Monday, 23 October 2023

Making Thresholds/Dialogues between the container and the contained.

 Outpost 260823


Clay-Drawings at Bayfield.

Observatory/Propositional Assemblage.










Animacy, surfaces/things that have opened up their surroundings.


The living body is only sustained thanks to continually taking in materials from its surroundings, and in turn discharging them, in the processes of respiration and metabolism. 


Yet as with pots, the same processes that keep it alive also render it forever vulnerable to dissolution. That is why constant attention is necessary, and also why bodies and other things are poor containers. Left to themselves, materials can run riot. Pots crumble; bodies disintegrate. It takes effort and vigilance to hold things together, whether pots or people.

Bodies on the run, Tim Ingold. 


Itinerant Correspondences/Drawing and Telling. 


Thinking From Things.

To think from materials, to find the consciousness or thought of the matter-flow.

Deleuze and Guattari.


The living work of art, however, is not an object but a thing, and the role of the artist is not to give effect to a preconceived idea but to follow the forces and flows of material that bring the work into being. To view the work is to join the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is the final product. The vitality of the work of art, then, lies in its  materials, and it is precisely because no work is ever truly 'finished' (except in the eyes of curators and purchasers, who require it to be so) that it remains alive.

Tim Ingold.


The Telling of Stories is an Education of Attention.


Making Through Anticipatory Foresight.


To tell, in short, is not to explicate the world, to provide the information that would amount to a complete specification, obviating the need for would-be practitioners to inquire for themselves.


It is rather to trace a path that others can follow. Thus the hunter, educated in stories of the chase, can follow a trail; the trained archaeologist can follow the cut; the competent reader can follow the line of writing. Making their ways in the company of those more knowledgeable than themselves, and hearing their stories, novices grow into the knowledge of their predecessors through a process that could best be described as one of 'guided rediscovery' rather than receiving it ready-made through some mechanism of replication and transmission.

Tim Ingold.


In place of specification without guidance, the story offers guidance without specification.



Sensing Spaces

Making

Thresholds

The Materials of Life


Are you interested in the idea of threshold?


What is interesting in the world are the grey areas. So what I have designed is a threshold. It's not possible for an architect to design a space – such a concept does not exist. Instead, we design the thresholds and the limits: the walls, windows, doors and so on. And people have feelings about these elements and put them together and create the sensation of a space. I'm interested in designing the elements that give the impression of a space – which is why I like doors.


The dialogue between the container and the contained, the boundaries and the space within them, is an obsession in contemporary culture, where the node is more important than the object. That's why architecture must work at the limits, not invent the shape and language but straddle two worlds, on the knife edge.


A door is usually part of a wall, but you have extracted this element from the wall.


Kate Goodwin, Alvaro Siza. Sensing Spaces. 2014.




Telling By Hand.

The Humanity of the Hand.

The Eyes of the Skin.


Jacques Derrida holds that the proper function of the eyes is not to see but to weep. Behind the veil of tears that blurs the vision of the sighted, the eyes can tell of grief, loss and suffering, but also of love, joy and elation. Even the blind can weep.






Figure 2.3 Consciousness, materials, image, object: the diagram


Making/Flow of Consciousness/Materials into and across Image/Object


Experience can only be understood between mind and body or across them in their lived conjuction.

Merleau-Ponty. 


Telling By Hand.


The Tacit Dimension : That we can  know more than we can tell.


Polanyi is primarily interested in what it means to know, his reflections of personal knowledge assume that telling is tantamount to putting what one knows into words, in speech or writing, and that this entails two things: specification and articulation.

Michael Polanyi.


Tim Ingold, interested in 'performativity' what it means to tell, going beyond the 'predictive' nature of  what it means to know.


Ingold argues that we can tell of what we know through practice and experience, precisely because telling is itself a modality of performance that abhors articulation and specification.


The figure of the silent craftsman who is struck dumb when asked to tell of what he does, or how he does it, is largely a fiction sustained by those who have a vested interest in securing an academic monopoly over the spoken and written word.


Specifications provide information about the specified, about the materials to be used, about parts and their dimensions, about movements to be made. They define a project. But stories issue from moving bodies and vital materials, in the telling. They lay down an itinerary. It is precisely because both their knowledge and their practice have the same itinerant character that ,in storytelling, practitioners can bring them into correspondence with one another. 


