Inquiry is essentially the way of learning : Fragile Architectures of Hapticity and Time.

In an era in which architecture is once more learning its potential as a form of inquiry, rather than as a service — as a producer of knowledge, and not merely of ‘projects’.

Brett Steele, Atlas-Tectonics in Barkow Leibininger, Bricoleur Bricolage. AA 2013

Inquiry is essentially the way of learning.

On Learning ‘The Cultivation of a Good Mind’ J. Krishnamurti, Brockwood 1963

THE WAVERLEY INQUIRY

Interior Design MA, UCA Farnham 2013-2015.

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

ROOMS AS EXPERIENTIAL OUTPOSTS 

Translations from Drawing to Building.

Robin Evans.

Interiors crafted as a palimpsest of augmented realities. 

Robin Evans, Figures, Doors and Passages.

The architect is Not a Carpenter:

On Design and Building, a talk by Tim Ingold Fieldwork on Foot: Perceiving, Routing, Socializing

Jo Lee, Tim Ingold.

The Perception of the Environment,

Essays on Livelihood, dwelling and Skill, Tim Ingold.

The Aesthetics of Decay

Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the absence of Reason, Dylan Trigg. The Projection Room (the darkened room, camera obscura)

Ruin In Architecture and Cinema, Kiefer, Pallasmaa

Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky

The Artist/'Monk, Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky 1966)

Six Memos for the New Millennium, Italo Calvino Architecture as a stage for the effects of an immersive cinema. Palimpsest

Edward De Waal, Antony Gormley, Studio Spaces designed by Architects. Tony Fretton on Retreats, Creative Centres and Exhibition Spaces. Herzog and De Meuron, Working Models, Surfaces, Images and Materials.

Subversive Libraries, researching between the walls of culture and politics.

A HUT WITHIN THE INFLUENCE AND NATURE OF ARCHITECTURE

The tendency of technological culture to standardize environmental condition 

and make the environment entirely predictable is causing a serious sensory impoverishment. Our buildings have lost their opacity and depth, sensory invitation and discovery, mystery and shadow.

Juhani Pallasmaa. Hapticity and Time. Notes on Fragile Architecture. 2000

The Scriptorium Description of Work

The ruined site of the abbey at Waverley, near Farnham has been appropriated as a site and as a place within which to position and develop architectural and sociological inquires. The design processes of interiors have been employed as a tool to both critique and to create how we might further develop the contents of architecture. This Spatiality and its diffractions of differences and similarities, narratives and subjective experiences are what my interior spaces attempt to initiate.

Design as a interactive structure, an interlocutory interior in the making of space and spatial relations.

Interior design presented as an interactive and immersive spatial inquiry

The Scriptorium brings together a varied and discursive set of objects, texts and i interior architectures. This work seeks to understand how the virtual changes physical architecture and how this affects the space between people and buildings. The “performativity of research” is presented through specifically designed apparatuses and partitions. These designed components, made objects together with annotated texts and drawings conspire to create a complex design led inquiry a “Place Study” staged in a niche-like space. This interior presents itself as both distinct and relational to the other projects in the MA Interiors Show. The interior presents the many manifestations of creative research, structures and even symposia that have been developed through engaging with the site. The visualization of the research and the relational architectures rendered through montage and collage explores digital and analogue technologies. This hybridisation and the use of pinhole photography and film footage further explore interests in the field of performance as an immaterial architecture drawn in the presence of place.

The realisation of my interiors project consists of two separate but relational elements that are presented into a built environment. The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday. The rather hybrid design appropriates a merging of minimalism, modernism and the plastic architecture of a ruined Cistercian Abbey. The construction comes into close contact with its occupant, it is a restricted spatial apparatus that attempts to promote through its awkwardness distinctive experiences. In particular the apparatus of the Scriptorium and its materiality is attempting to promote a sensory intensification that is further underpinned by the cognitive processes of reading and perhaps other social dialogues. The sensory intensification of a hut like space promotes a haptic sensibility, allowing the nearness and intimacies of both the built space and the imaginative, virtual realm to become entangled. Ultimately the Scriptorium is trying to build on unique human subjectivities that are manifested through a kinaesthetic repertoire or script that helps to enact further spatial experiences. It might be useful to think of this constructed space as itself still under construction, a site that acts as its own vessel within the multiplicities of human perception itself. The influence of the Cistercian Order, the site of Waverly Abbey and its pastoral landscape, have all contributed to a sense of the design process, The Scriptorium like the ruins themselves is open to the elements. Waverley Abbey remains as a sensory site between the remains of architecture and its society and the effects of our own global culture in the information age.

In troubled times they all sought to experience life away from social definitions of success or failure. From there, these primitive huts marked personal, original inquires into the ever-mysterious nature of human existence.

Anne Cline. A Hut of One’s Own

Life Outside The Circle Of Architecture.

The Scriptorium began through a research of both architectural themed texts and documentation of the site, and creative practice involving photography (digital, analogue and film) art practices of collage and drawing. The many visits promoted my own subjectivities to the site and these were also frequently subjected to change by the intervention of others in unexpected ways, these social intrusions by other revealed the very boundaries that the historic site engenders, some playful other malicious. These extremities within the social order of the visitors became problematic in designing for the site itself. An earlier proposal to host a Symposium centred on the Arts and The Humanities, that would use the Abbey and its surrounding ground appeared to be a project of vast diversities and logistics better suited to a cultural project through arts management and funding. As the project developed certain creative methodologies around particularities of the site itself began to appear, the notion of palimpsest being one of them. This promoted the idea of a reading room, as an ephemeral interior space that gathers up the experiential values of ‘ruins’ and re-enacts them as a site to explore the architectures of images. It became apparent that ‘palimpsest’ could be both a visual surface of erasures, earlier markings partially over written by newer ones ‘annotations’ and it could be a scaffold of developing ideas clearly visible merging as adaptations into the very usage of the site.

These re-imaginations through the notion of palimpsest seemed filmic and as such they would able to display a vast amount of diversities and subject matter, a library of recourses that would require users or an audience or both. The referencing of the reading room to the library, and the symposium to the cinema or theatre allowed me to realise that I was dealing with a number of spatial arrangements that needed to develop together, but which could be employed separately. The theatre of research became the vehicle in which to see if this collaboration might be possible.

