Showing posts with label rituals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rituals. Show all posts

Friday, 18 August 2023

Violence of Architecture : Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.

 Outpost 170823


The Movement of Bodies in the Space of Architecture.

White Cubes/Art Museums/Architectures of  Ritualized Display.


Violence of Architecture.

Bodies Violating Space/Space Violating Bodies.












Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion  of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another. This intrusion is inherent in the idea of architecture; any reduction of architecture to its spaces at the expense of its events is as simplistic as the reduction of architecture to its facades.


By 'violence,' I do not mean the brutality that destroys physical or emotional integrity but a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.


Bodies carve all sorts of new and unexpected spaces, through fluid or erratic motions. Architecture, then, is only an organism engaged in constant intercourse with users, those bodies rush against the carefully established rules of architectural thought. No wonder the human body has always been suspect in architecture: it has always set limits to the most extreme architectural ambitions. The body disturbs the purity of architectural order. It is equivalent to a dangerous prohibition.


Spaces are qualified by actions just as actions are qualified by spaces. One does not trigger the other; they exist independently. Only when they intersect do they affect one another. The same occurs in architecture: the event is altered by each new space. And vice versa: by ascribing to a given, supposedly 'autonomous' space a contradictory program, the space attains new levels of meaning. Event and space do not merge but affect one another.


When spaces and programs are largely independent of one another, one observes a strategy of indifference in which architectural considerations do not depend on utilitarian ones, in which space has one logic and events another.


A ritual implies a near-frozen relationship between action and space. It institutes a new order after the disorder of the original event. When it becomes necessary to mediate tension and fix it by custom, then no single fragment must escape attention. Nothing strange and unexpected must happen. Control must be absolute. 

Bernard Tschumi.



Everyday Life/Spatial Intimacy.

The original, spontaneous interaction of the body with a space is often purified by ritual.



Concerned with the way art museums offer up values and beliefs.

Civilizing Rituals/Inside Public Art Museums.

Carol Duncan.


Art always risks the plurality its iterations, that they can become colonized, immobilized and arrested within dominant belief structures. It is always the plurality alive in the art work that always risks being overtaken by the forces of encounter it invites.

Erin Manning, Relationscapes.


The Diagram/Drawing of the Work

In-Gathers the Works Feeling.


The Dreaming's, potential to create new kinds of futures in the present.

Making works/drawings that resonate/openings into the indeterminacy of experience.

Allowing the workings of art to facilitate the opening of the present to its potential for experiential complexity through the ontogenetic plurality of sense(s). 

Napangardi's work activates the Dreaming's potential, becoming both a technology of the future and a technique for the present.

Erin Manning/Dreaming's paintings by Napangardi.



The Final Act/Fact in the Work of Art.

Landing Sites, we land into the focus of an awareness that becomes with us.


The Decision of Emphasis is how the work satisfies its becoming, this satisfaction is the present finality of its current iteration.

Alfred North Whitehead.


Creating art-work that remains open to an infinity of potential evocations.



Feeling Drawing/Spatial Experience.

Indexical Traces/Decarcations/Materiality/Media

The flow of time in the event/duration of drawing.


Figuring it out, drawings/diagrams/lines/paths of sensory inquiry.

How we feel things/phenomenology.

Uncovering unconscious things/psychoanalysis. 


Life Drawings/Propositions with/for the human body.

What the ecology of the drawings show, what is hidden, seeing naked or nude.


Naked in Norwich.

Undercroft.


Space violating bodies : Architectures of Display/Ritual/Violence.

General Ritual Features of Art Museums.


Firstly, the achievement of a marked of 'liminal' zone of time and space in which visitors, removed from the concerns of their daily, practical lives, open themselves to a different quality of experience.


Secondarily, the organization of the museum setting as a kind  of script or scenario which visitors perform. Carol Duncan has argued that western concepts of the aesthetic experience, generally taken as the art museum's raison d' etre, match up rather closely to the kind of rationales often given  for traditional rituals (enlightenment, revelation, spiritual equilibrium or rejuvenation).


