With The Drawing Board : On the transitiveness of going along with things.

The Drawing Board, a photo by Russell Moreton on Flickr.

The Granary Studio, Brockwood Park, Bramdean. 2013

The Body and Spatial Boundaries~A Spatial Inquiry into Skin, Surface and Subjectivity.

Outpost 280122

The World on Edge

The Body and Spatial Boundaries.

russellmoreton.com

Tim Ingold.

From science to art and back again: The pendulum of an anthropologist.

https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/2237/2055

Merleau-Ponty, intertwining of vision and movement into an embodied knowledge.

The body and space are reflexive/diffractive and interdependent, we need spatial contexts/entanglements for our physical bodies and the intangibles of our inner beings.

The un-doing of place/sites of making

Responses to place and interventions on temporal space.

A spatial practice cannot be divorced from its response to the specificity of place.

Acts of exploratory dissection, in which one is un-making/making into a space with new realms of sensory engagement.

Architecture comes from the making of a room, a room is not a room without natural light.

All spaces need natural light, That is because the moods which are created by the time of day and seasons of the year are constantly helping you in evoking what a space can be if it has natural light and can't be if it doesn't. Artificial light is a single tiny static moment in light and can never equal the nuances of mood created by the time of day and the wonder of the seasons.

Louis Kahn, 1959.

Light forms a real presence in empty space, and even within/between physical things, its vibrant intensity stemming from a complex interaction of light with matter and the way in which solid volumes could throw attention to the flowing energy they trapped and displayed.

The Architecture of Natural Light, Henry Plummer, 2009.

She rarely used artificial lighting and instead relied on the often sharp geometries of a room's natural daylight.

He created new openings, that welcomed new infiltrations of light, sound and smells all revealed through the previously unseen materials and their structural layers. 

It was the urgency of the forthcoming demolition that Matta-Clark inserted himself in order to artistically deconstruct, while also reconstructing to produce radical spatial interventions. 

Beyond privileging her body as subject and ruinous spaces as sites, Woodman made certain methodologies and technical approaches characteristic aspects of her spatial practice in furthering the effects of the body and the space it encounters. 

Spaces to be activated by her performative body, offering new photographic carnalities of flesh, taken from imprints of the bare, textured concrete walls of the factories interior.

Exploring the surfaces and movements of her own body, by transferring traces of the surrounding architectural material onto her skin by pressing her skin into the wall. 

Francesca  Woodman's work, although performative, is explicitly photographic, her work is not only informed by a history of photography, but it is also actively engaged with addressing some of the medium's limits and possibilities. 

The relationship between self and objectified image through a re-staging of the drama of the photographic medium process on her own skin.

Skin, Surface and Subjectivity

Harriet Katherine Riches, 2004.

A generation of young photographers were becoming more and more interested in how the photograph sees than what it sees. Woodman's method of exploring and exposing the process of image making itself also resonates with the critical framework in which photography was being interpreted at the time. Her work is a critique on the way in which the photographic medium is itself a means through which meaning is fixed, identity lost and subjectivity de-formed. 

Woodman's work could be read as a post-modern project of appropriation and de-familiarisation.

Woodman draws attention to the way in which the subject always evades the frame/framing of the photographic representation.

Using the terms of the medium, to draw attention, to evasion or disappearance, to using and re-situating the cropping edge onto her body, and ultimately diffusing her image by the light on which the photographs visualisation depends.

Movements/thinking, staged within photographic moments of capture, producing, entangling and amalgamated, overwritten subjectivities presented on the photographic surface.

By frequently configuring the photograph's relationship to her body as one that is tenuous or fragile, fleeting in which a subject is captured in flight, as if slipping from its surface reality, its situation.

Making Matter(s)~Truth : The unison of experience and imagination in a world to which we are alive and that is alive to us. Tim Ingold

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

The purpose, dynamic and potential of Anthropology.

russellmoreton.com

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

Oceanic Metaphors~An Interpenetrated Meshwork

On Human Correspondence.

For Marcel Mauss, real-life human beings inhabit a fluid reality in which nothing is ever the same from one moment to the next and in which nothing ever repeats. In this oceanic world every being has to find a place for itself by sending out tendrils which can bind it to others.

Thus hanging on to one another beings strive to resist the current that would otherwise sweep them asunder. Things do not aggregate and they do not fuse. They do however interpenetrate their many tendrils and tentacles interweave to form a boundless and ever extending meshwork.

 

On The Gift~Octopuses and Anemones.

The Life of Lines.

Tim Ingold

russellmoreton.com

Artworks : Living on the macroscopic description/analysis of what happens.

