Painting/Studio Practice : Micropolitics of slowness and repetition

Indexical Patterning/Painting : Affective Relational Intensities 

Micropolitics of slowness and repetition

Pattern and Chaos/Liminality/Tectonics

Architectural surface for a Library,  raw materials, light, silence and solitude.  

We are not in the presence of a passively representative image, but a vector of subjectivation.

Guattari, 1995 :25

Vessels that resist unbeing made

Generative/Emergent/Influences : The vibrancy and effectivity of nonhuman bodies, forces and flows/Jane Bennett

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter

Jane Bennett. 2018

Everything changes. It is not that everything is always at the precipice of dissolution, but that every thing is changing in relations with oth­ers—at speeds that are sometimes slow and gradual and sometimes fast and overwhelming. This is the fate of mimetic bodies, human or not.

Every act of artistic mimesis will differ from all blueprints and inspirational ideas and  dreams,  insofar as the creative process always differs from itself as it proceeds. Process or new materialist philosophy also  rejects—or perhaps the better verb  here is elides—the model of the autonomous human  agent,  highlighting  instead  the vibrancy  and effectivity of nonhuman bodies, forces, and flows and the ways in which human agency is itself enabled and constrained by them.

Amorphous Photography : Star Trails/Pylon : Hybrid Musical Sources

Side C

10. Sola Gratia (Part 2)- Jozef Van Wissem et SQURL

Corpus : Propositions/Proofs and the situatedness of an environment

Architectural Body/An organism that persons

Organism, Person, Environment : Madeline Gins and Arakawa

You cannot see me from where I look at myself 

Francesca Woodman

Therefore the idea of the human body is composed of the many ideas of the component parts.

The idea which  constitutes the formal being  of the human mind is the idea of the body, which is composed of many indi­viduals,  each  composed  of many  parts.

(Ethics, Part II, Proposition XV, Proof)

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Mimesis

Sensuous Correspondence

Sympathetic Magic

Mimicry

Becoming

Mimesis : Paradox or Encounter. Jane Bennett

Yet,  freed  from the block, the relations between her and everything which was not her had changed. An absolute yet invisible change. She was now the centre of what surrounded her. All that was not her made space for her.

Where there are no  words, knowledge comes through  physical acts and  through  the space through which those acts are made; by permitting each act the space conferred  meaning  upon  it and  no  further meaning  was necessary.

John Berger

We sense and experience that we are eternal. For the mind no less senses those things which it conceives in understanding than those which it has in the memory. For the eyes of the mind by which it sees things and observes them are proofs. So although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration.

(Spinoza, Ethics, Part V, Proposition XXIII)

Situatedness is a theoretical position that posits that the mind is ontologically and functionally intertwined within environmental, social, and cultural factors. As such, psychological functions are best understood as constituted by the close coupling between the agent and the environment.

Spatial Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

 Assemblage : Apparatus/Diffraction

"There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them.

It therefore has a combination [chiffre]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity

is conceptual...

Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin

with the same concept,

they do not have the same concept of beginning...

Every concept has an irregular

contour defined by the sum of its components,

which is why,

from Plato to Bergson,

we find

the idea of the concept being a

matter of articulation,

of cutting and

cross-cutting.

The concept is a whole because it totalizes

its components, but it is

a fragmentary whole.

Only on this condition can it escape the

mental chaos

constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it."

-- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15-16.

Assemblage (Wilcox)

As opposed to concepts like structure, culture, science, objectivity, production, agency, technology, and nature, the idea of assemblage emphasizes the material-discursive heterogeneity of which the cosmos is constituted. As Deleuze explains:

In assemblages you find states of things, bodies, various combinations of bodies, hodgepodges; but you also find utterances, modes of expression, and whole regimes of signs. The relations between the two are pretty complex. For example, a society is defined not by productive forces and ideology, but by ‘hodgepodges’ and ‘verdicts.’ [i]

Fortun and Bernstein (1998) use the term “realitty” to describe the complex, messy world made up of assemblages and trace the genealogy of the concept throughout the twentieth century’s continental philosophical traditions. Beginning with Frankfurt School critical theorists like Walker Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who coined the term “constellation,” and moving through Foucault and Deleuze, Fortun and Bernstein characterize the concept of the assemblage thus:

In an assemblage, nothing explains it all: not the sciences, not the social sciences, not the human sciences. There isn’t anything that is first or fundamental in an assemblage—nature, language, culture, institutions, whatever—it’s all at once, and we with our questions come after it. Meaning that we are both assembled by it, and in pursuit of it. Even though we’re consigned to come after the assemblage has been assembled, both with and without our intentionality, that doesn’t stop us from going after it, too.[ii]

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+%28Wilcox%29

Assemblage (Weiss)

(Disambiguation: Assemblage (Wilcox))

The assemblage is introduced as a heuristic tool to map out the realitty of an idea: the conceptual connections surrounding and contributing to the formation of a topic, such as Darwin's theory of evolution. The primary source text for this idea is Muddling Through by Fortun and Bernstein.