In the liminal space of the museum, everything, and sometimes anything, may become art,including fire extinguishers, thermostats, and humidity gauges, which when isolated on a wall and looked through the aesthetizing lens of museum space, can appear if only for a mistaken moment, every bit as interesting as some of the intended-as-art works on display, which in any case do not always look very different.


Circumstances are everything.

Notes on the making of a conditional art.

Robert Irwin.


Art is primarily a situation.

Robert Morris. 


Like everything else in life, art is not defined by its physical description, its formal qualities or even its conceptual foundation, circumstances are everything. Something could be art or it could not be art, it all depends on the situation.


Bernard Tschumi agues that architecture is never autonomous, never pure form, not a matter of style and cannot be reduced to a language. He opposes an over-rated notion of architectural form, and hopes to reinstate the term function and more particularly, to re inscribe the movement of bodies in space, together with the actions and events that take place within the social and political realm of architecture. In Architecture and Disjunction he refuses the simplistic relation by which form follows function, or use, or socioeconomics. In contrast, he argues that in contemporary urban society, any cause-and-effect relationship between form, use, function, and socioeconomic structure has become both impossible and obsolete.   

 

Sunday, 26 February 2023

Sensing Places : Dwelling/Making/Attention/Environments

Russell Moreton
Artist Statement 2023


Spatial practitioner employing a  speculative site based practice linking visual fine art, education, architecture and philosophy. Interested in duration and experience, repetition and improvisation, together with intuitive working methods that are local and quotidian. 

Architectural Body
Organism/Person/Environment.
Awareness that repetitions and rituals can give meaning to existence.











Dwelling.
Giving Sensation Place.
An Education Of Attention.
Creative Curriculum Making.

Developing a creative inquiry and its presentation through generative art based methodologies.
Re-imagining learning through site based education, art practices and philosophy.

The construction of working drawings/sites that are themselves habitable and that capture insist moments of mark making and subjectivity.

Installing a creative practice as a 'place driven site' for subjective experience, gathering things and personal inquiry from which to present 'findings' into the social environment.

As a contemporary practitioner operating within the Arts and Architecture, I am interested in social apparatuses and agents that explore the possibilities of place based relations. 


For Tim Ingold, life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.
And dwelling means that the forms people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground arise within the current of their involved activity in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagement with their surroundings.
Tim Ingold, Lines. 2007
 

Key Words: Site Based Inquiry, Post Studio Practice, Education, Fine Art, Spatial Practice, Philosophy, Presentation, Exhibition, Workshops, Research Led, Exploratory Processes, Curriculum, Placemaking, Sensing, Architecture, Circulation, Subjectivity, Relationscapes, Dwelling, Inhabitation, Environment, Landscape, Person, Organism,


Friday, 14 October 2022

Refractive Phenomena : Site Circumstances, Water/Glass/Film.

 Outpost 141022










Water : A Phenomenal Lens.

Refractive Phenomena.

Void Space Water Gardens.

Steven Holl.


The haptic realm of architecture is defined by the sense of touch.


When the materiality of the details forming an architectural space become evident, the haptic realm is opened up. Sensory experience is intensified; psychological dimensions are engaged.


The psychological power of reflections overcomes the science of refraction.


As rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them, for when he does not understand he, becomes them by transforming himself into them.

Vico, New Science.


One of the tragedies of modern urban life is that a complex of urban constructions often puts us out of touch with the poetry and unpredictability of the everyday change in the weather.


Patti Smith

Baptised by the New World 


Site : Circumstance and Idea.


Phenomenal zones function life a manifold of parts, presenting the question of a whole more substantial than any of its components. 


Each challenge in architecture is unique; each has a particular site and circumstance or program, and for each to fuse sit, circumstance, and a multiplicity of phenomena, an organizing idea .. a driving concept is required.


The unity of the whole emerges from the thread that runs through the variety of parts; whether it be one discrete idea or the interrelation of several concepts.



