Spatial Practice/UCA Canterbury 2009/10
Researching Proactive Apparatuses : A laboratory for speculative social evolution.
SENSORIUM AND STILLNESS, MOVEMENT AND MIRROR
A MIRROR ON WHAT IT IS TO BE HUMAN
Site ~ Interior ~ Apparatus : Humanities Spatial Relations
This earlier body of work begins from a deceptively simple proposition: space is not simply where something happens. Space participates in what can happen.
The Scriptorium, the Theatre of Research, the reading room, the collage, the ruin and the various apparatuses gathered around them were attempts to make this participation tangible. They were not simply architectural proposals, nor were they illustrations of an already established theory of space. They were provisional situations through which architecture, reading, image, body, memory and material could become uncertainly entangled.
The earlier language of spatial relations can therefore be approached now as an opening rather than a conclusion.
What was being explored was not only the relation between people and buildings, but the possibility that a spatial arrangement might alter the conditions through which a relation becomes perceptible.
The Scriptorium was conceived as an intimate, hut-like interior: a restricted apparatus for reading, contemplation and sensory intensification. The ruined architecture of Waverley Abbey was not treated simply as historical backdrop. Its fragmentary condition, its exposure to the elements and its accumulated traces became part of an inquiry into how place might become an active participant in making. The site was already more than location.
It was a body of relations.
The Theatre of Research extended this proposition differently. Rather than functioning as a library or repository, it was imagined as a working space in which theoretical and practical objects, images, texts and materials could be brought into proximity. Collage became particularly important because its fragments could remain distinct while entering new relations. Images, texts and architectural propositions could occupy the same field without needing to resolve their differences.
This now appears remarkably close to what might be called correspondence without convergence.
The earlier work did not yet use this vocabulary. Nor should it be made to.
What it did was construct situations in which things could interfere with one another.
The fragment could remain a fragment.
The image could remain an image.
The text could remain unresolved.
The ruin could remain ruinous.
The interior could remain provisional.
The apparatus could remain awkward.
And yet something could happen between them.
This is where the question of the heuristic becomes important. You asked whether these miniature architectures might become relational: whether they might be encountered through a hands-on process of finding-out rather than through recognition alone. The question remains remarkably open. russellmoreton.com
It suggests that spatial practice is not primarily the production of an answer.
It is the production of conditions in which another encounter becomes possible.
The earlier interest in voids, cavities and spaces between things can be understood in this way. The void is not simply an absence. It is an interval in which relations can occur. The cavity is not merely an empty interior. It is a condition of potential occupation, sensing, memory and exchange.
This makes the Scriptorium's interior particularly significant.
It was conceived as a refuge, but not as a sealed refuge. Its sensory intensity depended upon proximity: the occupant, the material, the doorway, the surrounding architecture, the remembered ruin, the act of reading. The interior became meaningful through its relation to what was beyond it.
The interior was already permeable.
The same is true of the Theatre of Research. Its importance was not that it could contain research, but that it could stage relations between different kinds of research — theoretical, practical, visual, architectural, social and material.
Research became spatial when it began to alter the conditions of encounter.
This is perhaps where the older notion of the apparatus begins to move towards the present notion of the chamber.
An apparatus establishes conditions.
A chamber gathers those conditions.
A surface allows something of what has gathered to become perceptible.
The later ceramic body takes up this movement materially, but does not simply repeat it.
The hut becomes chamber.
The chamber becomes body.
The body becomes permeable.
The aperture becomes hole.
The collage becomes gathering.
The palimpsest becomes material memory.
The theatre becomes atmosphere.
The spatial proposition becomes in~play.
What changes is not the existence of the earlier spatial inquiry, but the material body through which it can now be encountered.
Clay enters this genealogy differently from architecture. It resists. It records pressure. It allows correction, interruption, collapse, incision and repetition. It becomes an especially responsive material through which spatial relations can be felt rather than only constructed.
Yet the ceramic should not be understood as the fulfilment of the earlier architectural work.
It is another chamber.
Another threshold.
Another way of asking what happens between things.
This is why the earlier work remains active.
Not because it predicted the ceramic.
Not because the Scriptorium was secretly already a ceramic work.
But because it established a recurring spatial question:
What happens when an arrangement becomes sufficiently open for bodies, materials, images, ideas and places to alter one another?
The question moves from architecture into clay.
It moves from the designed interior towards the material interior.
From spatial apparatus to spatial body.
From representation towards encounter.
From place towards site.
From enclosure towards permeability.
From object towards proposition.
And perhaps this is where the earlier humanities inquiry becomes newly available.
The humanities are not simply a body of texts to be gathered and interpreted. They become another collection of correspondent bodies: philosophy, architecture, literature, image, memory, ruin, material, place and lived experience entering a spatial field.