There are four general characteristics of assemblages:

1) Assemblages are a kind of infrastructure (1, 2) - "a complex, crazily reticulated transportation system" (105) - that, like roadways, facilitate (conceptual) movement in certain directions while constraining movement in other ways.

2) Despite the constraining nature of assemblages, they still allow for some elements of power and agency to be exercised. If you have the ability, granted by some modes of thinking, to go "off-road" or to start a new chain of self-organizing "roadwork", then you are able to recoup more agency in choosing which direction to think in. (105)

3) An assemblage is always in some type of restricted motion as various nodes are afforded slight shifting within the constraints of their linkages. "The lobster form is not entirely whimsical, but a deliberate reminder that the sciences are in motion and, indeed, composed of linked motions." (106) Stabilization is possible in small regions of an assemblage through stronger interconnections made between nodes of institutions, concepts, and activities, such as those found in the sciences. It is important to recognize that this stabilization effect comes not from reality, but from realitty, the social elements that contribute to a sense of fact or truth. This movement also emphasizes that visual representations are "diagrams of contingency" - the elements are all interdependent upon connections to other elements and that shifts in force or direction will transfer across the diagram, sometimes in indirect ways. (107)

4) The representation of an assemblage is itself a kludged tool to aid our understanding of and inquiry into scientific activities. Rather than providing answers or hard-and-fast explanations, assemblages are meant to provoke questions and to open up possibilities in thinking about events and topics in new ways.

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Assemblage+(Weiss)

Agential Realism

A theory coined by Karen Barad, agential realism reconceptualizes the process by which objects are examined and knowledge created in scientific activities. Barad emphasizes that agential realism is not just an epistemological theory, but an ontological one, as it describes how reality is actually shaped. 

" [Agential realism] is an epistemological and ontological framework that extends Bohr's insights and takes as its central concerns the nature of materiality, the relationship between the material and the discursive, the nature of "nature" and of "culture" and the relationship between them, the nature of agency, and the effects of boundary, including the nature of exclusions that accompany boundary projects.

Agential realism entails a reformulation of both of its terms - "agency" and "realism" - and provides an understanding of the role of human and nonhuman factors in the production of knowledge, thereby moving considerations of epistemic practices beyond the traditional realism versus social constructivism debates." (89)

Agency, according to Barad, “is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.” (112) 

Niels Bohr's Quantum Physics

“Bohr’s epistemology calls into question several foundationalist assumptions that Western epistemology generally takes as essential to its project; among these are an inherent subject/object distinction and the representational status of language.” (89) 

Influential in the development of agential realism was Niels Bohr, a quantum physicist who asserted that observing apparatuses are not merely passive instruments, but things that participate in the formulation of scientific observation. He also resolved the "wave-particle" duality paradox (97) by positing that the paradox existed because the methods used by scientists to measure light as a wave versus as a particle were mutually exclusive.

By granting apparatuses a more active role in the production of knowledge, Bohr challenged the separateness of observer and object by referring to “objects of observation” and “agencies of observation”.

“[T]his interaction between object and apparatus thus forms an inseparable part of the phenomenon.” (95)

Apparatus

“[A]pparatuses are specific material reconfigurings of the world that do not merely emerge in time but iteratively reconfigure space-timematter as part of the ongoing dynamism of becoming." 

“...apparatuses are not mere instruments or devices that can be deployed as neutral probes of the natural world, or determining structures of a social nature, but neither are they merely laboratory instruments or social forces that function in a performative mode." 

Barad uses the example of the transducer in a sonogram machine that is used to "view" a fetus: 

"the transducer does not allow us to peer innocently at the fetus, nor does it simply offer constraints on what we can see; rather, it helps produce and is "part of" the body it images.” (101)

A transducer in a sonogram is not merely a passive instrument; it actively participates in the production of an image of a fetus, both in how it transforms auditory input (sound waves) into visual outputs on a screen, but also in how it makes the fetus seem to be more real and existent than it would have been without. 

