategy.

According to Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena.

Phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components.

Phenomena are produced through agential intra-actions of multiple apparatuses of bodily production.

Things in phenomena/agential intra action

Steven Holl points out a path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. In this architectural journey the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site-force interact with each other. This interaction begins with the formation of an abstract idea, the formation of a concept out of this idea and its transformation into a material, a spatial and formal reality on a physical site.

The Visible and The Invisible.

Phenomenology of Perception.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Posthumanist Performativity.

Towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.

Karen Barad.

A Living Room For The City : V&A Dundee.

Kengo Kuma, Maurizio Mucciola.

Parallax

Some approaches and interpretations of phenomenology in architecture.

Steven Holl.

Lightness/Synthesis/Solitude

 Outpost 190822

LIGHTNESS

QUICKNESS

EXACTITUDE

VISIBILITY

MULTIPLICITY

Six Memos for The Next Millennium.

Italo Calvino, 1992.

The difference between the first versions I read and the final ones lies in structure, not content. 

Calvino wanted to call the sixth lecture 'consistency' and he planned to write it in Cambridge. 

I found the others, all in perfect order, in the Italian original, on his writing desk ready to be put into his suitcase.

Esther Calvino.

The Drought.

J.G. Ballard.

Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts what ruins are in the realm of things.

Walter Benjamin on the origin of German Tragic Drama.

Photographic ruins an amalgam/agency of what remains.

Brown and Blue.

A Field in England.

Cyanotype material on canvas with iron pigment.

Developing a spatial serenity/synthesis/synergy.

This amalgam of colour with various substances demonstrates the change and transformation of the material world, which can be interpreted as essentially an alchemistic procedure.

The goal of such procedures is ultimately to resolve the material object into its spiritual substance.

Yves Klein.

Beuys Brown and Klein Blue.

Magdalena Broska.

Air and Dreams.

An essay on the imagination of movement.

Gaston Bachelard.

Shotesham, site based inquiry,studio practice.

Spatial registers around the corporeal and the transcendental.

Ruin its relation to time.

Fragment as ruin and on melancholia as an attitude of retrospective contemplation.

Dialectics at a standstill, a moment where the past is recognized in the present as a ruin that was once desired, allowing allegory to be understood, felt as a contemplative calm, an equilibrium in the becoming and wrapping nowness of the self/situation.

Dialectical thinking involves the clarification of ideas through discussion and contradiction.

What remains after the process of dialectical thinking?

An initial thesis is opposed by an antithesis, then resolved through a synthesis of the two terms, which can in turn become a new thesis.

Objects/inclusions for painting with/layered transitions and movements.

Holga 120WPC, f135.

Ilford Delta 100/8 exposures 92x55mm.

The Gaze of Orpheus.

Maurice Blanchot.

The Essential Solitude

In the solitude of the work, we see a more essential solitude, a self communion.

MULTIPLICITY

The work grew denser and denser from the inside through its own organic vitality.

For Musil, knowledge is the awareness of the incompatibility of two opposite polarities. One of these he calls exactitude or at other times mathematics, pure spirit, or even the military mentality, while the other he calls soul, or irrationality, humanity, chaos.

Everything he knows or thinks he deposits in an encyclopedic book that he tries to keep in the form of a novel, but its structure continually changes; it comes to pieces in his hands.

The result is that not only does he never manage to finish the novel, but he never succeeds in deciding on its general outlines or how to contain the enormous mass of material within set limits.

The network that links all things is also Proust's theme, but in him this net is composed of points in space-time occupied in succession by everyone, which brings about an infinite multiplication of the dimensions of space and time.

The world expands until it can no longer be grasped, and knowledge, for Proust, is attained by suffering this intangibility. In this sense a typical experience of knowledge is the jealousy felt by the narrator for Albertine.

It is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy.

But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.

Remembrance of Things Past : The Captive.

 

Infra-ordinary.

Species of Spaces

We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.

But where is our life?

Where is our body?

Where is our space?

Georges Perec.

CHORA : trace/mark/map/body

The drama of encountering space.

Recombinant Poetics via Interventions.

Thinking about temporal issues through visual, material and spatial registers.

Concerned with artworks and architectural projects that reconfigure the temporality of sites, repositioning the relationship of the past and the present in a number of different ways.

Allegory, Montage, Dialectical Image.

Between Art and Architecture.

Jane Rendell.