To find a balance between the science of water and the exhilarating qualities of experience, consider the many states and transformative properties of the substance. We might consider water a 'phenomenal lens' with powers of reflection, spatial reversal, refraction, and the transformation of rays of light.


The 'void space' water gardens and the interior ceilings of the adjacent apartments are connected by reflected light from the ponds. These 'void spaces' containing three inches of water over black smooth stones from Ise, are analogous to a sacred space within the every day world of domestic urban life.



Hungate Medieval Art.

Water, Working Title.

Exhibition, St Peter Hungate, Norwich. 2023.

Sculpture, Installation, Sonic Art, Performance and Film Screenings.


The live reflection of echo and re-echo within a stone cathedral increases our awareness of the vastness, geometry and material of its space.


Water, its use in Christian rituals, baptism, confirmation, confession, ordination, matrimony and anointing of the sick.


Responding to the physicality of stone fonts as objects to hold holy water.


Objects produced according to the doctrines of the Roman Catholic church before the Reformation.


An attention to phenomenal properties of the transformation of light through material can present poetic tools for making spaces of exhilarating perceptions. Refraction phenomena produce a particular magic in architecture that is adjacent to or incorporates water.




Of Sound.


Quieting the mind

deep in the forest

water drips down

Hosha.


The brevity of a Japanese haiku poem isolates the 'thing-in-itself' of experience and perception of material and detail.


Space brings the resonance of the acoustic near to life.

John Cage.


In some European cities, the regular sound of the church bell's community call creates a psychological space. Its perceptual associations are tied to the materiality of the bell, its resonant tower, and the adjacent square. This kind of 'sound space' cannot be accurately recreated with electronic speakers.


Sound is absorbed and perceived by the entire body. A sequence of sounds can have a mesmerizing effect on the psyche.


John Cage went into an anechoic chamber over sixty years ago in order to 'hear sounds' and found that experience gave his life direction. Cage's radical and poetic experiments with sound bridged the conventional gap between musical phenomena and the physical and psychological effects of sound.


Electronic music has increased the ranges available to composers and changes in thinking have reframed sound and time.


Scripting Aural Phenomena.


The architecture of music, the structure of aural phenomena might have a graphic parallel in architectural notations; plans sections, axonometrics, etc. Many composers have used time-space notations in order to compose with irregular rhythms. Notations which allow for accidental chromatic notes, microtones, clusters of vertical bands between marked pitches all appear different from conventional notation.


Accordingly we consider a re-framing of space, light and time in architecture.


Paul Valery suggested the closeness of music and architecture, that sculpture and painting one can turn way from, but music surrounds us as does the space of architecture.


Detail : The Haptic Realm.


Today the industrial and commercial forces at work on the 'products' for architecture tend towards the synthetic; wooden casement windows are delivered with waterproof plastic vinyl coatings, metals are 'anodized' or coated with a synthetic outer finish, tiles are glazed with coloured synthetic coatings, stone is simulated as is wood grain. 


The sense of touch is dulle or canceled with these commercial industrial methods, as is the texture and essence of material and detail displaced. 


The total perception of architectural spaces depends much on the material and detail found and experienced through the haptic realm.


The texture of a silk drape, the sharp corners of cut steel, the mottled shade and shadow of rough sprayed plaster or the sound of a spoon striking a concave wooden bowl, all reveal an authentic essence which stimulates the senses.


Fields.

Diagrams of Field Conditions.


All grids are fields, but not all fields are grids. 


On of the potentials of the field is to redefine the relation between figure and ground. If  we think of the figure not as a demarcated object read against a stable field, but as an effect emerging from the field itself- as moments of intensity, as peaks or valley within a continuous field, as the figure and field become more enmeshed.


Rather than considering photography as a means to capture an instant, some artists subverted this practice to express duration in time. Sometimes through collages, sequences and superimpositions, in some cases through a single long exposure.


Photographers are exploring different methods to synthesize the fourth dimension within the bidimensional range of the frame. The results provide a wide variety of unexpected solutions, some extremely synthetic while others very fragmented, pushing further the boundaries of the practice.