Friday, 20 October 2023

Art Works Outpost Studio 2021 : Discursive Constructions/Speculative Practices of Knowing : Possible Worlds/Robert Lepage 2001

Art Works : Discursive Constructions/Speculative Practices of Knowing
Outpost Studio
020921


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. 
On Installation and Site Specificity (introduction) Erika Suderburg

The point is not simply to put the observer or knower back in the world (as if the world were a container and we needed merely to acknowledge our situatedness in it) but to understand and take account of the fact that we are part of the world’s differential becoming.  And  furthermore, the point is not merely  that knowledge practices have material consequences but that practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway

OUTPOST STUDIO 2021
The Potential of The Abstract Field
Robert Cooper

The Materials of Life
Tim Ingold








Possible Worlds (2001)
Reviewed by Jason Korsner
Updated 11 July 2001

The fourth film by the French Canadian theatre director Robert Lepage - his first in English - cements his reputation as a film maker with a unique vision.

"Possible Worlds" is a poetic study of the nature of human existence, wrapped up in a murder mystery.

George Barber (McCamus) is found dead with $1000 in his pocket but with his brain missing. Interspersed with the subsequent police investigation, we see moments of George's life as he struggles to make sense of the world - or worlds - he lived in. "Each one of us exists in an infinite number of possible worlds," he muses, as he keeps meeting the same woman, Joyce (Swinton), although each Joyce he meets has a different past, a different present, and a different personality.

Lepage employs exquisite visuals as he explores George's imagination and the role it played in his life, asking fundamental questions like do our thoughts exist before we think them? Or is there another me?

Tom McCamus displays just the right amount of vacant confusion, while Tilda Swinton gives a remarkable performance - or four performances - reprising the same character in different but simultaneous worlds.

The pace is slow and deliberate, but any faster and the audience would get lost. "Possible Worlds" is not easy to watch, and poses more questions than it could ever hope to answer, but this intelligent film will certainly achieve the director's goal of inspiring discussion.

The Psychoanalysis of Fire : Gaston Bachelard. 1964









Wednesday, 4 October 2023

Cyanotypes : Creative Ecologies

The sun has gone mad and stripped the earth of its ionosphere. For decades blasting radiation has poured upon earth, melting the polar caps and turning permafrost into streams, rivers, oceans. Huge deltas have been built, lakes formed, seas have risen.

The Drowned World, JG Ballard.

Blueprints : Anthropological Forms
Botanical traces with leper graves

DSC_0205 Archipelagic

DSC_0250 Architectural Blueprint

Biosphere (Ecology and Entropy) 2012.













Friday, 22 September 2023

Explorations around dwelling/site based ontologies : Site/Life-specific/animate installations.

Outpost 240123

Harleston 170923


Speculative/Creative /Geographies/around Moving Bodies of Thought.

Rethinking The Animate, re-animating thought, Tim Ingold. 


Overlay, Contemporary Art and The Art of Prehistory, Lucy R. Lippard.

Homes and Graves and Gardens. 


The Architecture Of Luis Barragan, Emilio Ambasz.

Intimately bound to Barragan's sensitivity for colour is his animistic feeling for matter. In a culture exhausted and irreparably fragmented, the walls surrounding Barragan's gardens are perhaps the last defences to preserve centuries of thought and emotion.













Explorations around dwelling/site based ontologies.


Dwelling/Person/Environment/Engagements.


The simple fluid 'flat' making ontologies of bringing/bonding clay forms together.


Worlding/Water/Performative/Intraventions.


A Practice of Transformational Modalities.



The Processual Character of Form.


Organic life, as I envisage it, is active rather than reactive, the creative unfolding of an entire field of relations within which beings emerge and take on the forms they do, each in relation to the others. Life is the very process wherein forms are generated and held in place.

Ingold.


For Ingold, there is no environment without the folding and enmeshment that is the process of life. Organisms are not folded in on themselves and surrounded by an 'environment'. Instead organisms are points of growth of environment, and whose relations are rhizoidal; and the environment is better understood as a domain of entanglement.

 


Making/Curriculum/Dwelling/Landscape/Place.


Re-imagining Education.

Brockwood Park School.


Understandings of place and agency.

Development/Growth/Knowledge/Skill.


Studies in Philosophy and Education.

Discussions around epistemology and ontology.


Improving Human-Environment Relations.


Dwelling.