The work does not need to reconcile them.
It needs to keep them in correspondence.
The old Theatre of Research therefore begins to look less like a proposed institution and more like a proto-spatial apparatus for the practice that is now emerging: a place where different bodies of thought could meet, become troubled, and produce propositions that were not contained in any one of them.
The ceramic chamber continues this operation at another scale.
It gathers without containing.
It opens without becoming transparent.
It withdraws without disappearing.
It surfaces without exhausting what lies within.
Site ~ Interior ~ Apparatus ~ Chamber ~ Surface
The site remains capable of undoing place.
The interior remains capable of undoing enclosure.
The apparatus remains capable of disturbing perception.
The chamber remains capable of gathering.
And the surface remains capable of surfacing otherwise.
Perhaps the spatial practice has always been concerned with this threshold:
not where things are, but what becomes possible between them.
What was once called spatial relations can now be encountered as relations remaining in~play.
The earlier work does not need to be brought forward intact.
It can be re-entered.
And in that re-entry, something from the earlier spatial inquiry becomes available again — not as an origin, but as another body with which the present practice can correspond.
Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).
Drawing a relationality through others in site.
VISITORS : A film by Godfrey Reggio
We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche
MEANING IN THE FORM OF THE FILM
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
GESALT,
GRISAILLE,
LEITMOTIF,
MATRIX,
FORMAL PATTERN,
SURFACE
John Wood, The Virtual Embodied, (London: Routledge, 1998)
The Virtual Embodied, “ explores the ideas of embodiment, knowledge and space to address fundamental questions about technology and human presence,” these parameters are being investigated and researched in my creative practice.
Embodied knowledge and virtual space.
Physical, Psychological and Virtual Realities, Max Velmans.
List of “typical beliefs about physical, psychological and virtual realities”. PHYSICAL REALITY
Extended in space-in the world
Exists independently of the observer
Has tangible properties, e.g. Mass and solidity
Descartes s proposed our classical view of the mind/body split into res extensa ( material that extends in space) and res cogitans (thinking material). We commonly associate the physical world as having both extension and location in space.
PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITY
Non-extended in space-in the mind
Existence depends on the observer
Is relatively intangible and insubstantial
Psychological realities do not have spatial dimensions, and their location is only metaphorically “ in the mind”. It is crucial to note that psychological realities are only real for a given observer. Velmans notes” these intuitions are confirmed by the fact that physical realities have tangible, substantial properties such as mass, solidity and weight. Whilst psychological properties are, by comparison, intangible and insubstantial”.
VIRTUAL REALITY
Appears to have extension in space, but has no actual extension Appears to be in the world, but is actually in the mind
Existence depends on the interaction of the observer with VR equipment
Can appear to have tangible properties ( with suitable equipment) but does not have such properties.
Virtual realities via appropriate headsets which give “feedback” from bodily movements and visual displays, conspire to give the appearance of a virtual world extended into our physical space, but they have no actual 3D physical extension. Interestingly such worlds are physical in the fact that they rely on the physical existence and placement of equipment, virtual realities seek to create apparent changes in “self location” which do not correspond with actual changes in location. New developments can now give a physical realm into the virtual by the use of body interfaces that can restrict the movement of the body to correspond to the visual perception of a virtual identity.
Fragment from material resonances project, spatial practice research, CSA.
THE ACTIVITY OF PERCEPTION
Perception is in the “condition” of an interruption.
Rehearsal is the creative part of any performance.
Humanities : Spatial Relations
Interested in the speculative nature of work-sites that contain a narrative intervention via a device that registers and records the documentary and its rehearsal.
Work as revealed into a final sequence of superimposures on a surface created from the collective transparency of the text.
Thresholds that reveal the interspace between the Human and its condition/environment.
Photographic surface of events, a visual entropy resolved as a history of consolidated exactitudes/enactments.
The photographic surface shows that which no longer exists, it concretizes contingences on offer into an image of irreversibility.
Double Occupancy , Dwelling with the critique and its realization of an uncovering event, criticism collides with and into the work. Deleuze, Baroque house (65).
Presenting both a virtual walk through “text” ,using the transparency of “text” both as a literal transparency and its phenomenal “physicality” as applied to surface and structures within the site. Using the body of the visitor to enable
enactments/sensitivities to be derived from the site encounter. Enactments triggered by the singularity of an individuals engagement with walking amongst the working site. The final experience/superimpose remains uniquely a product of the visitor. This site driven explorative experience undertaken by both a passitivity and a curiosity on the part of “the guest” creates a self /space/time/ place relation, a localised intimacy that promotes an encapsulated sense of enchantment/wisdom.
