Assemblages of movement : Human Bodies/Spatial Bodies/Body Matters

Outpost 201124

Parables for the Virtual.

Brian Massumi. 1985

When we think of space as 'extensive' as being measurable, divisible and composed of points plotting possible positions that objects may occupy, we are stopping the world in thought. We are thinking away its dynamic unity, the continuity of its movements. We are looking at only one dimension of reality.

If you know where you where you will end up when you begin, nothing happens tn the meantime.

Bergson redefined space in terms of movement, space is not a ground on which real motion is posited, rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself. Space comes into being through motion or event.

On Architectural Experience.

Architecture has the potential capacity on human/spatial bodies to affect or to be affected.

Relations of Movement and Rest.

The bodies capacity to enter into relations of movement and rest, to affect or to be affected.

Massumi/Spinoza/Deleuze.

Architecture still remains primarily as a discussion of distinct bodies, spatial and human with the two remaining physically and psychologically distinct.

Violated Bodies-Spaces.

Intense confrontations between body and space.

Tschumi allows for architecture to be considered as an assemblage, composed of a space and a bodily event, however, even his 'equation' retains a demarcation between spatial bodies and human bodies engaging in event and maintaining that the two function according to independent logics, but  serve to affect one another.

Bodies and spaces excrete out of themselves, they penetrate one another, contemporary architecture does not know what to do with such borderless entities. It has no mode of thinking about assemblages of this kind, where once discrete objects leak into one another creating indiscernible masses. There is a multiplicity of bodies, bodies that are forever being created and dismantled, forever in flux.

Architecture between Spectacle and Use.

Anthony Vidler. 2008

Architecture in Abjection.

Bodies-Spaces and their Relations.

Zuzana Kovar. 2018

For Vidler this spectacle architecturre is one that embraces the ideas of image and iconomy.

In addition to carefully placing and posing lone figures within architectural photographs, architecture is also synonymous with casting idealised bodies, Le Corbusier's athelitic figures and his 'Modulor' of an ideal masculine body. And then there are the bodies available in computer models, and the physical little white plastic figurines. These are all ideal figures, doing proper things.

Disjunction.

Volatility-Violence.

Sets in motion a particular series of potentialities that otherwise lie dormant, which can alter architectures physical, social, cultural, ethical and at times political properties. 

Creating a schism between program and space, space and program, it does this so precisely because event-space and movement each follow a distinct logic, that when they are superimposed over one another they create disjunction.

For Tschumi there is an intense confrontation that occurs between body and space, bodies violate space and space violates bodies, the relationship between the two is symmetrical.

FORMWORK / ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS~The Minor Gesture : Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

Making~Intensified Surfaces of a Transdisciplinary Spatial Inquiry.

https://axisweb.org/artist/russellmoreton

The 'exigencies' of the situation at hand.

Tim Ingold, MAKING. 

Clay becomes a procedural matter of concern(s).

Spatial Intelligence/Architectures

Abject (ion) Body and Matter in Process/Processual Relations.

For Manning, Arakawa and Gins, the challenge is that the procedures of a procedural architecture (its architecting) must continuously be reinvented to stay apace with the architecting of experience. And this procedure must be crafted with care, it must be relevant to the conditions already at hand.

Dress Becomes Body in The Minor Gesture, Erin Manning. 2016 

Indexical Drawing : Pencil, Wax and iron oxide on paper. 240x150 1008

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

IMMATERIAL / REPETITION / SINGULARITY

ENCLOSURES / ITERATIONS / THINKING FORMS

MINIMALIST SPACES / INTERVALS, tuning objects to construct environments

Mediating the experience of LANDSCAPE

SITE / COLLAGE COMPONENTS working/walking, developing a creative spatial syntax COLOUR AS CONDUIT / PERCEPTUAL ENVIRONS / CRAFT MEDIA / IMPROVISATION PIERCED  DAPPLED NATURAL LIGHT

DIFFERENTIATED SHADOW / SURFACE

EXTRAORDINARY MATERIALS / TECTONICS AND TEXTILES INDEXICAL / GESTALT  VISUAL PERCEPTION

NETWORKS / RESOURCES / AGENCY for the potential of BUILDING SCAFFOLDS / GAUZE / POCHE solids of a building/architectural plan ABSENCES / INTERSECTIONS / GRIDS / MESHES / SPRAYS / MOTIFS ACTUALITY

Without opposition nothing is revealed,

No image appears in a clear mirror If one side is not darkend.