Rethinking the animate, re-animating thought.

Tim Ingold.


Ingold insists on a flat,continuous and processual ontology of dwelling and becoming.




Curriculum Making as the Enactment of Dwelling in Places.

Empirical Research.

Participation.


Poetics of Space.

Reverberations/Dwelling.

Gaston Bachelard.



Why is everything we think we know about ecology wrong?


Being Ecological.

Timothy Morton.


Architecture has the capacity to be inspiring, engaging and life-enhancing. But why is it that architectural schemes which look good on the drawing board or the computer screen can be so disappointing 'in the flesh'?


The Eyes Of The Skin.

Architecture and the Senses.

Juhani Pallasmaa.


Marking The Line.

Ceramics and Architecture.


Formal/Monumental/Archetypal Vessels.

The giving jug/the receiving bowl.


The making by pressing clay into a mould and then manually hollowing and adjusting the form is clearly a sculptural one-off procedure as opposed to industrial repetition. However, the obsessive working of the surface- post-firing pigments, hand painted layers and final waxing- is reminiscent of the prototyping of industrial design and automotive design products in a mimesis of an envisaged perfected shell.

The Present in the Past, Eric Parry.


  


Site/Life-specific installations.


Building a bridge between ceramics and architecture.

Shared ground, both pursuits are primarily occupied with the use of space, scale, volume and materials.


220923

Requiem: 

Drawn to that moment.

Thoughts on disappearances opposed as assemblages/John Berger.


False Hope/Short Movie/Laura Marling.

Wonderful World/Nocturama/Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.

Atom and Cell/Snow Borne Sorrow/Nine Horses.

The Faster I Breathe The Further I Go/The Wind/P J Harvey.

Balamory Death Chant/Songs for Lonely Americans/Sir Vincent Lone.

The Temple of Love (1992)/Touched By The Hand Of Ofra Haza/The Sisters Of Mercy.

Ruins/When Shall This Bright Day Begin/Josef Van Wissem, Zola Jesus.

Fall/Some Ancient Misty Morning/Jackie Leven.






Friday, 15 September 2023

Propositions and Structures/Landing Sites/Event Markers : Experience in the making.

Outpost 190723

Ceramic Forms/Speculative Spaces.






The ambient wholeness of the world at large is impossible to take in.

Erin Manning/Arakawa and Gins.



Demarcations/Sensations in the Landscape of Perception.


The Apparent Blindness of Little Perceptions.


White Sticks and Subsidiaries.

The Meaning of the Tactile Experience.


Curriculum Making as the Enactment of Dwelling in Places.


The Environment without Objects.

Bringing Things To Life.

Creative Entanglements In A World Of Materials.

Tim Ingold.



Subsidiaries exist, as such by bearing down on the focus to which we are attending from them, and are integrated one to the other by the act of a person, and last only as long as a person, the knower, sustains this integration by indwelling (living in) them.



The proof of the existence of two kinds of awareness comes when we try to observe how we do all this. If our blind man shifts his attention from the tip of his cane to his hand, the meaning on the end of the cane disappears (or becomes something else). Deprived of the meaning of its actions, any description of the process is merely a description of the 'mechanics' and not perception at all.

Robert Irwin.



Relationscapes : Erin Manning.


For Arakawa and Gins.


Fielding Microperceptibility.


Suddenly we are no longer simply watching things moving, we are feeling movement moving. We are moving with our watching fielding the finding form of microperceptions. This finding form of microperceptibility that gives rise, to a quasi registering of an affective tonality rather than a particular emotion. 


We move-with the movement even as we are moved by it, 


The more ambiguous the surroundings, the greater number of Imaging Landing Sites. 


Imaging Landing Sites are virtual events in the making, they foreground the kinaesthetic flickering that propels the taking form of an event.


Landing Sites are event markers in and of the event fabric that is organism-person-environment.


Landing Sites corner the experience in the making.


Imaging Landing Sites give affective resonance to the relation between experience and feeling, they give force to the taking form of the experience.

Arakawa and Gins.


Hungate Glass Abstracts



Raveningham Site Drawing on Architectural Paper.

White Sticks/Visual Feeling/Drawing on Blindness/Feeling through Subsidiaries.

Feeling Drawing/Drawing with Trace and Inscription.



