Spatial Abstractions : Photogram/Collage/Drawing/Mapping

Art practice/agents of a discursive social praxis : Building on Differentiated Data/Collage

Folder Cover, The Thinking Hand
TheThinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture.

Juhani Pallasmaa

Frameworks with Enclosures

Of the mason's who built them, we can say that they both designed as they drew, and drew as they designed. But their designing, like their drawing, was a process of work, not a  project of the mind.

Tim Ingold 'Making'

Openings and Conclusions
Text Fragments

Aerial Imagery/Remote Sensing

Openings and Conclusions 3
https://www.flickr.com/photos/russellmoreton/14618816405/in/photostream/

Collage on paper,written fragments and images from Peter Greenaway, Josef Albers and Robin Evans. Photo montage of The Physical Self (Greenaway) and Waverley Abbey UK.Visual research as part of The Waverley Project/Obscura and Reading Room.

On the horizon, then, at the furthest edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species-the collective (generic) work of the species-on the model of what used to be called "art" ; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an "object" isolated by and for the individual.

Henri Lefebvre, Openings and Conclusions. from On Installation and Site Specificity (introduction) Erika Suderburg

Working Drawings : Spatial Agency/refigurations on the everyday possibilities between movements and social space

The Making/Production of Space

We All Make Space/The Social Production of Possibility

Space and the Social becomes Spatial Agency (a continuity of action and occupation)

Life Drawings : The nature of minor everyday movements/narratives. Becoming responsive and flexible with materials to the dynamics of social structures/contexts. Drawings become reshaped as they are enacted through their working conditions and beyond (a here and an elsewhere, John Berger)

Drawing into the everyday, calling upon an anthropology of the here and now, so as to reveal the spatial and temporal inscriptions of present-day social practices. Marc Auge, Non-Spaces. 

Agency means being able to intervene in the world or to refrain from such intervention with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs. Anthony Giddens/Jeremy Till.

The defining point of agency is namely its potential to transform the given.

 ‘Everyday life is lived in the medium of cultural form. Its phenomenological immediacy is the sedimented result of myriad repetitive practices, yet it is constantly open to the randomness of the chance occurrence, the unexpected encounter, the surprising event, as well as to the refiguration of its meanings by more explicit forms of social intervention.’ The everyday thus acknowledges the historical constitution of the now, but also its very incompleteness demands an active (political) response to what could happen, to the ‘social production of possibility’. It is through such temporalisation that one escapes a myopic entrapment in the present and moves into viewing the everyday as a site for transformative practice. 

Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Jeremy Till, Architecture in Space,Time.

Layered Drawings : Architectural Screens/Modulations of Translucency

Space Between People

How the virtual changes physical architecture
Stephan Doesinger

This book shows how the virtual has completely changed the physical world around us. If architecture is the construction of space between people, what happens when that space exists in a virtual world? That question is the starting point for this collection of revolutionary projects by a new generation of designers. The book begins by examining the important issues that have emerged as technology reshapes our idea of place and proceeds to present the four winning projects from the first architecture competition held within the explosively popular Internet community known as Second Life. Chosen for their inventiveness and aesthetic excellence, these structures - a cloud that can be inhabited; a meta-museum; an interactive sound scape; and a snow palace of discarded objects - illustrate the mindbending possibilities of digital design. In the books final section, media artists share their real-time experiences conceptualizing and creating projects for the virtual world.


Non Spaces/Digital Still Image : Fire escape Winchester School of Art

Meshworks/Norwich, moving analogue source : Midway/Dante
Beginning as one always does in the middle, in mediis rebus, one experiences a sense of disorientation, a sort of cartographic anxiety or spatial perplexity that appears to be part of our fundamental being-in-the-world. It is an experience not unlike that of Dante, in the opening lines of his Commedia:

Midway along the journey of our life,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
for I had wandered off from the straight path.

( Dante 1984 : 67)
Introduction : Spatiality .
Robert T. Tally Jr.
the New Critical Idiom, Routledge 2013

Art as Spatial Practice.
Space folds : Containing "Spatialities around historicality and sociality"

"All that is solid melts into air"

Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels,
(Poetic observation concerning the constant revolutionizing of social conditions)

Perceptions now gathering at the end of the millennium. Spatiality, Robert T. Tally Jr. 2013

Sensuality, Drawing and Astronomical Space.
Architectural Translucency (Tracing Layers)
DSC_8860 Pavilion : Borderlands

Andreas Horlitz : Simulacrum. 2006

Brian Clarke : Lamina. 2005

Gathering Energies/Planetary Movements/Reveries on Reverie : Blue Drawing 9549

Presentation Slide,  The Architecture of Continuity : Lars Spuybroek, essays and conversations. Rotterdam 2008. The Poetics of Memory "The Cinema of Robert Lepage : Alexsander Dundjerovic. London 2003. Spatiality : Robert T. Tally Jr. London 2013. The Poetics of Reverie "Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos" : Gaston Bachelard (trans Daniel Russell). Boston 1971.

Reveries on Reverie/Reveries toward Childhood

Childhood sees the World illus­trated,  the World  with  its original colors,  its true colors.  The great once-upon-a-time (autrefois) which we relive by dreaming in our memories of childhood is precisely the world of the first time.

For those of us who can only work on written documents, on documents which are produced by a will to 'edit,' a certain indecision cannot be obliterated in the conclusions which terminate our inquiries. In point of fact, who writes? The animus or the anima?

These seasons find  the means to  be singular while remaining universal.  They  circle in  the sky  of Childhood  and  mark  each childhood  with  indelible signs.  Thus our great memories lodge within the zodiac of memory, of a cosmic memory which does not need the precisions of the social memory in order to be psycholog­ically  faithful.  It is the very  memory  of our belonging  to  the world,  to  a world  commanded  by  the dominating  sun.

Gaston Bachelard

Drawing/Openings and Conclusions/Collages for the Reading Room : Heuristic/Discursive/Practical/Agency

Ordinary things contain the deepest mysteries

On the horizon, then, at the furthest edge of the possible, it is a matter of producing the space of the human species-the collective (generic) work of the species-on the model of what used to be called "art" ; indeed, it is still so called, but art no longer has any meaning at the level of an "object" isolated by and for the individual.

Henri Lefebvre, Openings and Conclusions. from On Installation and Site Specificity (introduction) Erika Suderburg

Is there still an aesthetic illusion? And if not, a path to an “aesthetic” illusion, the radical illusion of secret, seduction and magic? Is there still, on the edges of hypervisibility, of virtuality, room for an image?

Jean Baudrillard : The Conspiracy of Art, 2005

The Social Condenser in Operation.

Five figures and a stature distributed evenly in its isotropic space; a picture of the socialized as opposed to the sociable.

Robin Evans : Figures, Doors and Passages.

A Hut of One's Own : Ann Cline

Texts, Annotations, Foundations, Pathways, Corridors, Bookmarks, Walking, Thinking, Ramble, Cross Country, Disciplines, 

Collage on paper, written fragments and images from Peter Greenaway, Josef Albers and Robin Evans. Photo montage of The Physical Self (Greenaway) and Waverley Abbey UK. 

Visual research as part of The Waverley Project/Obscura and Reading Room. 

A heuristic technique (/hjᵿˈrɪstᵻk/; Ancient Greek: εὑρίσκω, "find" or "discover"), often called simply a heuristic, is any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals.

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