The use of the image and text in my architectural collages allowed me to visualize associations, to create the possibilities of interior spaces that might be manifested into the built environment. The use of the collage in Architecture is widely acknowledged, architects from the likes of Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind and Rem Koolhaas. The ability of the collage process to juxtaposition fragments, images and texts from irreconcilable origins into an experience, that is visual, tactile and time-based makes it an interesting tool into the realms of architectural design. Collage begins to visualise not only the structure of spaces but also there content and circulation. The theatre of research is interested in how to promote collage and its use as a cognitive and perceptive tool in architecture.

Collage and montage are quintessentially techniques in modern and contemporary art and filmmaking. Collage combines pictorial motifs and fragments from disconnected origins into a new synthetic entity, which casts new roles and meanings to the parts. It suggests new narratives, dialogues, juxtapositions and temporal durations. Its elements lead double-lives; the collaged ingredients are suspended between their originary essences and the new roles assigned to them by the poetic ensemble.

Juhani Pallasmaa. The World is a Collage

Jennifer A. H. Shields. Collage and Architecture

Both the Scriptorium and The Theatre Of Research exist only in the form of the exhibition presentation. What they singularly of together propose can only be imagined through their manifested form as static objects placed within a built structure that loosely references architectural concerns and materials. They appear diminished and assigned to the voyeuristic gaze of the visitor that is equally curios and dismissive. These objects and the interior spaces they promoted seem stilled and stalled, as much they appear beyond reach as if the authenticity of their materials and construction have some how been subsumed by their stature and scale. The issues and qualities of which they are attempting to speak of seem reduced by the hegemony of vision, there is little hapicity and time to encounter, only it seems by investing narratives can we begin to re-enact the spatial encounter.

How might the performativity of research be staged, and into what contexts might it be appropriated?

As Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht notes, we live in a culture of meaning, not in a culture of presence. We constantly produce effects of meaning and multiply them with mass media. This applies not only to the humanities but also to a large degree to our wholly normal everyday lives. And in this respect, our experience of presence is getting drastically lost.

Art works may never completely be explained by theory or meaning. The sensual, material makeup of the work in its presence is not the cinders, slag, and ashes, the undigested remains of theory, but remains of an intensified moment

Peter Lodermeyer.Time, Symposium Amsterdam 2007.

Personal Structures, Time, Space, Existence.

The question I ask is do these objects and their interior spaces cause me to think beyond mere representation and recognition, or rather do they create enough of an encounter to force me to engage with them, even if I or the viewer are un-certain as to their meaning or possible outcome. Deleuze comments that something forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter. Something that challenges us. Have these miniature architectures of objects become relational, do we start to use them in perhaps a heuristic manner, a hands-on approach to learning or inquiring, something that we can discover for ourselves. This heuristic finding-out could be made informative through collective collaborations and exhibition through the theatre of research. Is design stripping us of our qualitative spaces as the digital tooling removes the makers trace.

The model object has served as a thinking place in the development of the idea of the Scriptorium. The materials used and their proportions echo interests in Minimalist Sculpture, the intervals between things in the work of Donald Judd and the architectural languages of memory and tectonics of the craftsman turned architect Peter Zumthor. This open sided hut seems cut away almost anatomical as if we were looking into the internal workings of an environment and resident. The structure would have to be made relational to its surroundings if it were to be placed in the landscape. Adaptations to weather the structure, to make it serviceable for use. The Scriptorium has analogues to the notion of a fire-place and its chimney stack. It is a the heart of a building the place of warmth, of dialogues and under the influence through fire of the imagination. The incompleteness that surrounds the scriptorium creatively asks for further design proposals that are even more site specific. The Solar Pavilion built by the Smithsons utilised the old fire place and chimney from the demolished cottage. Around this central element they developed the beginnings of their Modernist (Brutalism) pavilion, an architecture clad with glass, wood and zinc and contained by a walled garden and situated in the pastoral landscape of Wiltshire. Furthering the themes of being in the landscape the Scriptorium could become an observatory, as place from both to look out from and also to look in. The mobility or need to be re-assembled from site to site could promote innovative design solutions as well as interesting detailing or use of materials and surfaces that would facilitate interactions between visitors.

The notion of the Scriptorium becoming clad by an exterior skin, an ephemeral membrane which would then render the differences between the interior and the exterior into the realms of an almost immaterial architectural experience; in as much as the usual distinction between the unpredictable forces of nature outside and the predictable domestic spaces inside. This prompt further investigation into an  architecture that blurs the boundaries of both architecture and nature, this could be further explored through the notion of quixotic gestures, art and performance that can capture the experience and the experiential engagement with the natural elements. The Scriptorium becomes the centred structure of remnant that is surrounded by an architecture that can create imprecise boundaries through inconsistent materials. This spatial arrangement will create its own qualitative responses, dialogues and subsequent movements. Architecture in this context becomes purely a sensorial response.

The body as the vector for active mediation with the world of the spirit. The body is the instrument of a qualitative evaluation, the measure of intensity, which alone is capable of giving space extension and modifying it Space is no objective parameter; it must be ‘excavated’ related to the mobile living parametrics of the body.

Frederic Migayrou. Architectures of the Intensive Body. Yves Klein. Guggenheim. 2005

Mark Prizeman. Intensity. Ephemeral, Portable Architecture.

Time, space and existence are amongst the greatest of themes-so great that we could never be so presumptuous to think we could do them justice, and too close that we could ever escape them, whether with our thoughts or actions, in life or in art.

Peter Lodermeyer. Personal Structures Time. Space. Existence. 2009

My design project has attempted to produce spaces and their interiors together with the apparatus of the Scriptorium that qualitatively seek to inquiry into the world we inhabit. The Theatre of Research attempts to establish some sense of a community that can do field work that invigorates the perception of the environment. My own interests are centred through experientially and mindfully exploring voids, cavities, and spaces between things, together with use of clay, glass and other vernacular materials. As an interior designer/artist I have become experiential to the agency of spaces. The theatre of research becomes a meeting place for furthering my programme initially proposed as a symposium at Waverley Abbey.