Performativity/Drama of Residency

Transient readings and encounters.

Other Enactments,Dialogues,Relationalities. 

Sites of evidence/knowledge and understanding.

The scheme should incorporate both careful repair of existing fabric and a significant element of new construction in a contemporary design.

SPAB, design competition.

We are not calling for a new disordered architecture to match the disorder of culture; this would only affirm the chaotic. 

Rather, we propose experiments in search of new orders, projections of new relationships.

We do not wish to transpose our study into a system or method.

The energy inherent in opening up relationships presents us with a continuity of ordering that compels refection.

Steven Holl. 

Correlational Programming, Parallax.

Studio Works

 Outpost 050822

The Thinking Field/Speculative Curriculums.

The Body-In-Action/Making Spaces between Art, Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology.

Sequences of actions that add up to an observational-heuristic procedure.

Conserved without restoration of lost detail.

The problem of historical materials, which we can never ignore but can't imitate directly either, is an issue that has always concerned me. I am primarily interested not in any concepts of restoration but an idea to do with historical clarity, making history visible by the co-existence of overlaying fragments of construction.

Carlo Scarpa, Castelvecchio.

Lime Wash, Field Chalk, China Clay.

Human Figure Drawing.

Waxed Paper, Canvas.

Charcoal, Clay, Liquid Iron Oxide.

 

Essential Work Only.

The SPAB Approach.

The Society's approach very often involves carefully considered inaction.

Where no problems exist, or where a problem has no major effect on use or conservation, an old building is best left alone and simply enjoyed.

Problems need to be tackled, but the society encourages work which is no more, but no less, than is essential.

 

Restricting work to these things helps ensure the maximum survival of historic fabric.

Site Sequencing/The Infra-Thin/The Viewing Chamber.

Tactically posed surrounds that contrast/entangle one segment of world with another.

Mapping Photons/Subjectivity.

Architectural Body/Collaged Users

Procedural Movements of Conservation/Care and Repair. 

Extracting that which has become interred.

Observing quotidian detail within the ruins of a  fabric of building.

Domestic and intimate details that create poetic themes that are universal and transcendent.

Wanting to see what things look like photographed/interrogations.

Pushing the photographic image to the point of failure, using the fading twilight to create new abstractions of light and movement.

The intermediate space of the negative.

A gap created between the mechanical attentive and unassumptive nature/vision of the camera and the presumptive and subjective vision of the human eye. 

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau Ponty struggled with the development of a theory of vision that would take account our embodied relationship to it, describing the 'chiastic' relationship between the viewer and the world, an intertwining through which the world was bought into a kind of visibility.

What needed to be put into question and seen as problematic was how the viewer came to be seen as separate from the world, how the visual ever became positioned as something other, something differentiated and separate from the spectator.

The force of presence/presentness.

Stillness and Time, 2006.

Still Video Portraits and the Account of The Soul.

Joanna Lowry.

The Visual, is predicated upon the construction of a distance between the spectator and the world, a distance maintained through the work of culture and the work of technology.

Photographic technologies have provided one key cultural mechanism for defining the place of the visual and positioning it in relationship to us.

In representing the subject they also define the site of the subjects's visibility, the place at which he or she can be seen.

They cut through the world, interrupt it, producing difference and distance and projecting it onto the surface of the paper or the screen.

They produce a differentiated space of the visible within which the subject and the spectator are made aware of their otherness and their distance from from each other.

 

Photographic Drawings/Haiku.

Luminous/Insubstantial Spectral Abstractions. 

Focus and detail  would drag it back to our world. 

Vision is the place where are continuity with the world conceals itself, the place where we mistake our contact for distance, imagining that seeing is a substitute for, rather than a mode of, touching, and it is this anaesthesia, this senselessness, at the heart of transparency that demands our acknowledgement and pushes our dealings with the visual beyond recognition.

Stephen Melville. 

Recombinant Poetics

Pinhole Photography/Qualitative Visual/Haptic Soundings.

St Martins, Shotesham. SPAB

Camera Room/Still Life

Paintings from the overlaying intervals of materials and processes of construction.

The Essential Solitude

Maurice Blanchot

Self Communion.

The person who is writing the work is thrust to one side, the person who has written the work is dismissed. What is more, the person who is dismissed does not know it.

This ignorance saves him, diverts him and allows him to go on.

The writer never knows if the work is done.

What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another.