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principiis 1619.

Everything is interrelated and suffers when it acts, so too the purest human thought. Holderlin, 1798.

Getting Lost, Walking whilst deep in thought/embodiment in the environment Between PLACE and SITE

Walking creates its own feedback loop, The Journey, The Return,

The specific, Here and Now

Psychogeography, Dossier, Forensic Study, Inquiry.

Spatial Abstractions : Reflexivity on Reflection. Embodiment on Experiential Subjectivity

 LANDSCAPES Constituted by creative practice

Walks as erasures, sedimentation, (Gardiner on painting)

Quotidian/Everyday Interests, Complexities of Contemporary Life. Ambients, Phenomenas, Objects, Subjectivities,

Everyday aesthetics, heuristic practices.

RAVENINGHAM THEMES : Working Notes

New Futures for Architecture Leon van Schaik

Spatial intelligence builds our mental space. Sensing Spaces

Architecture Reimagined Oak-Framed Buildings. Rupert Newman

Heidegger for Architects

Adam Sharr 

MAKING : ANTHROPOLOGY, ARCHAEOLOGY ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Tim Ingold

Touching objects, feeling materials 

The Cathedral and the Laboratory

A Hut of One's Own

Anne Cline

Solar Pavilion

Alison and Peter Smithson Architecture is not made with the brain 

The Parallel of Art and Life

Aesthetics about Perception Poetics about Production

HERZOG & DEMEURON NATURAL HISTORY

My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. Speculative Architecture

On The Aesthetics of Herzog & De Meuron 

The Thinking Hand

Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa

The Architecture of Natural Light. Henry Plummer

Peter Zumthor

Hortus Conclusus Serpentine Gallery Pavilion

The Potentials of Spaces

The Theory and Practice of Scenography and Performance. Alison Oddey, Christine White

See Yourself Sensing Redefining Human Perception. Madeline Schwartzman

Collage and Architecture. Jennifer A. E. Shields

COLLAGE

Assembling Contemporary Art. Sally O'Reilly 

Construction/Abstraction Body/Identity Environments/Geographies

Indexical

Absences

Actuality Immaterial Architectural Sensing Surfaces,

Textures

Dimensions, Sprays, Trace

Dwelling, Reverberations, Epiphanic Instant, Gaston Bachelard.

Repetition, Empirical Experiences

Forms, Pavilion, Hut, Shelter, simple enclosure

Minimalist, tuning objects, sequences to construct/de-construct environments 

Reflexive Surfaces into architectural presence

Art as indeterminate, able to arrest perceptions into different states/becomings 

Site, undoing of place. 

Gauze/Filtered Light/Phenomena

Gesture of the work, its situation,

Meshwork. The drawing grid, making of a proposition into space.

Cyan, Sky Blue, dappled light, membrane, responding to the weather/locality

AA Pavilion Project,

Its about learning through making, being involved in the process, the installation and its reception, dislocating contextual barriers.

Ephemeral Architectures, AA Document/Project, Prizeman

Immaterial Architecture : Waverley Pavilion Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.

Immaterial Architecture The Illegal Architect Jonathan Hill

Oak 

Tree 

Oil

Paper

Plaster

Rust 

Sgratfito 

Silence 

Sound 

Steel 

Television 

Weather

Frosted Light

Index of immaterial architectures

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL. Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body. Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson

Interactive Abstract Body (Square) The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman

Stan Allen

Indexical Characters FABRIC=MASS+ FORM

Alan Chandler

The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.

ANTI OBJECT Kengo Kuma

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. 

What that form is called- ARCHITECTURE, GARDENS< TECHNOLOGY is not important. ReThinking Matereriality

The engagement of mind with the material world. Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden. Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things

Towards a Theory of Material Engagement Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency

Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency

We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts 

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things

Material Engagement and the Extended Mind. Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality. Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective Carl Knappett

People make space, and space contains people

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things. Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments

Architectures for Perception

Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts. Charles Goodwin

 

Making Apparatuses/Fictioning Space : Reading with Deleuze and Spinoza~Radical Intuitions : Interacting through abject(ions) between clay+ceramic.

Speculative and Exploratory Field Works.