Through experiencing familiar images, smells, sounds, and textures, but also through making certain familiar movements and gestures, we achieve a certain symbolic stability. Disrupt that familiar world, and our psychic equilibrium is disturbed. From this we can surmise that home, and the operations performed at home, are linked intimately with human identity. Architecture, it would seem, plays a vital role in the forging of personal identities.

Neil Leach. Camouflage

Analysing the desire to blend-in with our surroundings

Beyond the limits of academic levels of discourse and learning 

Building/Working with Theoretical Objects in Architecture

The Scriptorium would need to collect up and question considerable more qualitative data. Some sort of portable shelter, lightweight and offering some protection from the elements; would have allowed longer periods of stay and the possibility of experiencing different times of day. The activity of walking to the site, of having to incorporate it into a journey would help to create a stronger sense of place and routine. I am interested in the ‘thingness’ of this place, its influence and how its influence might be transposed into a methodology of reading, theorising and making. I am reminded of the Peter Brook who deliberately demolished his avant-garde theatre building Bouffes du Nord in Paris so as he could create a more emotionally responsive space for theatre. It is this under the influence of the Abbey, which I wish to explore as a creative catalyst, a tool that picks up on its differences as qualitative readings. The ruin by its very nature has re-defined its own architecture from one of form into that of experience, this sense of liminality or immateriality that constitutes itself as the architectural experience.

A good space cannot be neutral, for an impersonal sterility gives no food to the imagination. The Bouffes has the magic and poetry of a ruin, and anyone who allowed themselves to be invaded by the atmosphere of a ruin knows strongly how the imagination is let loose.

Peter Brook. The Open Circle

Andrew Todd. Peter Brook’s Theatre Environments. 2003

Bricolage Processes : Creative Audit of Research Topics and Processes

Interiors/UCA Farnham. 2014

THE ARCHITECTURE OF NATURAL LIGHT, Henry Plummer. 2009 THE OTHER ARCHITECTURE, Constructing metaphysical space.

Catching The Light.

The Entwined History of Light And Mind. Arthur Zajonc

EVANESCENCE

Orchestration of light to mutate through time PROCESSION

Choreography of light for the moving eye VEILS OF GLASS

Refraction of light in a diaphanous film ATOMIZATION

Sifting of light through a porous screen CANALIZATION

Channelling of light through a hollow mass ATMOSPHERIC SILENCE

Suffusion of light with a unified mood LUMINESCENCE

Materialization of light in physical matter

ADVENTURES OF THE FIRE, VESSELS THROUGH TIME CERAMIC GATE

“The existing architectural environment is thought to be more or less official through the hierarchical arrangement, providing an rigidity to the public. The base for a creation is a freedom and I proposed an asymmetrical form for the gate to break the official space, bringing an atmosphere for freedom of creation. ”

Jung-mook Moon. CERAMIC PAVILION

“People make space, and space contains people. ” Seong-chil Park. (Exhibition Space Designer)

PALIMPSEST AS REMAINS OF A CREATIVE PRAXIS STUDIO SPACE AS A PHILOSOPHICAL WORKSHOP

PALIMPSEST IN ARCHITECTURE

“Architects, archaeologists and design historians sometimes use the word to describe the accumulated iterations of a design or a site, whether in literal layers of archaeological remains, or by the figurative accumulation and reinforcement of design ideas over time. Whenever spaces are rebuilt or remodelled, evidence of former uses remain. ”

Wikipedia

RODIN AND BEUYS

THE ALCHEMY OF BUILDING WORKING PRACTICES

RUINS, REDUCTIONS, and the LOSS of SUBSTANCE.

FRAGMENTS, ASSEMBLAGES and INTERIORS that re-enter the world of creativity.

The Theatre of Research is a working space that creates and crafts both theoretical and practical objects, things and documentation. Its reason for being is to explore the praxis for creative narratives between the Arts and The Humanities. It attempts through performance, fine art and architecture to collage qualitative and diffractive dialogues into new relational discourses, the results of which become exhibited or staged as open workshops engendering praxis, publication and production. In its fledgling state it is seen as being part of a University faculty that has interests in the Arts and The Humanities.

We have art so that we may not perish by the truth. Friedrich Nietzsche Can one achieve architecture without resorting to ‘design’? What if, instead of designing a new building, you keep the one skated for demolition? How do you insert an original program inside the old and new structures simultaneously? How do you reconcile coherence with multiplicity? Bernard Tschumi 2012

 PROGRAM. Tschumi, Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/Between, 1999/2012 Architecture was no longer an autonomous and isolated discipline but participated in the movement and confrontation of ideas. Tschumi, Red Is Not A Color. 2012

Questions of Space

Abstract Mediation and Strategy

CREATIVE AUDIT of RESEARCH TOPICS The Craftsman, Richard Sennett. 2008

“Making is thinking, the good craftsman uses solutions to uncover new territory; problem solving and problem finding are intimately related in his or her mind. For this reason curiosity can ask, “Why" as well as “How " about any project. ”

Prologue: Man as His Own Maker CRAFTSMEN

The Troubled Craftsman The Workshop Machines

Material Consciousness CRAFT

The Hand

Expressive Instructions Arousing Tools Resistance and Ambiguity CRAFTSMANSHIP Quality-Driven Work Ability

Conclusion: The Philosophical Workshop BRICOLEUR BRICOLAGE, Barkow Leibinger. 2013

“Bricolage indicates an approach that is inclusive, ie open-ended, and can come either from within architecture itself or from external sources. ”

CASTING WEAVING

FOLDING BUNDLING PRINTING ANTICIPATING

FROM MODELS TO DRAWINGS, Marco Frascari. 2007 CRITICAL STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURAL HUMANITIES

THE WAVERLEY PROJECT

Imagination and Representation in Spatial Practices (Architecture, Fine Art and Performance).

Historical Perspectives Emergent Realities Critical Dimensions

CRISTINA IGLESIAS Guggenheim Museum 1998

“Concrete and iron, glass, yellow, terracotta and tapestry, aluminium and photo etching, leather and amher glass, wood, resin and bronze powder, blue glass and alabaster. ”

Introduction, Carmen Gimenez

Screen Memories, Nancy Princenthal Stained With a Pale Light, Adrian Searle Wanting Shelter, Barbara Maria Stafford

CHRIS WILMARTH. 1986 Delancey Backs (and Other Moments)

Etched float/polished plate glass, steel and bronze, blown glass.