Outpost 240724

Art, suggests that there are other ways of conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality. 

An intermediate period of free energy in motion from one system to another.

Living on the macroscopic description of what happens.

russellmoreton.com

Architectures, processes of thought that are analogically driven and developed into further recombinations, poetics.

The disequilibrium of the world we live in. 

We reread the notes we had made in the ferry logbook in order to commit everything to memory. Then, to be rid of the evidence, the old man tore out the page and tossed it in the stove. Engulfed in flames, the paper shrivelled and dissolved. We stood in silence for a moment, staring into the fire.

The work began the next day. I divided the research materials from the storeroom into small batches and burned them in the garden incinerator as though disposing of old magazines.

The new cavities in my heart search for things to burn. They drive me to burn things and I can stop only when everything is in aches. Why would I keep them when I don't think I will be able to recall the meaning of the word 'photograph' much longer. Nothing comes back now when I see a photograph. No memories, no response. They're nothing more than pieces of paper. A new hole has opened in my heart, and there's no way to fill it up again. That's how it is when something disappears.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa 

Art works through the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning. What happens when we react to  a work of art is not down to the art object in itself, rather it lies in the complexity of our brain  in the kaleidoscopic networks of analogical relationships with which our neurons weave, for what we call meaning.

We are involved, engaged, being into art, takes us out of our habitual, sleepwalking, reconnecting us instead with the joy of seeing something anew in the world. 

Carlo Rovelli.

The disequilibrium/entropic nature for traces and memory. 

Men feel free because they are aware of their choices and their wishes. But they ignore the causes that lead them to will and to choose, and do not give the slightest attention to theses causes.

Spinoza.

Thoughts on Art : Janie says we all such a crush of want. Nick Cave.

little Janie wakes up on the floor & she says!!!!

we’re GONNA HAVE A REAL COOL TIME TONITE!!!!

(Janie says we are all such a crush of want half-mad w/ loss we are

violated in our sleep & we weep & we toss & we turn & we

burn we are

hypnotised we are cross-eyed we are pimped we are bitched we are told

such monstrous lies—)

Janie wakes up & she says

we’re GONNA HAVE A REAL COOL TIME TONITE!!!!

Today's Lesson.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. 

DIG!!!LAZARUS DIG !!!. 2008

The Planet drowns  in an ocean of photographic emulsion.

The more civilised we are, the fewer moral choices we have to make. But the mind atrophies. A moral calculus that took thousands of years to develop starts to wither  from neglect. Once you dispense with morality, the important decisions become a matter of aesthetics.
Super Cannes, J G Ballard. 2000

russellmoreton.com

Moments/Marks/Gestures differ because of their fecundity.

Outpost 010724

The Rehabilitation Of The Imagination.

Correspondences between humankind and the world.

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

russellmoreton.com

In the heart of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; in the night of matter black flowers blossom. They already have their velvet and the formula of their scent.

Gaston Bachelard 

Imagination must infuse a second life into familiar images, it must create 'metaphors of metaphors'.

Reverie, reconciles the world and the subject, present and past, solitude and communication.

Gaston Bachelard.

Moments differ because of their fecundity.

The Intuition Of The Instant.

The imagination is not a state, it is the human existence itself.

William Blake. 

For Bachelard, Blake's poetics, presents a complex around the dialectics of rock and cloud. A dynamic imagination, he is a poet of absolute imagination for whom the unreal directs the real.

The Reverberation of Images.

In a word, the phenomenological approach is a description of the immediate relationship of phenomena with a particular consciousness. It allows Bachelard to renew his warnings against the temptation to study images as things. Images are lived, experienced, re-imagined in an act of consciousness which restores at once their timelessness and their newness.

Therefore a poetic image does not duplicate present reality.

From phenomenology Bachelard retains above all the admonition to return to 'phenomena themselves' this requires putting aside naïve belief in the reality of things and approaching phenomena through consciousness which is always intentional, always consciousness of something.

I realized then we were thinking the same thing. As we looked into each other's eyes, I felt, once again, the anxiety that had taken root in our hearts a long time ago. The light reflecting from the spray of the fountain lit R's face.

The boy was fiddling with a nondescript stone as though it were a toy with some elaborate hidden mechanism. His plain light blue gloves had obviously been knit by hand. They were connected to each other with a strand of yarn, to keep them from becoming separated. I remembered wearing the same kind, long ago, and, in this basement so full of anxiety, they seemed like the lone sign of innocence and peace.

The Memory Police.

Yoko Ogawa.

The Immaterial Body.