The entirety of the “text” is stored latent in the interlocutor as they investigate the physicality of material relationships and spatial significations. In this respect the interlocutor defines his/her “traits” through a recognition and curiosity with their own body as it weaves a narrative of navigation through the experience of “site”. This theorizing by the body of its encounters, material and spatial, alone or within the proximities of others interests me as a “trace” of the encountering space through the human agent. This working notion and its site begin to posit the idea of an
“interspace” between the human and its environment. This theoretical and abstracted site could be utilized to research interventions and their effects, to attempt to register the spatial relations/traits of contemporary society. How might this material and its spatial census (human/ site temporalities) be gathered, registered and finally presented.
10 days, Observational material from site, They sense this articulating moment, their consolation becomes recursively and inexplicably consolidated with others unfamiliar undistinguishable, they are rendered into the resultant homogeneity of a surface relation bonded by specifics of space and time.
10 Days, Observational/Reflection, Journal notes Their erasure by the transits of change and chance of others over-writing themselves to reveal the transparency of temporalities as registered by the photographic duration of capture.
What remains is an exactitude of “what occurred” in a form/manner unknowable to those present, by dwelling in this visual interface of the photographic surface, things become inexplicably and irreversibly compounded with a time stretched and stilled.
Photography has the unusual attributes to be able to act as a particle accelerator on the human subject, it can present material assessed from numerous durational encounters with time. It can render a seduction and conversely an invisibility.
Spatial Practice is in effect a laboratory (of the self and worlds) from which I define and register and relate material tested under those conditions. This makes me part of the process and part of the results, part also of the problem of the investigation.
Reflections on the use of “the Negative” expedient use of material creates this inherent property, interesting analogy with human process of vision, in as much as the after-image rendered by the eye is always in the negative. This final image of what was is in effect being erased by the negative/negated. The perspective of the negative reveals more informative relations about the spatial/displacement of the environment in which the “objectivity” is being both immersed and conversely displaced. Like the displacement of a solid form by a liquid of the same displacement, the negative reveals the object displacing/relating in spatial terms. The negative gives proof to our mutual dependency and our forgetting of air as both surface and support.
In Drawing and Mapping it is tensions between the negative and the positive objectivity of things that helps to define a limit, a definition of form that is both simultaneously relational and indexical. The “Trace” also maintains these properties but interestingly it contains a transparency, a dimensionality that makes it both reflective and confrontational, it remains registered to the present but unable to escape its signification of the past.
Public Intimacy, Architecture and the Visual Arts. Giuliana Bruno.
Series of "essays" on the relations between Architecture and The Arts. Bruno notes the critical role in which architecture constitutes and supports a "public intimacy" initiated through both historical references and Contemporary Art. This spatiality of a public constructed space that grants the reception of an intimacy is seen by Bruno as being a "new moving space- a screen of vital cultural memory". She proposes a view that Architecture is mobilized as a screen/vessel in which to define a frame of memory. Architecture in this sense becomes not just "a matter of space but an art of time." Interestingly it is in the work of Rebecca Horn that she notes the combination of both the scientific and the artistic. This combination has a resonance with the architectural model and intended purpose of the anatomical theatre. Rebecca Hom and a growing number of contemporary practitioners are actively engaged in creating "works" which use architectonics and situation to create personal and profound experiences, intimacies evolved from public spaces. This new conceptualization of "body space" and its relationship to the production of space is ultimately being absorbed back into Architectural practice, the work of Nigel Coates "Guide to Ecstacity" and Rem Koolhaas use of materials and interventions that challenge our sensory and cultural aesthetics about architecture illustrate issues around the spatialisation of the body and its intimate consumption in the public realm of the senses.
To Live is to pass from one space to another. Georges Perec.
Bruno Taut, The New Dwelling, Women as Creator, (Leipzig : Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1924).
Taut asserts that it is a woman's way of inhabiting space that creates and modifies architecture, see also Mark Wigley, White walls, Designer dresses: The fashioning of Modern Architecture. (Cambridge: MIT press , 1995)
I would say that my fiction is set in the visionary present. J G Ballard.
Underlining the Hostility of the external world, The Autopsy Room/Theatre.
Victims surrender all that is left of their unique identities, what is left after the basic components are separated, nothing much to claim not even a faint presence of existence. We feel pity and the oblivion patiently waiting for us. J G Ballard on CSI
Frozen frames of a perverse geometry, flickering into a narrative of their own volition. The work is accompanied by a critical voyeurism that has the ability to reveal a prognosis.
Ballard, Every paragraph of this "fiction is frightening obscure and an obtuse puzzle. Surreal geometries, with a pervasive atmosphere of doom and imminent cataclysm that "exposes" the sordidly within us all.