BURNING ISSUES AND PRACTICAL CONCERNS

THE READING ROOM

The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.

‘A new alchemy is being formed which encompasses traditional methods of art, the new technology, and the revolutionary new scientific discoveries.’

Re-Enchanting the Land. (Woodcock,2000:140)

‘When one lacks outer space one creates inner space. Invention becomes more complex, cup and circle markings on stones, intricate Celtic spirals and knots, illuminated manuscripts, gothic architecture with its inherent story telling.’ (Woodcock,2000:131)

Reading The Landscape.

What distinguishes Neo-Romanticism from traditional romanticism is the feeling of danger, the juxtaposition of the urban with the countryside, the element of darkness, dissolution, an almost pagan reverie breaking through the ruins of post-industrialism. (Woodcock,2000:55)

Radio On by Chris Petit.

The film has a hallucinogenic noir-like quality, a weird hybrid of Fifties Americana and a displaced Britain. It is a seismographic disruption of British culture in a limbo land of displaced dreams, elements of an almost mythical Britain fleetingly appear. (Woodcock,2000:115)

England Dreaming.

Throughout John Piper’s long and prolific life he remained fascinated not only with churches, country houses and landscapes but also ancient sites. He comments on the landscape of Snowdonia, ‘Each rock lying in the grass had a positive personality, for the first time I saw the bones and the structure and the lie of mountains, living with them and climbing them as I was, lying on them in the sun and getting soaked with rain in their cloud cover and enclosed in their improbable, private rock-world in fog.’ Piper never dismissed the archaic spirit of place. 

(Woodcock,2000:31)

The small ‘Scriptorium’ conceived as a space as a refuge, an intimate minimal construction that features a doorway and an interior that contains a place for objects, perhaps books, as well as a small sitting area. This construction, an open cell perhaps is evocative to a state of contemplation between the fabric of the everyday.

WATER AND DREAMS

AN ESSAY ON THE IMAGINATION OF MATTER Gaston Bachelard

Viscosity/Water in Combination.

Tacit and intimate contact, relationships and encounters between water and the potter. Water is his/her first auxiliary.

WORKING NOTES for InDESIGN Document/Mood Board.

Old Buildings/New Designs: Architectural Transformations. Charles Bloszies. Knocktopher Friary is a quiet place of contemplation. The new residential cloister unifies the friary and the church. The composition of the architecture is a knitting together of two original forms with a ribbon of concrete, glass and wood. The new buildings are crafted from a minimalist vocabulary where the palette of materials was kept to a minimum. One of the interesting design features is that the new elevations never touch the old facades with a solid-to-solid intersection; the new is either set back from the old (Ashley Castle) or the joint is glazed. The existing church floor is used as both a datum for maintaining the new floor level in the new construction, and as a vein of closely controlled changes of materials and finishes. The resultant architecture is played between subtle material exchanges of concrete meeting wood, concrete meeting glass, and concrete meeting concrete with slightly different surface qualities. What results is a clear differentiation between the old and the new, both are remarkably quiet architecturally reflecting the concerns of the site as a Carmelite monastery in the southeast of Ireland.

Working Thoughts

The Phenomenology of Reading. GLAS, Derrida Literature and Language.

Barbed Nature, Pierced Flesh. Graham Sutherland 1903-80

He never worked in situ but collected information to be worked on in his studio. The detailed sketches and notes he had made when through a transition in his mind before the final painting, culminating therefore in an inner landscape rather than a factual rendition.

These landscapes were no idyllic reverie but evoked a sense of the mysterious and dangerous. In many ways they emitted a foretaste of the approaching Second World War. (Woodcock,2000:25)

Ruins, Shadows and Moonlight. Elizabeth Bowen

“It is a fact, that in Britain, and especially in London, in wartime many people had strange, deep. Intense dreams. We have never dreamed like this before; and I suppose we shall never dream like this again.” Elizabeth Bowen.

The awareness of the social changes which broke through wartime society is evident in her novels and short stories, the feeling of boundaries being broken, physically, psychologically and also on a spiritual level, where the sense of the living and the unaccounted dead, caused by the bombing, mingle. Her evocative descriptions of the quality of light, the particular smell of a room, of a garden after rain of walking over charred wood and broken glass following an air-raid, and even the effect atmospheres have on the individual all contribute to evoking a strong sense of place. She is a master at conjuring up the minutiae of the everyday world and the presence of another dimension. (Woodcock,2000:74-75)

Rogue Male. Geoffrey Household.

The novel evokes the solitude of the landscape as it was before the advent of the mechanisation of farming and the availability of the countryside created by the growth in transport of the following decades. (Woodcock,2000:77)

Tn the heart of this hedge, which I had been seeking all the way from London, the lane reappears. It is not marked on the map. It has not been used, I imagine, for a hundred years. The deep sandstone cutting, its hedges grown together across the top, is still there; anyone who wishes can dive under the sentinel horns at the entrance and push his way through and come out in a cross hedge that runs along the foot of the hills. But who would wish? Where there is light, the interior of the double hedge is of no conceivable use to the two farmers whose boundary fence it is, and nobody but an adventurous child would want to explore it.’

Geoffrey Household, Rogue Male 1939.

The Stride of The Mind

Reading Rooms. Figuring Space. Text/Fumiture/Dwelling Reading with Paths

Relativity through Walking and Thinking. Subjectivity. Space - Politics - Affect

Waverley Abbey. Cistercian Monastery

The peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologises the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomised and levelled down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to the pre- spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space.

The Aesthetics of Decay, An Uncanny Place. Dylan Trigg

Scarpa, extensive use of concrete with different aggregates and finishes.

Ashley Castle, restoration of ruin into a domestic dwelling, sensitive use of materials and methods of joining or revealing the historical fabric (allowing the ruinous to remain visible) of the building.

The Dovecote Studio, a building made of CORTEN steel built within the interior of a ruined Victorian dovecote (see further notes).

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

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence : Discursive Forms/Research Readings.

Bricolage/Reading : Further Reductions and Fabrications

The Production/use of Space into Places to engender Societies.

A site specific induced inquiry into dwelling and building through/by way of an attentive awareness (anthropological) to people and place.