Proposals through transparency and trans-illumination.

Sensate Inscriptions. 

The Mechanized Image.

Thresholds and projections of creative perception.

Drawing into the visual field.

Paint, pigments, lines, bought to light. 

Gestures, lines from sensations and its seeing.

Life Drawing/Corporeal Social Bodies.

Drawing/Sensations into the memory and anxieties of physical things.

Drawing attention to the relations of the body.

Social and sexual politics.

The Modernist Offence.

Schiele And The Naked Female Body.

Gemma Blackshaw.

Feminist art historians have developed new ways of thinking about the relationship between sex and spectatorship.

As Abigail Soloman-Godeau has claimed in her exploration of photography and female subjectivity in the Second French Empire, the barriers between what is deeped licit and illicit, acceptably seductive or wantonly salacious, aesthetic or prurient, are never solid because contingent, never steadfast because they traffic with each other – are indeed dependant upon each other.

How might such an engagement with difference, with the binary system, shift not only our understanding but also our appreciation of Schiele's representation of the naked female body, of what continues to be described and displayed as 'the nude'? 

Egon Schiele.

The Radical Nude.

Marking~Clay : The~Transition~of~Matter : The Lived Duration between Two States.

New Assemblages/Materialisms.

Spinoza/Lived Durations.

The Silent Transformations.

Spatial Bodies : Constellations/Spatial Composition.

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

Dwelling/Reverberation/Poetics : Physical Grammar/Passages

Outpost 200623

On The Experiential Level of Life

Investigating/Expanding 'The Spatial/Sculptural'
Space over Time/Operative Design

Tony Cragg

IN AND OUT OF MATERIAL

Demonstration

Tony Cragg : I basically mean the effectiveness of the object, of the material. But because the metaphysical and physical association are already occupied, I'm interested in somehow establishing some relationship with the materials and the things around me without using any preconceived notions of an already occupied language. It is a bit like taking away a Christian name and depersonalising something. What I mean is that it's an attempt on my side to restart the relationship with the material, which I think sculptors have to do anyway.

Jon Wood : Thinking of the increased awareness that this side of your work tries to capture and harness in the viewer, can you say a bit about the kind of sensitivities that you would like to be heightened? What would you see your work as demonstrations of and for? Your sculptures are triggers for what kind of thinking?

Tony Cragg : Well there is an attitude to looking at things and to looking at objects and materials which is based on a meditative tradition of contemplation : the universe in a grain of sand idea, or maybe even religious ideas where you actually get in contact on some level with the material world, on a deeper level than the one you obviously are capable of reaching in an everyday situation, so on an extraordinary level, outside of your own experiences.

I am not saying that that's not interesting or important. But I also think that this leaves the battleground for the everyday life to be governed by non-contemplative thought and non-meditative thought. And this may sound like a mixture of terms, but I think that there is a job to be done even on an everyday, “second for second” level of life—on the experiential level of life. I think there is a job to be done here improving the quality of contemplation about an awareness of the material world—the material world seen as an immediate extension of the communal social effort, the cultural effort that you are part of.

Jon Wood : How does it move from being an individual contemplative experience to being one that has a communal relevance?

Tony Cragg : In the main part it only has communal relevance. All you can do for yourself is formulate your sentences, cook yourself a meal that suits you, get dressed in a fashion that suits you, and everything else you have to put up with as having been made by other people for you. But obviously, even if they didn't ask your permission, there's something consensual about that, isn't there? Even though you don't like it, it doesn't look like you're making an effort to change it. And maybe there's some active thing there. My idea is that even if I don't like it, I wouldn't be able to change a great deal of it, but I could sow the seed for some change in the direction that I would feel would be important. It's a measure of how much responsibility one takes for the change. Looking for more in the visual world around me and looking for more language, in a sense, is one way of heightening sensibilities and expanding a vocabulary and then expanding the responses to a vocabulary is a way of heightening sensibilities. I'm not a politician, but I think we still live in a world that is greatly dominated by mesmerism and mystical models, which are very distracting because they actually stop us from really trying to face reality.

Objects/Subjects in Space : Passages in Sculpture

OPERATIVE DESIGN : SPATIAL VERBS

To serve as a fundamental tool for spatial and architectural interpretation

Spatial operations, illustrated beginnings to activate architectural inquiry.

This catalogue thus introduces the possibility of understanding spatial formation as a process that can be derived from fundamental actions, here grouped into volumetric addition, subtraction, or displacement, which define a lexicon of starting points for the creation of space and also imply the relationship between oneself and the space created.