Breathing/Perceiving in the landscape through the phenomenal sensations of subsidiaries/white sticks integrating an awareness of both an indwelling (living in) and a visual demarcation of that movement of gathering sensations.   



Drawing into the phenomenal by using media/tools and sensations/experiences through the site of the situated body of the knower.



Personal Knowledge, Michael Polanyi.


The semantic aspect of this transformation is that the information the man gets by feeling with the cane is the meaning of the tactile experience.



Picture a blind man probing his way with a cane. While he is alert to the feelings in the hand holding the cane, the crucial distinction may be defined by saying that these feelings are not watched in themselves, but he watches something else by way of them, that is by keeping  aware of them.



He has a subsidiary awareness of the feelings in his hand, feelings which are merged into focal awareness at the end of the cane, constituting two kinds of awareness that are mutually exclusive-'from awareness' and 'focal awareness.' There is here a particularly interesting phenomenal transformation. The sensations of the cane on his hand (the surface of the cane as it touches the palm of his hand, etc.) are lost. Instead, he feels the end of the cane as it touches an object.




Being and Circumstance.

Notes Towards a Conditional Art.

Robert Irwin.



All perceptual knowing is knowing in action (change) and the equivalent of the phenomenal.


Change is the most basic condition (physic) of our universe. In its dynamic, change (alongside time and space) constitutes a given in all things, and is indeed what we are talking about when we are talking about when we speak of the phenomenal in perception. Most critically, change  is the key physical and physiological factor in our being able to perceive at all.



For Irwin, our perceptual process is a kind of 'perpetual motion' assimilator. No change, no perceptual consciousness. So while it is perfectly understandable that the overwhelming majority of our conceptual energies are spent on organizing this myriad of perceptual data into some 'familiar picture' we can work and live with, what is not so understandable is how much of those intellectual energies have been spent on trying to avoid this fact and its effects on our lives. 





LEARNING TO LEARN



On Learning

Brockwood Park School.

J. Krishnamurti.



MAKING : Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture.

Towards an Ecology of Materials.

Knowing is Movement/Knowing from the inside.

Tim Ingold.



Transvaluation Symposium 2015.

Performative Intraventions and Matters of Care.


Choreographing Values.


Thinking Things-in-Phenomena.

Diffractive Readings.

Karen Barad.



Oren Lieberman and Alberto Altes.

LiAi : Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention.


The shift we propose in architectural practices and pedagogies- towards a privileging of processes and modalities of responsible making and learning- starts with an active stance that focuses on the transformational nature of interventions performed in real times and places. 


Through the performative, we shift our attention from what a thing looks like to what a thing does, and from objects and artefacts to 'movements' as well as to the effects of our practices and actions in life. This transformational 'mode' echoes the proposed category of worlding- with its accompanying history of 'indefinition' and 'indetermination' as well as its clear co-responsive engagement in the making of the world-and locates us in the realm of 'situatedness', or inside phenomena.


We are within, and active parts of, specific situations that we encounter in relationship to a series of concerns, things that really matter and have to do with the ongoing becoming of the world. Becoming inside these situations requires a certain fidelity, a certain willingness to stay and to endure; a caring in duration. In this duration it is both possible and necessary to develop situated knowledges, which emerge as 'ways-of-doing-and-making' from our engagement in worlding practices, practices which are also, for that reason, learning experiences.



Thursday, 14 September 2023

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry

Tentative Building Profiles : Speculative landing sites of surface, image and texts.

Procedural Architecture


Start by thinking of architecture as a tentative constructing toward a holding in place. Architecture's holding in place occurs within and as part of a prevailing atmospheric condition that others routinely call biosphere but which we, feeling the need to stress its dynamic nature, have renamed bioscleave.

Architectural Body

Madeline Gins and Arakawa


Working Notes/Holding in Place





Wayfinding/Movements through accumulated research

Running scripts, enactments, instances, involvements

Collaborative texts, complexity, emergent, discursive 

From The Bookcase to The Field Table : Landing Sites of Inquiry


Camouflage

Neil Leach

For Benjamin, the twentieth century is an age of alienation. Human beings are no longer 'cocooned' within their dwelling spaces. Architectural spaces are no longer reflections of the human spirit. Something has been lost.

Mimesis, 19.


New Concepts of Architecture

Existence, Space and Architecture

Christian Norberg-Schulz

A child 'concretizes' its existential space.


A Philosophy of Emptiness

Gay Watson

Artistic Emptiness

Everything flows, nothing remains.