‘What I am post interested in now is inverting the structure of a culture that is centred around the city.’

‘The richness and strength of that(their) culture cannot be understood until one has worked with the people who live their- until one has eaten their food, drunk their sake, talked together with the craftsmen and made things with them.’

Kengo Kuma, Complete Works, (preface) 2012

Diffractive Gratings/Apparatuses/Methodologies through which to use in thinking from different disciplines.

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

Clay, Interior Skins of Light and Dark Contemporary Ceramic Practices in Craft and Design.

Interior Spaces. Environments and Atmospheres. Ceramic Building Technologies.

Questioning the discursive nature of Screens, Boundaries and Borders.

Placing different interdisciplinary practices in conversation with one another.

Situatedness, Performativity, being/becoming attentive to the iterative production of boundaries. (Barad)

‘As found is a small affair, it is about being careful.’ Peter Smithson, 2001

‘The ‘as found’ attitude is anti-utopian; its form is (site) specific, raw and immediate. It calls the will to question. It is a technique of reaction ( Opposition/Kengo Kuma and Herzog and De Meuron and Multiplicity/Calvino and Zumthor) and a concern for that which exists.’(Schregenberger, 2005)

Sensuality, Materiality as Memory in the Poetics of Space. 

Breaking The Mould : New Approaches to Ceramics. 2007

Ceramic Environments.

Space/Time based work, using clay in large-scale contexts, in gallery or outside spaces to create a fully immersive moment that challenges the common perception of what clay is capable of.

Surreal Geometries.

Makers who use large and small-scale sculpture that is in some way abstracted or represents a heightened version of reality.

The Vessel.

Works around the practicalities of functional ceramics. Human Interest.

Explorations into the human form and human nature. Beyond The Vessel.

Experimentation around the ideas of deconstructing the vessel. Earthly Inspirations.

Formal and conceptual properties of using the very nature of clay. Surface Pleasures.

The exterior skin of ceramics and clay.

Notes from The Essential Vessel, Natasha Daintry. 

A Vessel defines emptiness as presence.

Vessel as a fundamental expression of being and non-being a ‘no-thing’ A vessel is both a hollow receptacle for liquid, and also a place where

“The mind of man balances and reconciles opposites” Tom Chetwynd,

“We turn clay to make a vessel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.” Tzu, Lao, Tao Te Ching.

Around Form and Formlessness.

A Vessel is an effortless three-dimensional manifestation of form and formlessness.

‘The benign existential riddle of the vessel is that we only see the material bit that holds our coffee.’ (Daintry2007:8)

One comes about as a result of the other, and this search has a particular resonance at the beginning of this fledgling millennium as technological progress masks a perilous sense of physical and psychological uncertainty. (Daintry2007:6)

Pottery is bound up with the elemental needs of civilisation.

The search of form/cultural and individual through participating with the potters’ wheel.

Alternative “Thinking”States, Sensing, Doing and Being.

‘Its not easy to talk about sensing, doing and being. They’re not concepts as such, neat little fixed shiny packages of ideas, but more existential states which shift and move as you inhabit them-more amorphous, like clay.’ (Daintry2007:6)

Amorphous values of things/memory manifested through existential states (as a spatial device/movement/atmosphere) in architectural spaces?

Zumthor, Holl, Pallasmaa, Bachelard.

For the potter the making of a cup or bowl through the opening up or hollowing out of clay is itself ‘an essay into abstraction, a clothing of emptiness’; for a vessel is as much defined by the negative space in and around it, as the skin of the ceramic itself. This skin is a sort of negotiation between inside and outside, between solid and fluid, and where they intersect. A vessel embodies something and nothing and is an effortless three-dimension manifestation of form and formlessness. (Daintry2007:8)

The vessel inhabits rich, liminal territory of uncertainty and abstraction. (Daintry2007:12)

Metaphors of Memory and Experience by way of the Vessel. 

Spatial Negotiations (Metamorphosis) between Inside and Outside.

Clay Water Volume Vessel

A vessel (as membrane/threshold that can hold social rituals/traditions and memories) seems to occupy space but simultaneously be occupied by space.

Water, although fluid it is supremely germinative and represents the condition of all potentials.(Eliade Mirceal983)

Permeable in flux, water and water’s symbolism became the pagan’s way of intuitively knowing the world. Matter was plastic, fluid and changeable. The body was plastic with parameters defined not only by individual consciousness, but also in relation to other realms of the physical world.

The pagan participated in a vast mythology where his identity changed according to narrative fantasies that combined and recombined human and animal activity endlessly, weaving together memory, reason and sensation. In this permeable world there is no sharp division between things or between life and death. It is a world of energetic flow where bodies can indifferently become attached or unattached from myriad objects and forms. (Daintry2007:9)

Flexible Ways of Seeing/Re-Making the World.

“A large part of the reason for making is to see things that I have never seen before, to build something which I cannot fully understand or explain.”

Artist Statement, Ken Eastman.

Theories of relativity and uncertainty have shown that all matter, even the airy oxygenated void inside a vessel is energy, and that it is composed of the same building blocks generated from exploded stars. (Daintry2007:10)

Italo Calvino : Six Memos for the Next Millennium. 1996 

LIGHTNESS

Lucretius, preoccupied with infinitesimal entities on the nature of things. 

A philosophy of lightness (Calvino) formed from Lucretius ‘he is the poet of physical concreteness, viewed in its permanent and immutable substance, but the first thing he tells us that emptiness is just as concrete as solid bodies.’(Calvino l996)

Knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world. (Daintry2007:10) The synchronic flow between form and emptiness, solid and fluid is in itself an 

awareness of conjoining the concrete with emptiness. The drawings of Cy Twombly as Roland Barthes comments have the ‘appearance of a form (that) testifies to its simultaneous ineluctable disappearance’ this produces a sort of life-death thought and gesture caught within a semblance of writing (graphism). This mark making is evident in the drawings of Alberto Giacometti where the very mark itself seems to illustrate both its arrival and its disappearance. This erasure and its subsequent superimposure is a sensation caught in flux, the written in the unwritten.