Diffraction

Another key idea behind agential realism is Barad's emphasis on a transformative and transgressive diffraction, not just reproducing reflection:

"In this regard, it is important not to confuse the fact that I am drawing on an optical phenomenon for my inspiration in developing certain aspects of my methodological approach ... with the nature of the method itself. In particular, calling a method 'diffractive' in analogy with the physical phenomenon of diffraction does not imply that the method itself is analogical. On the contrary, my aim is to disrupt the widespread reliance on an existing optical metaphor - namely, reflection - that is set up to look for homologies and analogies between separate entities. By contrast, diffraction, as I argue, does not concern homologies but attends to specific material entanglements." (87)

Again, Barad's posthumanist expansion of performativity to include nonhumans comes into play:

"I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism. The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices, doings, and actions." (135) 

Barad clarifies that her posthumanism is not celebrating "after humans", but more challenging the prima facie segregation and privileging of humans over and from other beings:

"Posthumanism, as I intend it here, is not calibrated to the human; on the contrary, it is about taking issue with human exceptionalism while being accountable for the role we play in the differential constitution and differential positioning of the human among other creatures (both living and nonliving)" (136) 

Hearkening back to her physics roots, Barad compares the conceptual diffraction to optical diffraction versus reflection, explaining that diffraction allows for more insight because it transforms (conceptual) images:

"Such an approach also brings to the forefront important questions of ontology, materiality, and agency, which social constructivist and traditional realist approaches get caught up in the geometrical optics of reflection where, much like the infinite play of images between two facing mirrors, the epistemological gets bounced back and forth, but nothing more is seen.

Moving away from the representationalist trap of geometrical optics, I shift the focus to physical optics, to questions of diffraction rather than reflection. Diffractively reading the insights of poststructuralist theory, science studies, and physics through one another entails thinking the cultural and the natural together in illuminating ways." (135) 

This diffraction challenges the singularity and solidity of boundaries, making what was sharply delineated a zone of fuzzy regions that have questionable divisions held in place by iterative performativity:

https://conceptsinsts.wikispaces.com/Agential+Realism+%28Weiss%29

The Poetics of Order/Making/Odyssey : Dom Hans van der Laan/Tim Ingold/Jane Bennett

Architectonic Space: Fifteen Lessons on the Disposition of the Human Habitat

By Hans van der Laan

http://www.vanderlaanstichting.nl/en/home/

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

The social life of making

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 

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

The aesthetic/vibrant spaces between objects

Collected Notes : Raveningham Sculpture Trail 2020

Walking underneath, through, passing by, 

… are all laid out in different moments in time.

Dom Hans van der Laan

ODYSSEY Aesthetic Intervals/Timbre/Traces

Studio Blackboard

Immateriality/Temporal/Transitions material and movement/Human agency

A Species of Spaces

 

Construction/Making/Collage

Forming, slowness and repetition, elements of painting

Assemblage, sensation, surface, objects and spaces between them gathered/thresholds

Sheltering/Weathered/ Exploring a fragility of a painting in the landscape

 

Robert Mangold, Paintings and Architectural Forms

Fragments from sketchbooks

 Ephemeral Architecture

 

Canvas as spatial verb

Yellow Ochre, Molochite, Gesso, Canvas, Paper, Textiles,

Wood, Lead, Nails

Canvas as folded construction/shelter/place

Operative Design, A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs

Georg Simmel, text Frames, Handles, Landscapes and the aesthetic ecology of things

The poetics of order:

Dom Hans van der Laan’s architectonic space
Caroline Voet

Already in his first writings in the 1930s, Dom van der Laan aims to define architectural principles that provide an intellectual expression of the act of dwelling (‘wonen’). To dwell is to enter into a relationship with one’s surroundings, meaning to understand them. For van der Laan, this is the primordial function of architecture: it makes space readable. From his Benedictine background, he draws concepts that enable him to understand this complex process of cognition. He studies the old church fathers such as St Thomas Aquinas, especially his comments on Plato and Aristotle. The Benedictine way of life builds upon the intertwined relation between mystery and matter, between intellect and senses, believing that this relation can be expressed through a Platonic order.5 Professor van Hooff, in describing the work of Dom van der Laan, defines cognition as a dual process of synthesis and analysis.6 On the one hand, there is the act of living, a synthesis of the concrete and singular reality. On the other hand, there is the process of analysis by the abstracting intellect. For us to know the concrete and singular reality, an intense interrelation between the two processes is needed.

http://www.vanderlaanstichting.nl/pics/pdf/130105-poetics_of_order-Caroline_Voet.pdf

 

Collage Body : Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies.

Collage : Diversions, Contradictions and Anomalies.

Body : Personal Relations and Spatial Values

Reading : Slow Philosophy

Collage's integral methods of discordance and displacement have so insistently reflected turbulent developments in twentieth century art, science and geopolitics that our response might be to categorise the whole genre as iconoclasm or subversive fantasy.

Sally O'Reilly

THE PERSPECTIVE OF EXPERIENCE

Yi-Fu Tuan

1959 : Patti Smith

Peace and Noise

Lingering at the threshold between word and image

Cy Twombly

Claire Daigle

Although his work resonates strongly with generations of younger artists, ranging from Brice Marden to Richard Prince to Tacita Dean to Patti Smith, it has a general propensity to polarise its audience between perplexity and unbridled admiration. 

