Other ways, other than buildings of making : Reading Rooms/Performative Collages and Models

Spatial Agency : Other ways of thinking about social space and its architectural structuring.

Other ways, other than buildings of making a spatial difference.

Collage and Architecture. Jennifer A. E. Shields

Collage Methodologies in Architectural Analysis + Design

Architecture as Collage

Social Space, is dynamic space, things happen, and its production continues over time and hence it is not fixed to/by a single moment of completion.  

Performative Collages : Dualities of agency and structure, linked but separately identifiable conditions or proposals.

Agents are neither completely free as individuals, nor are they completely entrapped by structure. They are negotiators of existing conditions in order to partially reform them. 

Spaces are charged with the dynamics of power, empowerment, interaction, isolation, control, freedom, alienation.

Social space is intractably political space, in so much as people live out their lives in this space.

Spatial Agency/The Arts and the dance of thinking : The body is open to the intensities of the present.

BIOSPHERE

And all of our thinking, for its part, forms its own ecosystem as well. Mind is an ecological phenomenon, the result of a collective dance.

Gregory Bateson was fascinated by the fact that the relational networks between  root hairs and  mycelial filaments,  between  predator and  prey,  partners and  competitors,  have a form similar to  the neural pathways between the different hubs of our brains. Bateson drew several conclusions from this: that the landscape is also capable of thinking—not in  ideas and  words,  but in  forms,  colors,  tones,  and  scents.  Its thinking has no  object,  and  it therefore knows nothing  of either accusations or reproaches.  The natural world  thinks by  transforming  itself as a subject. The relationships within  an  ecosystem thereby  constitute something  like the synapses of a landscape’s nervous system (a very  specific nervous system,  which  has the form of a very  specific landscape).  In  this,  an ecosystem resembles a brain. Like a brain, it is capable of cognition. The way in which vegetation changes as the climate around it becomes more dry, for example, could be imagined as the way in which that ecosystem imagines a drought.  The biosphere is a system that constantly  produces new relationships by  responding  to  existing  ones.  Our brain  does the very  same thing.  Moreover,  since it resides within  a body,  it does not just map  the relationships from the outside,  but is itself a part of the relational network within an ecosystem.

Matter and Desire, an erotic ecology, Andreas Weber. 2017

The mind is always embodied, always based on corporeal and sensory relations.

Elizabeth Grosz.

Categories and things may make it easier for us to grasp reality, but they also hide its underlying complexities.

Peripheral Vision, Relationality. Robert Cooper. 2005

Oxford Dictionary of Geography: spatiality

The effect that space has on actions, interactions, entities, concepts, and theories. Physical spatiality can also be metaphorical. It is used to show social power—thrones are higher than the seats of commoners, and ‘high tables’ for university teachers in most Oxbridge colleges physically elevate the teachers over the taught. People use proximity to show how intimate they want to be with others (See personal space), or orientation; we may face someone or turn away from them. Institutions and governments have used large architectural spaces to invoke awe, while restaurateurs may create ‘cosiness’ in small spaces.

FILMIC COLLAGE : Veiled Melancholy/Book Narratives

  "He rubbed his eyes. The riddle of his surroundings was confusing but his mind was quite clear - evidently his sleep had  benefited him. He was not in a bed at all as he understood the word, but lying naked on a very soft and yielding mattress, in a trough of dark glass. The mattress was partly transparent, a fact he observed with a sense of insecurity, and below it was a mirror reflecting him greyly. Above his arm- and he saw with a shock that his skin was strangely dry and yellow - was bound a curious apparatus of rubber, bound so cunningly that it seemed to pass into his skin above and below. And this bed was placed in a case of greenish-coloured glass (as it seemed to him), a bar in the white framework of which had first arrested his attention. In the corner of the case was a stand of glittering and delicately made apparatus, for the most part quite strange appliances, though a maximum  and minimum thermometer was recognizable."

H. G. Wells : The Sleeper Awakes. 1899/1910

"Spatial turn" The increased attention to matters of space, place and mapping in literary and cultural studies, as well as in social theory, philosophy, and other disciplinary fields.

Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. Routledge 2013.

Immediate Architectural Interventions, Durations and Effects : Apparatuses, Things and People in the Making of the City and the World. Alberto Altes Arlandis, Oren Lieberman. 2013

Preface (1921) ” The great city of this story is no more than a nightmare of Capitalism triumphant, a nightmare that was dreamt a quarter of a century ago. It is a fantastic possibility no longer possible. Much evil may be in store for mankind, but to this immense, grim organization of servitude, our race will never come” H.G. Wells. Easton Glebe, Dunmow,1921.

EMULSION : Photographic Landscape

I do not start with the idea but with the experience
Peter Lanyon

The Experience of Landscape
Paintings, Drawings and Photographs
South Bank Centre

An Anthropology Of Landscape
Christopher Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE
Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics
Timothy Morton

Matter and Desire, An Erotic Ecology

Andreas Weber

BLUE SPACES : White Absences #2. Silence/Void : Gap/Reveal

Ordinary Lives
Studies in the Everyday
Ben Highmore

RUINED INTERIOR : Consumerism and Culture.