The painted bottles of Giogio Morandi share a similar quality where reality floats somewhere between inscription and erasure. (Daintry2007:l 1)

Morandi ‘I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see.’ He comments further on the specifics of an objects he paints that a ‘precipitous position can be seen in psychological terms as a confrontation with the void of existence.’(Tate Modem 2001)

‘The didactic boundaries of the outer pot surrender to an informal space within that seems far larger than the vessel itself.’ This is how Gareth Clark has described Ebuzziya Siesbye’s hand built pots, how they seem to levitate volume and float in space. (Daintry2007:11)

A “Retreat” as an entrance to a vast, limitless space- an inner landscape.

One can speak of this duality of inside and outside but the real experience is more kinetic, more fluid and interchangeable. (Daintry2007:11)

This dialectic of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ is explored by Gaston Bachelard in his Poetics of Space. Bachelard points to an interlockingness that inverts the experience of in and out through the imagination. He notes that ‘we absorb a mixture of being and nothingness’ explaining that ‘being does not see itself; it does not stand out, it is not bordered by nothingness’. (Bachelard1994)

Form

Form as a Transport/Transitional Device to arrive/present somewhere/something. The Abstract to The Concrete.

Architectural Experiences.

Anthropomorphic Qualities. The Physical Self.

Materials and material sensuality in both architecture and the making processes of vessels.

Thinking and Learning through Objects (things).

Do we notice the minute differences between textures, light and spatial volumes? This attending to the physicality of things has the effect of locating you in the world 

and connecting you to you own physicality. It represents a way of felt experience, of being known and knowing the world through the corporal. (Daintry2007:12)

The Body in Pain: The Unmaking and Making of the World. Elaine Scarry.

Theorises how creative efforts-making both stories and objects-construct the world. Scarry describes both tools and objects as being extensions of the body into the world and therefore they become ways of knowing it. Importantly Scarry documents how tools have become increasingly detached from the body over time. This detachment from our bodies is creating a disembodied relationship with ourselves, and the technological world we now inhabit.

Wanderlust, A History of Walking. Rebecca Solnit. 2002

The Mind at Three Miles an Hour.

Are we using objects to feel are way back into the world?

Solnit explores Susan Bordo’s claim that ‘if the body is a metaphor for our locatedness in space and time and thus for the finitude of human perception and knowledge, then the postmodern body is no body at all.’ Solnit comments on this postmodern body that it is more of a passive object, appearing most often laid out upon an examining table or in bed. ‘A medical and sexual phenomenon, it is site of sensations, processes, and desires rather than a source of action and production, this body has nothing left but the erotic as a residue of what it means to be embodied. Which is not to disparage sex and the erotic as fascinating and profound, only to propose that they are so emphasised because other aspects of being embodied have atrophied for many people.’(Solnit 2002)

The pagan life that St Augustine (bom 354AD) sought to reorganise was too complicated, sensuous and unsettling to be contained within a monotheistic belief system. He stood on the cusp of the two worlds, the sensual, fluid pagan one and the incipient Christian. He succeeded in steering the Christian church into absorbing the essentially Platonic philosophy of a timeless and non-material self, existing alongside the fleeting and decaying material world of the sensory body. Thus creating a reality that was divided onto two, the material and the non material. (Daintry2007:12)

Does the interior spaces of Hans Coper’s ceramics reverberate with this archaic pagan sense of a permeable sensuality? Is this not what he himself writes about when he comments on the Platonic values of “the Egyptian vessel”.

Endless repetition, Graham Gussin can take you nowhere, to a non state, akind of Utopia-meaning literally ‘no place’ Gregory Bateson cites this no place as like a plateau ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation towards a culminating point or external end’. (Daintry2007:13)

Voids within vessels become sources of emptiness that cause flows of intensities, held in place and time by being able to allow ourselves to become permeable to the place, to the situation.

Artists and potters who make reduced forms often work in series. They seemingly go over and over the same terrain in minute but varying detail.

Throwing and its vocational situation allow the phenomena of ‘forgetting themselves in a function, WH Auden’ Finding deep satisfaction from losing themselves in their work.

What sense of interior space do we experience with Edmund de Waal’s installations, are we in some way becoming further located in a conceptualised and contextualised postmodern body. A body created and grafted into ’’fetishism” by being nourished solely on conceptual concerns in highly contextualised and ultimately passive spaces. Bachelard’s interlockingness, his mixture of being and nothingness (the sensory space of the void, Ma), is in effect the fluid and kinetically driven attendances we give to the physicality of things.

Ceramics like an architecture experience as recorded by Pallasmaa “ The duty of architecture is to slow down perceptions and create silences” ceramics are also able to create a ‘sensory map of actions slowed down’. The viewer like the visitor has to slow down their own act of looking and begin to sense and feel their way inch by inch over the pots or the interior spaces of a room, in so doing one is beginning the process of undoing the conceptual knowledge of our current situation into a nowness that allows us to re-learn, to feel something from the inside out, in effect to regain our innerness through the ‘usefulness’ that Tzu, Lao explains as being the usefulness of which the vessel depends, Tao Te Ching.

Studio Works/Research Explorations : Praxis between theory and practice. Outpost 2020.

Research Explorations : Creative Humanities

Orange School Graph Books

Harleston 2020-2021

A Species of Spaces

The Social Turn

Museum Site and Display

Political Philosophy

We have all the choice in the world in terms of products, but very little choice in terms of the kind of economy within which those things are made, accessed and used

Whose Economy

Reframing the Debate

After Neoliberalism

Doreen Massey

Other 'material interventions' and the revaluation of making through strategies of repair and maintenance

Making Ecological Politics

A world teeming with impulsive movements, deviations and many other lively (capacious) materialities

Influences that pervade, enable, and disrupt us

All agency is 'distributive' it always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces

Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett

Makers work in a world that does not stand still

Iteration allows for continual correction (material conversation) in response to an ongoing perceptual monitoring of the task as it unfolds, mixing the potential for blending or combining matter that already exists into new combinations

Tim Ingold 2010

Making is central to who we are as individuals, what we make as part of everyday practice forms our identities and place in the world

The mundane experience of making, and thus of labour, is resolutely political, a geographical imperative, and a critical means of operating a meaningful relationship with this material life

The Quarry as Sculpture : The Place of Making

D A Paton 2013

The making of a building does not stop when the building work is (temporarily) finished. But only really begins upon occupation, when the work commences of maintaining the buildings integrity against an onslaught of wilfully destructive elements, insects, rodents, fungal infestations, corrosion, damp, harsh sun, water, wind