OPERATIONS

to | Expand | Extrude | Inflate | Branch | Merge | Nest | Offset | Bend | Skew | Split | Twist | Interlock | Intersect | Lift | Lodge | Overlap | Rotate | Shift | Carve | Compress | Fracture | Grade | Notch | Pinch | Shear | Taper | Embed | Extract | Inscribe | Puncture |

MAKE SPACE

Space matters. We read our physical environment like we read a human face.

The Eyes Of The Skin

Architecture and the Senses

Juhani Pallasmaam Steven Holl

2005

How to set the stage for creative collaboration

Scott Doorley, Scott Witthoft, David Kelley

2012

Surface + Volume

Generative Process

Combinations and Aggregations

Implementations

Writing and Seeing Architectue

Christian de Portzamparc, Philippe Sollers

2008

In and Out of material : Passages in Sculpture

COMBINATIONS

to | Inscribe + Inscribe | Intersect + Intersect | Split + Split | Embed + Embed | Taper + Taper | Bend + Bend | Branch + Branch | Shift + Shift | Notch + Notch | Inscribe + Intersect | Intersect + Split | Split + Embed | Embed + Taper | Taper + Bend | Bend + Branch | Branch + Expand | Expand + Shift | Shift + Notch | Notch + Twist |  

Languages,dialogues,conflicts that can evoke form,experience and interaction.

Research, inquiry and practice as a systematic approach through operative terms.

Investigating the 'Spatial' its formal/experiential essence/action and character for spatial opportunities.

The Feeling Of What Happens

Body,emotion and the making of consciousness

Antonio Damasio

1999

The Architecture Of The Jumping Universe

A Polemic

How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture

Charles Jencks

1995

RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

ARCHITECTURE, ART AND DESIGN

V&A Contemporary, Lucy Bullivant

2006

to fold

to modulate

of tension

of entropy

Richard Serra, "Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself" [1967-1968]

to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to compliment to enclose to surround to encircle to hole to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of cabonization to continue

AGGREGATIONS

to | Reflect | Expand

Reflect + Pack | Skew

Pack | Inflate

Pack + Stack | Branch

Stack | Bend

Array + Stack | Rotate

Array | Taper

Join + Array | Pinch

Join | Split

Poetics and Place

The Architectures Of Sign, Subjects and Site

Kristen Kreider

2014

A Hut of One's Own

Ann Cline

Open Office/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture

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

SPATIALITY

Writer as mapmaker, literature of the city and urban space, concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism.

Robert T. Tally Jr

2013

OPERATIVE DESIGN

A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs

2012/18

IMPLEMENTATIONS

to | Carve + Offset

Poli House : Pezo von Ellrichshausen

Offset program | Perimeter Services | Thickened Openings

to | Embed + Branch

Villa 1 : Powerhouse Company

Branched Programs | Volume Wrapper | Embedded Entry

to | Embed + Overlap

Casa para un Carpintero : RCR Arquitectes

Overlapping Program | Circulation Core | Embedded Entry

to | Expand + Nest

House N : Sou Fujimoto Architects

Expanded Outer Volume | Nested Private Program | Nested Living + Dining




Collage/Drawing Frame : Passages in Sculpture
to | Overlap + Expand

House in Minamimachi 2 : Suppose Design Office

Overlapping Light Wells | Stacked Program | Expanded Volumes

to | Bend + Shift

Nursing Home : Aires Mateus

Shifted Volumes | Bent Massing | Embedded Massing

to | Embed + Taper

Leimondo Nursery School : Archivision Hirotani Studio

Tapered Volumes | Thickened Roof | Embedded Program

to | Lift + Carve

Gouveia Law Courts : Barbosa and Guimaraes

Carved Massing | Lifted Program | Carved Plinth

to | Lift + Extrude

Carabanchel Housing : Dosmasuno Arquitectos

Extruded Living Spaces | Lifted Massing | Carved Plinth

to | Overlap + Rotate

Ironbank : RTA Studio

Rotated Volumes | Stacked Utility and Circulation Cores | Plinth and Street Facade

Anthony Di Mari

Nore Yoo

Volumetric Spatial Operations/Agents/Variations/Combinations

Additions

Subtractions

Displacements


Colour/Making Space : Passages in Sculpture/Architectural Glass

Mesh Topologies : Pattern and Chaos

Speculative Narratives 12

DSC_0018 Spatial/Visual Apparatus

Spatiality : Space over Time
DSC_0476 Spatial/Architectural Drawing

Reading Collage : Spatial Drawings/Documents/Analogue Photography

Speculative Narratives 8
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