The Art of Survival?
Jacqueline Rose
Essay for 'Elsewhere' Therese Oulton

Hermeneutic Philosophy and The Sociology of Art
Janet Wolff

Hermeneutics
Jens Zimmermann

Teaching Drawing Concepts : Oskar Schlemmer/Calvin Albert

Oskar Schlemmer, Man.1971
Lund Humphries/MIT, London,

Oskar Schlemmer's conception of man
Syllabuses/Teaching Schedules
Drawing from the nude
Measurement and proportion
Natural sciences
Figure drawing
Philosophy
Psychology
Question and answers to the preliminary course 'man'
Postscript




Figure Drawing Comes To Life, Albert Seckler. 1957
Reinhold Publishing Corporation, New York

A series of experiments in drawing the figure conducted by Calvin Albert

Interpreted in a text by Dorothy Gees Seckler

New concepts of architecture
Existence, Space and Architecture, Christian Norberg-Schulz. 1972

Anthropometrics for designers, John Croney. 1971

Hiding Making Showing Creation : The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean 2013, Academia post

 Making : Tim Ingold

The Materials Of Life

Re-Shaping Learning

You read the paper FROM IMAGE TO INTERACTION: MEANING AND AGENCY IN THE ARTS. A related paper is available on Academia. Rachel Esner, Sandra Kisters, Ann-Sophie Lehmann (eds), Hiding Making, Showing Creation. The Studio from Turner to Tacita Dean, Amsterdam: AUP 2013  Ann-Sophie Lehmann 2013 832 Views  View PDF ▸   Download PDF ⬇ Your recent reading history: MEANWHILE/BECOMING: A POSTPHENOMENOLOGICAL POSITION EXPLORING VISION AND VISUALITY IN LANDSCAPE PHOTOGRAPHY - Jan Fyfe FROM IMAGE TO INTERACTION: MEANING AND AGENCY IN THE ARTS - Arjen Mulder Scripting the City: J. G. Ballard among the Architects - Duncan Bell Rough Poetry: Patio and Pavilion Revisited - Ben Highmore J. G. Ballard's 'Crash! A Science Theatre Presentation for the ICA': The Context of a Document Newly Discovered - Chris Beckett Memories of Catastrophes Yet to Come: New Brutalism and Thing-Memory - Ben Highmore Violence and the Act of Reading JG Ballard - Richard Hayes Marks and Remembrancers: Alison and Peter Smithson’s Architectural Memory - Ryan Johnston The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. By Jane Bennett. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. 213p. 55.00cloth, 17.95 Paper … - Kennan Ferguson Retreating in / from art institutions - Heather Anderson

Mechanisms of Seeing : 10 Days at the Laundry/Axisweb post migrations

MOLECULAR SIEVE, is a performative analysis of “this place” utilising the simple properties of the pinhole camera. This appropriated apparatus makes visible the extrusive nature of time as it is deposited on the photographic surface. 

The extended durations required to register “place” impart a sense of dwelling as recorded by the apparatuses passive gaze. These surfaces record and register a relation constructed by the architecture of the chamber and what is beyond it. Movements when visible appear as simple abbreviated enactments caught like inclusions within this consolidated and timely consolation of place.

https://www.axisweb.org/p/russellmoreton/#projects

Cameras consist of small voids, the ‘camera’, a lens and photographic film. They are camerae obscurae  that collect light and allow it to meet the surface of the film. But in fact the light comes from the larger void outside the camera. The moment the light has registered on the light-sensitive surface of the film, memories are constructed. The memory is literally conceived in this meeting and is added to life as an additional layer of being. The process through which void meets surface is therefore also about love—the love of ancestors and relatives, but also of life and its conception.

Daniel Libeskind’s building will, when finished, offer a path for the visitor, the path of history that crosses the void of commemoration. 

Working with/into experiential perspectives : CHOREUTICS : Principles of Dynamic Space and Movement

The Curse of the Contemporary

Living in Spatial Times
Instantaneity/depthlessness
Doreen Massey, for space

Making sites that matter : choreographing situated knowing in architectural analysis and design. 

Oren Lieberman

Organism, Person, Environment :  Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa

Space for Peace, Winchester

Situated Knowledges : Donna Haraway

chaos, territory, art

Deleuze and the framing of the earth

Elizabeth Grosz

The Illuminated Cathedral

RELATIONSCAPES
Movement, Art, Philosophy
Erin Manning

Prelude : What moves as a body returns as a movement of thought

Something in the world forces us to think. This something is not an object of recognition, but a fundamental encounter.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Deeper Darkness, Photographic Memory/Process, Metonymy, Negative,