Evocative Thoughts on Building, Alvaro Siza

The social life of making

Making good is about maintaining continuity with the past, in the face of efforts to rupture that continuity

The need for repair is a remorseless and necessary process that keeps society ticking over

Making speaks in vivid dialogue with two associated themes, material and skill

Creativity involves not merely a spark of innovation or the execution of artistic inspiration. But the capacity to respond to unfolding iterations with materials. To use slowly accrued haptic knowledge to manipulate processes on the fly, and to judge how to counteract error and seize opportunities as they evolve

Making becomes a process of iteration, and a maker works with this iteration prolifically

Geographies of Making

ReThinking Materials and Skills for Volatile Futures

The skill to sustain the life of something through repair and reappropriation

Collecting is an example or a pre-emptive activity that people who are skilled with their hands commonly share

Matter and materials are lively and require attention, materials continue to thwart in unpredictable ways, decaying and breaking down or wearing or breaking under force

Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things

Jane Bennett 2010

Attending to the process of making opens up prospects for following the lead of the material, where the properties of the materials themselves shape the direction in which making proceeds

Tim Ingold 2010

New Urban Adventures in Collaboration/Conceptual Ceramics

Ceramic Practice as a form of research engaged in a process/ecology of inquiry, an exploration of ideas predicated on and exploiting the characteristics of clay

The transformation of the material is a central concern and semiotic significance unfolds with making

Seeking a symbiotic relationship between idea and object

Materials are substances in becoming

Karen Barad

Towards an Ecology of Materials

Tim Ingold 2012

From the 'objectness' of things to the material flows and formative processes wherein they come into being. It means to think of making as a process of growth or ontogenesis

Materials-Centered Perspective

Making, almost defies precise definition

The composition and/or manipulation of materials that bring into being new or revised objects

Tim Ingold 2010

Cultures of thrift and scavenging, maintenance and repair

Making encompasses the ingenuity of fluid, locally situated and adapted technologies

Materials carry on overtaking the formal destinations that, at one time or another, have been assigned to them

Sensibilities and dispositions that are centred on a deep and considered relationship with materials

The Craftsman, Richard Sennett 2008

Crafting, often reconnects mind and body in the sites and processes of production, thereby potentially reconstituting labour processes in ways that ascribe agency to workers

Makers finding ways to resist norms of gender and neoliberal entrepreneurial subjectivities, finding ways and spaces for ethical practice to predominate

Contemporary conceptual ceramics operates at the permeable boundary between art and craft, partaking of aspects of both, and ultimately demonstrating (or performing) that permeability

The emergence of the museum as proactive laboratory of social evolution

Extradisciplinary Investigations/Operative Principle

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice

Microtopias, small contained sites of functioning democracy

Tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline

The New Institutional Practice

Projective Enterprises (should unsettle, activate, and raise questions)

The exhibitions to emerge through new institutionalism are considered as points of exchange and collision, made through intersections of social, economic and political relations, it follows that the predominant forms of artistic practice included are the social, the spatial, the interdisciplinary

So our understanding of site has shifted from a fixed , physical location to somewhere or something constituted through social-economic-cultural and political processes

Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity

Miwon Kwon 2002

Collaborations and its Discontents

Claire Bishop 2006

The motivating factors for participatory projects is its critiquing of the essentialising of site and community in context-specific activities/exhibitions

A complex environment, awash in affect and subjectivity

When subjective and analytic processes mesh together to form a new productive and political 'contexts' of communicational labour

New curatorial initiatives must unpack the terminologies we use to distinguish one project from another

A playful psychogeographical situation, that resists the representative, illustrative and thematic narratives

Unsettling-Complicit

Provocative-Strategic

Interventionist-Collaborative

Perforative Curating/Prescribed Participation

Creating new/more coded patterns of behavior/conventions/role play for visitor's

New Institionalism and the Exhibition As Situation/Social Experiment

Claire Doherty 2006

Participation

In which people constitute the central artistic medium and material

In the manner of theatre and performance

Participatory art is both a social activity and a symbolic one, as it is both embedded in the world and at one, remove from it

The artist is conceived less as an individual producer of discrete objects, than as a collaborator and producer of situations

The contemporary artwork is finite, portable, commodifiable product, and is reconceived as an ongoing or long term project with an unclear beginning and end

Artists are more interested in the creative rewards of participation as a politicised working process, than the relational aesthetic which renders discursive and dialogic projects more amenable to museums and galleries

Artificial Hells (exposing the political and aesthetic limitations in the work)

Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

Claire Bishop 2011

Site-Specificity/Spatial Practice

The distinguishing characteristic of today's site-oriented art is the way in which both the art work's relationship to the actuality of a location (as site) and the social conditions of the institutional frame (as site) are subordinated to a discursively determined site that is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual exchange or cultural debate

Miwon Kwon 1997

Whilst temporary exhibitions can expand the scope of medium-specific discourse, they can also impose alternative, but equally restrictive frames

Participation, creating a bridge between socially engaged practice and the permanent collection

Expressing itself expressing

Creating a conceptual and linguistic dexterity between absolutes, certainties, definitions

Dissolving the intellectual relevance, with its symbiotic relationship with utility to create 'vessels' beyond art and artifact

The strategy of making artworks as response

The Ceramic Object, by means of preservation and display becomes a vehicle/vessel for a social and historical narrative/entanglement/engagement

Making vessels, beyond the examining and intellectually impoverished questions

A vessel is identified as such by its physical disposition, giving shape to the contents and clarifying what is inside and what is outside

Few boundaries are impenetrable

They are rather, semi-permeable membranes providing housing while allowing selective commerce

Like the vessel, the house shapes and nurtures the life contained inside

The Factory I build in the Tate is a place to discuss the transactions and transformations of Labour that Create Knowledge and Community

In the Factory we will examine skills and how we form Exchanges at Work , with ourselves and with others

Clare Twomey, Lead artist at Tate Exchange 2017

Post Studio Ceramics

Interfaces between Making-Makers-Museums

Exploring object engagement beyond the known historical models of clay practice

'Generate' Historical Material and Spatial Relations as they interacted with the work, and reflected on the role of the Museum/Hospital