Certainly, the fortuities of a name are being pushed too far here, but what does Twombly do but offer up words in all of their resonance: literal, metaphoric, corporeal, material? His citations often have the vanitas effect of graffiti: ‘Cy was here’. Lingering at the threshold between word and image, Twombly renders visible those things – experience, emotion, the body’s share – that lie beyond the reach of verbal articulation

Research Material
Photographic Drawings

PETER ZUMTHOR ATMOSPHERES

Architectural Environments
Surrounding Objects
2006 Birkhauser, Basel, Switzerland.

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

On the nature of photography : Alternative Photographic Processes

On the nature of photography

Alternative Photographic Processes

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.

Contexts:

Community , Conference / Symposium , Socially Engaged

Artforms:

Performance , Architecture , Photography , Installation

Tags:

10 Days Winchester, pinhole photography, creative arts research, 

spatial practices, social apparatuses, event, fallow site

Film based inquiry into analogue based darkroom processes and timed intervals of exposures. 

Work staged within the initial developing spaces for 10 days in the laundry, Winchester.

Contexts:

Community , Public art

Artforms:

Performance , Installation , Photography

Tags:

10 Days in the Laundry, Winchester, fallow site, analogue, pinhole camera, daylight, interior, semblances, exploratory, documentation, agency

Camera obscura

Liquid Light Emulsion

Photograms

Analogue and Digital Hybrid Printing

Cyanotypes

Pinhole Cameras

alternative photographic processes, liquid light, photograms, 

textual, light writing, collage, experimental, analogue, filmic,

KONTAKTE : THESE MACHINES

Alternative photographic photograms and collages for the CD artwork 

to promote the ambient music of Kontakte.

Limited edition CD artwork, and booklet.

Contexts:

Commission , Design , Public art

Artforms:

Book works , Illustration , Photography

Tags:

KONTAKTE, ambient music, CD artwork, alternative photography, photograms, collage, These Machines, Nuclear Winter

What is philosophy/Deleuze, Guattari : The unfolded garment and other spatial concepts

 Intermezzo : Nomadic Photographic Assemblage

What is philosophy/Deleuze, Guattari 

a thousand plateaus

Deleuze, Guattari

Assemblage

Becoming

Body Without Organs

Nomad

Rhizome

Smooth Space

State

War Machine

The Uberficiation of the University

BY MARK CARRIGAN ON NOVEMBER 22, 2016

A fascinating short book by Gary Hall, available open access at the Coventry University repository: 

The Sharing Economy

Platform Capitalism

Uber.edu

The Reputation Economy

The Microentrepreneur of the Self

The Para-academic

The Artrepreneur

Affirmative Disruption

The unfolded garment and other spatial concepts

The Unfolded Garment

Embracing Subjectivity

Pierced Assemblage on Photogram

Espace-Milieu, Winchester Cathedral.

Painting evolved from Space for Peace, Winchester Cathedral. Site drawing from architectural plan and documentation of people moving within the event.

aerial, cathedral, cyanotype, public gathering, 

spatial mapping, palimpsest, drawing, lightness

What is Philosophy?

Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari

Their book is a profound and careful interrogation of what it might mean to be a 'friend of wisdom', but it is also a devastating attack on the sterility of what has become, when 'the only events are exhibitions and the only concepts are products which can be sold'. Philosophy, they insist, is not contemplation, reflection or communication, but the creation of concepts

Grisaille Patterning : Translucency/Paintings/Object Fields for a Luminous Philosophy

Grisaille Patterning : Translucency/Paintings for a Luminous Philosophy

Painting and Mapping/Choreutics : The luminous

Palimpsest/Making Spaces through movements  and atomized materials

Grisaille Patterning : Redundancies making spaces between objects

Gilles Deleuze's Luminous Philosophy : Hanjo Berressem

Spinoza :Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze

Drawing into painting, paintings/environs in the company of philosophy

Painting as explorative material sites (aporias/difficult futures) between the discursive and the practical.

The discursive investigates and reconfigures further temporal propositions and contingences, it draws its subject beyond its ordered description and context of relations.

Architectural painting for glass exploring slowness and repetition.

Surface depths, an intermingling on the cusp of a speculative un-knowing

patterning, architectural, surface, design, painting, 

translucency, lightness, silence, reading room

An Anthropology of Landscape

Christopher Tilley

Kate Cameron-Daum

Spirituality in Contemporary Art

The Idea Of The Numinous

Jingu Yoon

New Global Ecologies

Baratunde Thurston

The Rooms

To Love Is To Live

Jehnny Beth

lightness, luminosity, fluid, hybrid media, material, 

asperity, field, gesso, molochite, yellow ochre

Baratunde Thurston, Hanjo Berressem, Kate Cameron-Daum, Spinoza, philosophy, painting, numinous, An Anthropology of Landscape, luminosity, Gilles Deleuze, Jingu Yoon, Grisaille, Russell Moreton, Christopher Tilley,