Analogue, Negated Nocturne. Walking, Others, Presence, Becoming,

Temporal Perspectives

Working Notes/Spaces

Space and Place
The Perspective of Experience
Yi-Fu Tuan

Experiential Perspective
Space, Place, and the Child
Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values
Spaciousness and Crowding
Spatial Ability, Knowledge, and Place
Architectural Space and Awareness
Time in Experiential Space
Intimate Experiences of Place
Attachment to Homeland
Visibility : the Creation of Place
Time and Place


for
space
Doreen Massey

A Relational Politics of The Spatial
Making and Contesting time-spaces



Contemporary artists aim to produce specific relations with the technologies they adopt and adapt;
This schematic offers a partial taxonomy.
Caroline A. Jones, Sensorium : Embodied Experience, Technology and Contemporary Art 2006










Immersive
the "cave" paradigm, the virtual helmet, the black-box video, the earphone set

Alienated
taking technology and "making it strange," exaggerating attributes to provoke shock, using technologies to switch senses or induce disorientation

Interrogative
work that repurposes  or remakes devices to enhance their insidious or wondrous properties; available data translated into sensible systems

Residual
work that holds on to an earlier technology, repurposes or even fetishizes an abandoned one

Resistant
work that refuses to use marketed technologies for their stated purpose; work that pushes viewers to reject technologies or subvert them

Adaptive
work that takes up technologies and extends or applies them for creative purposes, producing new subjects for the technologies in question




Transactive Memory
Systems Virtual Teams
The Body
Minds and Metaphors
Laban-CHOREUTICS

The Mind In The Cave
David Lewis-Williams

The Matter of The World
Minds and metaphors
Cathedrals of Intelligence
The 'Looking mind'

Information Processing and Performance in Traditional and Virtual Teams
The Role of Transactive Memory
Terri Griffith, Margaret A. Neale

Acquisition/Sharing of Implicit and Explicit Information

Organisations increasingly rely on teams to do much of the work traditionally accomplished by individuals.
Successful groups are those who are able to create synergies in the form of information aggregation and innovation that is beyond the ability of any single member.

Nascent Knowledge
Information Diversity
Task Conflict

The knowledge and perspectives of group members from the same social networks may be more redundant than diversified. However a total diversity among work group members is not desirable; some 'redundancy' (agreement in perspective) among group members is necessary to ensure enough common ground to facilitate successful group interaction.

Transactive Memory : Knowing and Accessing What We Know

For teams to have synergy they must be able to access their information, it is important to know who does what.
Wegner 1987; 1995)

RELATIONAL DEVELOPMENT
TIME
Synchronous/ Asynchronous
COMMUNICATION

Transactive Memory : A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind
Daniel M. Wegner

The study of transactive memory is concerned with the prediction of group (and individual) behaviour through an understanding of the manner in which groups process and structure information.

Individual Memory
Information is entered into memory at the encoding  stage, it resides in memory during a storage stage, and is bought back during the retrieval stage.

Organisation : differentiated/ integrated
Label
Location

THE LABAN SOURCEBOOK
Dick McCaw

Rudolf Laban (1879-1958) was a pioneer in dance and movement, who found a extraordinary range of application for his ideas; from industry to drama, education to therapy. Laban believed that you can understand about human beings by observing how they move, and devised two complimentary methods of notating the shape and quality of movements.

Diagram : Three Planes of Movement from Choreography
Inner and Outer Tension : Inner and Outer Form

CHOREUTICS : Principles of Dynamic Space and Movement

Choreutics presents the grammar and syntax of spatial form in movement and the nature of movement's harmonic content.

Effort
Exertion of Power, Physical or/and Mental

Force
Space
Time
Flight

Indulging/Contending

SPACE Flexible/Direct
WEIGHT Light/Strong
TIME Sustained/Quick
FLOW Free/Bound

Shadow Moves
An acute observer of Shadow Movement of a person in different situations and at different times will show the consistency of that individual's basic attitude and personality.

Effort and Recovery

Movement Psychology
Thinking
Intuiting
Sensing
Feeling


AN
ANTHROPOLOGY
OF
LANDSCAPE
Christoper Tilley, Kate Cameron-Daum

Materiality
From our perspective in this book representations of landscape, textual or pictorial, are of secondary significance and we should treat them as such; they are selective and partial, and often highly ideological, ways of seeing and knowing.
It forms a material medium in which we dwell and move and think.
Redirecting the study of landscape from representation to the materially grounded messiness of everyday life and the minutiae of material practices that constitute it.
Landscapes are contested, untidy and messy, tensioned, always in the making. Our landscapes of modernity are frequently on the move and peopled by diasporas and migrants of identity, people making homes in new places.

Field Observations
Spatial relations within the landscape are complex.
The manner in which persons and their bodies cannot be understood apart from the landscapes of which they are a part, reciprocally involved in forms of movement, action, awareness and social memory.
Embodied Identities
Art in and from the landscape
Fragile Environments : Nature and Culture

On Ways of Walking and Making Art
A personal reflection
M Collier
Making art is a practical application of phenomenology
Engaging  with an embodied experience of space and depth (what Merleau-Ponty called the 'flesh of the world').

WATERLOG
Journeys Around An Exhibition
Landscape and Memory

AFTER SEBALD
Essays and Illuminations
Edited by Jon Cook


The Forum, Norwich : Research Outposts
Alternative Photography