Clare Twomey

Ceramics In The Environment

An International Review

Janet Mansfield 2005

With Fire, Richard Hirsch

A Life Between Chance and Design (invites the unknown)

Scott Meyer 2012

Hirsch takes us to the heart of the interface between ageless earth and the spare evidence of the rhythm of human utility

Raku as an Ideology

Breath-Energy-Immanence

Raku, A Review of Contemporary Work

Tim Andrews 1994

The Poetry of The Vessel

A calm invitation to thought and imagination

Chris Tyler

Choreographing

Events and Demolition

Trace and Encounter

Brian Massumi refers to all arts as 'occurrent' because any and every perception, artefactual or natural is just an experiential event

It is an event both in the sense that it is happening, and in the sense that when it happens something new transpires

Semblance and Event, Activist Philisophy and the Occurrent Arts

Brian Massumi 2011

The vessel (making, thinking, subject) as both a historically grounded form, and a vehicle to examine abstract aspects of the physical body and the natural world

Making new aesthetic utilities, materialities/modalities for thinking about the world

Frames, Handles and Landscapes

Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things

Eduardo de la Fuente 2016

Simmel, ecological approaches to aesthetics, shares the insight of ecological thinkers regarding how aesthetic perception is not reducible to either the internal mechanisms of the perceiving subject nor to the properties of the external environment, but rather the complex interplay of both

Materiality in art that attempts to expand notions of time, space, process or participation. Looking at materials that obstruct, disrupt or interfere with social norms, surfacing as impure formations and messy unstable substances.

Materiality that surveys the relationships between materiality and bodies, exploring the vitality of substances and the concepts of intermateriality and transmateriality that have emerged in the hybrid zones of digital experimentation

Materiality, Whitchapel 2015

Arte Povera/Germano Celant, an aesthetic-philosophical movement

An eclectic synthesis of knowledge fields, that emerges into a total space where disparate categories can meet; a art that asks only for the essential information, that refuses the dialogue with the social and cultural system, and aspires to present itself as something sudden and unforeseen

Artisanal, pre-industrial trades, firmly rooted in context, often evocatively sketching out the relations between material and place

Dispositions that open possibilities, experimental alternatives opened up by small scale non capitalist and self provisioning crafting

Making is central to our legacy as a society, materially, economically, ecologically and socially

In the small-scale culture of domestic craft enterprise, there is a rapidly expanding, fetishized and globally networked economy, premised on continued consumption of stuff

Idea is, the invisible of this world, which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible

Merleau Ponty

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

A methodology of connecting phenomenal properties with a conceptual strategy

Responds to every project by re-evaluating the physical, cultural, historical references of the site-time or program, through which he achieves a 'limited concept' that establishes an order, a field of inquiry, a limited principle for each architectural design process

As the body-subject is perceptually situated into the world by inhabiting space and time, a building is rooted into a specific site and situated by inhabiting, 'the visible and invisible of the site and situation'

By locating the body, 'at the very essence of our being and our spatial perception' Holl redefines architectural space as perceived space with reference to the perceiving-body-subject

Steven Holl uses 'parallax' as an experiential tool as well as a design tool in which architectural space is redefined with reference to the moving body's constantly changing spatial perceptions

Merleau Ponty's main thesis that phenomenology has potential to put the essences back into existence by re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world through the realm of perceptual experiences drives Steven Holl to search for vitalizing these essences through the experiences of architectural forms, spaces, materials, light and colour

Intellectual and Phenomenal

Philosophical Inquiry

Interplays in his thinking on and making of architecture

Utility/Interpretation

Bachelard's Poetics of Space, explores the essence of being as it resides in the perceptual situadedness of the body-subject into the world

Perception fundamentally 'acts' enabling human beings to inhabit space and time

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

Architecture

That which begins as an interaction 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

Creating the experiential power of architecture

Intertwining, idea-space-material

Anchoring, physics and metaphysics of site

A path of passage in architecture that leads from the abstract to the concrete, the unformed to the formed. An architectural journey in which the idea-force, phenomenal properties and the site force interact with each other

Frames Handles and Landscapes

Gibson's theory of affordances

Behavioral complexities of affordances, grow exponentially through the production of tools, utensils, weapons. Are our aesthetic sensations therefore determined by the environment or do we impose qualities through observation, sensation and perception.

Affordance points in both directions at the same time

Substances also guide the kind of practical actions that the organism senses from elements of the environment, something flat, vertical, convex, concave, rigid, flexible, determines whether something affords support

Art and Aesthetic Patterns

An Ecology of Mind

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

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

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

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

Fittingness/Ecological Approaches to Aesthetic Perception

Colour, Light, Time: Quintessentially relational phenomena in which location, background, density will provide different perceptual relations

Steven Holl

Symmetry appeals because symmetrical patterning provides for the observing mind a maximum of insight with a minimum of intellectual effort, quintessentially relational phenomena ( colour, light, time) and location, provide a background density that will provide for different perceptual relations

Relatedness, connected to the place and function of things within a field

The rational organization of society has its own aesthetic attraction

Redundancy is a synonym for patterning

A pattern is a method for coping with the redundancies of messages emanating from the environment

Patterning of message material always helps the receiver to differentiate between signal and noise

Bateson 1973

Elaborations (Dynamic aesthetic totalities) of such everyday patternings in Art, Music, Ballet, Poetry

Initiating causal consequences, agency as persons and things

Camouflage takes away the ability to block out the irrelevant things in the environment, thus camouflage (which is designed to subvert communication) achieves its aims by breaking up the patterns and regularities in the signal, or by introducing similar patterns into the noise.

But what unambiguous codes gain in noise reduction, they lose in richness and expressiveness

Somewhere in between is the effective use of redundancy in which the blocking out of redundancies paradoxically heightens our attention to what is important

Frames, Handles and Landscapes

Simmel 1965

A tools beauty springs from the many unintended and absolute causalities, instead of being a materialization of an aesthetic idea

The Thinking Hand

Pallasmaa

Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things

Gibson

A psychology of causality is at work as we use everyday things

Donald Norman 2002

Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

Tim Ingold

Each thing framed dwells in the world differently

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

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

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

On The Picture Frame, Simmel

Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

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

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

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

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

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

Gell