Practical Philosophy ~in~the~making~

Asking of those that create things through material engagements, all the poetics~makings are crafted from modalities of becoming affective abject(ions)~aesthetics~

Inscriptions, handwriting, cognitive connections across visual art materialisms.

Gathered readings, walking across holloways and embodied dispositions, surfaces/inseparable cartographies of embodied experiences.

Undisciplined knowledge enables and sustains actions, gestures of a post disciplinary field.

Inseparable categories (containers and bodies) and their contents.

The Aesthetic,

The Economic,

The Political,

The Social,

Naked~Nude : On The Corporeality Of The Drawn~Drawing Body

Outpost 230323

Drawing, depicting something found through the process of making visible.

The Luminescence Of Space.

An Archaeological Inquiry Into Drawing.

Correspondences/Reclaiming the drawings.

The Affect and Memory of Drawing.

To interrogate ways of seeing/looking, John Berger.

The world of the creative practitioner promotes conditions, gestures and responses that articulate social, political and other theoretical findings which are all 'present' at the inception of the work.

Colin Renfrew.

The Myth of Butades.

Figure/Ground Relationships.

Theoretical Thought : Diagram and map.

Neo-Sumerian temple plan on clay tablet from c. 2100BC.

The drawing/work may take the form of the result of an act or action carried out at a specific time but which itself does not persist.

Art can be the expression in the material world of a concept, or the transformation into one material form of a structure that exists in another.

Drawing/Substance/Memory/Display.

The artist's creative act, is of a self amongst others.

Material/Thinking Matter.

Drawings mediated by the distance of memory.

Art Works, subtle embodiments, visual markers both spatial and sociological.

Life/Drawing/Figuring It Out.

The Luminescent Dematerialization Of The Subject.

Expressions Of Both Figuration And Abstraction.

Phenomenological approaches to Drawing/Looking/Others.

Demarcation/drawing boundaries/wayfaring/paths on the land, re The Making of Space.

Walking/Movement is quiet literally what made us human.

The walk is a 'mark' laid upon thousands of other layers of human and geographical history on the surface of the land. Bipedalism is the precursor to the evolution of a large brain, creative intelligence and language.

Richard Long/Colin Renfrew.

Charles Mausson.

Walking Man, No. 3. 1990.

Oil, crayon, 203.0 x 137.0 cm.

Starting from a subject or a simple figurative form, Charles Maussion sets of like an explorer, in search of unexplored lands, looking for something spiritual. It is through walking/drawing/thinking that one can remain human even while seeking out, and without even knowing it, finding it, or finding yourself in lands which are thousands of light years from our society, whilst nevertheless being very close to it. A calm, a loudness, that is extreme, beautiful.

Robert Combas. 1993.

The simple presence of a figure is sufficient to suggest the unity of the individual in a universe which is patiently observed and precisely apprehended. There is a complete absence of any compositional device suggested within the canvas, all that emanates is a climate of strangeness, serenity and disquiet.

Sophie Dupont. 1995.

The blurring of the conventional distinction between the figure and the ground, so as to capture an atmospheric effect, which sought to approximate the murkiness of visual perception.

The legibility of the photographic image was denied by the process of blurring the image.

Paintings, abstract identities of surface and material, introducing content via a dematerialization, so as to engage in a process of pure vision, pure silence, reincarnated, vibrant, alive.

William Jeffett. 1995.

Drawing on the consciousness and corporeality of others, of figural dissolution of the traditional figure/ground relationships, and fragmentation/blurring of the human form. The contemporary body and its environments are experientially brought into abstracted absences, corporeal traces of visual matter, movement and dissolving/reappearing forms.

Figural Expressions.

Figural dissolution of a nude descending a staircase, Marcel Duchamp.

Stop-motion photography of the human body in motion, Etienne Marey.

Figural, paintings/drawings not as representations of tangible subjects, but as registers of a more abstract range of emotions, as a series of studies, always incomplete and never finished, a work in progress. The nude/ the human body has become mediated by the mechanical effects of photography and the distance/blindness of memory.

Notations.

Contemporary Drawing as Idea and Process.

Fred Sandback.

The Drawing Room.

The Secret Theory of Drawing.

Jim Dine.

Figure Drawings, 1975-79.

The Drawings of Richard Diebenkorn.

John Eldenfield.

Manuel Neri.

Drawings/Relief Sculptures.

Naked To Nude.

Life Drawing in the Twentieth Century.

Georg Eisler.

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