Ballard, Obsessions- Dystopias/Sexuality/Technology and their discontinuities' Ballard, Abstractions-Science/Psychiatry/Mathematics.
Questions the "concrete delinearations of morality, ethics and sanity".
Notion that Aesthetics/Landscapes can harbour relations, The Gaze, male/female.
THE RESEARCH POSTER, a document outlining a field of inquiry, placing ones pitch into the public domain.
Life is Data
Progress is Optional
Understanding is a product of good marketing.
Attempting to keep the moment from being realized. Robert Rauschenberg
On Photography, Rauschenberg.
My photography is supported by a personal conflict between curiosity and shyness. Rauschenberg uses his camera as a social shied, he has "a need to be where it will always never be the same again." He comments that "photography is the most direct communication in non-violent contacts". His concern is to move at a speed within which to act in the "archaeology" of what light or its darkness touches.
The object itself is dictating your possibilities.
Validity, cannot exist without standards. How long are standards fresh? Every minute everything is different everywhere. Where is the basis for criticism. Criticism collides into the work ,it attempts to arrest it, it deliberately attempts to affect a stop.
Oren Lieberman, The "Plastic Wallet thing/Spatial Practice interview Canterbury" They promote attention, They are seductive in their surface, they "house" temporalities into a permanent/recognisable system or archive. They are deterministic in the sense of belonging to an instantly recognisable protective and presentational system of storing information. The indexical "holes" themselves promote the notion of a terminology on the material within them, sort of ironic when they contain thoughts and issues about methodologies. Perhaps these useful wallets have just become another material victim of contemporary homogeneities. Corrupt their inherent homogeneity by removal or adaptation of their indexical register (the punched holes) thereby making them unique or of a non purpose, or for a purpose not yet disclosed/realised.
The marked agency and its absence of the artist leaves the site live and open. Oxford MOMA 2006 Jannis Kounallis left his coat hanging by a window adjacent and in the same room as his installation.
RUSSELL MORETON. MA SPATIAL PRACTICES.
Artist Statement used to accompany promotional powerpoint display at UCA Canterbury, 2009.
Spatial Practice provides an interesting set of methodologies in which to explore our own “relationality”1. This is particularly relevant in respect to my understanding and subsequent proposal for the role of the interlocutor within my work. Becoming increasingly interested in the concept of “ open text ”2 to explore the nature of space and its relational properties that create place, or rather a self placed. At present using Photography (large pinhole chambers) embedded in working environments to further explore properties of latency, transparency and the peripheral dwelling of spatial material.
The Practice.
Currently exploring the dynamics and dwellings of spatial relations. The use of a large oil drum as a “pin hole camera” creates a tool that records/witnesses a specific duration (dwelling) in place. This duration of approximately 45 minutes renders visual data that underpins our temporality as we constantly re-form spatial relations with each other and that of the architectural environment. The internal architectonics of the chamber gives a sense of both the proximity of peripheral space and the distance/dislocation of a filmic surface concretized by time. These imaged surfaces render a sense of place, an aura and a psychosis/pathology around images and their representation.
1 Robert Cooper, Peripheral Vision: Relationality ( London: Sage Publishing, 2005)
2 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between ( London: I. B. Tauris, 2006)
METHODOLOGIES/PROJECT PROPOSAL
TIME
RELATIONALITY
CONTINGENT
SURFACE
CONSOLATIONS
The Trace becoming a material witness to an event/situation
Use of “information” gathered from site being re-invested with another sense of time and ambient light.
Transparent/Translucent materials “surfaced” by contemporary digital technologies, corporate media presentational light boxes, large format 24 square metres.
Use of “interventions” liquids between visual and haptic membranes, utilization of direct drawing within and amongst the “media technologies”.
Direct more of “working practice” into larger scale painting investigations with drawing and photography as inclusions. Suggest notion of temporary space situated in fine art.
Explore relationships of “objects” as the custodian of place. Analysis of the Reception and relations generated by this “first objectivity”.
Relation of “what was ”to what is left being a “spatial involvement” placed back into the continuum of ongoing spatial relations.
Spatial involvements as a surface of contingent enactments giving “us” a sense of our temporality, exactitude and anonymity that becomes “preserved” by Place/Studies (Rendell).
Drawing a relationality through others in site.
Drawn inscriptions that leave traces for others to respond
Documents of a theoretical investigation over the surface from both beneath (the place) and from above (the event).
A performative membrane/drawing/diagram/script that gains its authenticity/performativity from being there and allowing what might occur to be witnessed.
Drawing as a “open text” that allows a perspectival immersion/situatedness, because it is still active, un-resolved needing to be taken further under the authorship of viewer.
These fragments of precise interventions/enactments engender a dynamic of relational possibilities.
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