Heraclitus


Rethinking Architecture

Neil Leach

Figure 1, Sketch by Jacques Derrida for Choral Work project. 343

Foucault, Figure 2 Bentham's Panopticon (1791). 360

Page laid in, The Atrocity Exhibition by J. G. Ballard, new revised edition,annotations, commentary, illustrations and photos.


Tracing Eisaenman

Plenum, juxtaposed to form/haptic values/body absences

Robert Mangold

Between moments of 'meaning' lie spaces or blanks of immediate experience. Such blanks are actuality. Usually the blank, the actuality, goes unnoticed because it works so efficiently to differentiate one meaningful event from another. Kubler discussed this in The Shape of Time.


Interactions of the Abstract Body

Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson/Heuristic Device

The term 'heuristic' is understood here to denote a method of addressing and solving problems that draws not on logic but on experience, learning and testing. In this regard stories and fictional narratives can be heuristic devices in acting as ideal models that are not to be emulated but which help to situate characters, actions and objects.


Space Between People

Degrees of virtualization

Mario Gerosa


Adaptive Architectural Design

Device-Apparatus

Place

Function

Adaptation

The second phase of project activity acknowledges that the proposal involves two sites; the landscape of settlement and the artifice of the factory. The design is intended to be a reflection of the conditions of each, so there was a need to work directly with the manufacturing process, at full scale, as early as possible. This would provide an immediate counterpoint to the earlier representations and a necessary part of exploring the manufacturing medium in the context of architectural design. 69


Building The Drawing

The Illegal Architect

Immaterial Architecture

Mark Cousins suggests that the discipline of architecture is weak because it involves not just objects but relations between subjects and objects. And if the discipline of architecture is weak, then so, too, is the practice of architects. Architecture must be immaterial and spatially porous, as well as solid and stable where necessary, and so should be the practice of architects.

Jonathan Hill

Index of immaterial architectures


Herzog and De Meuron

Natural History

Exhibiting Herzog and De Meuron

We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectonic work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be conveying false information regarding our architecture. People imagine that they can follow the process, from the sketch to the final, photographed work, but in reality nothing has really been understood, all that has happened is that records of an architectural reality have been added together.


My studio is a piece of architecture that is silent. The things of which it is made say all and at the same time nothing. Its strength lies in its demanding silence. A stern silence in order to permit works to occur. I imagine that a painting by Newman could be hung there.


The arrival of Beuys in a world that was gradually falling asleep amidst minimalism generated a kind of confusion that was truly excellent for opening up the mind. Comfort vanished, driven away by subversive complexity.


Speculative architecture

On the aesthetics of Herzog and De Meuron


Without opposition nothing is revealed,

no image appears in a clear mirror

if one side is not darkened

Jacob Bohme, De tribus principii (1619)


Reflections on a photographic medium

Memorial to the Unknown Photographer

Thomas Ruff's Newspaper Photos

Valeria Liebermann


Working Collages

Karl Blossfeldt


Anti Object

We are composed of matter and live in the midst of matter. Our objective should not be to renounce matter, but to search for a form of matter other than objects. What that form is called architecture, gardens, technology is not important. 

Kengo Kuma



Corporeal Phantoms/Attendants/Skins : Alternatives/Others in Photography/Phantasy Surfaces

Landscapes : entering/intruding/emerging (holga819)

Working Title : Montage Samples
Historical Presence #4

Helena Eflerova, 18 minute rehearsal ,GASP 2009

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

Do you live as Humans in the Holocene or as Earthbound in the Anthropocene? (50.37)

Dr. Bruno Latour on climate change and the "Anthropocene": Wall Exchange, Fall 2013

Camera Obscura : Physical Touch #2

Photograph (240) drawing

Sequential Photograph : Performing Photography/The Inseparable Attendant


















Sunday, 10 September 2023

Molecular Sieve/Performative Apparatuses : CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES/10 DAYS WINCHESTER

Winchester - Hyde Abbey Laundry

The site of approximately 1,500 sq. metres comprises redundant industrial buildings and a yard at the edge of the city centre and close to the Winchester School of Art. The site is considered to be important in townscape terms and being vacant is an underused resource. The Laundry ceased trading in 2007 and has been empty since. It is a short walk from the city centre, near car parks, leisure centre, Winchester School of Art, the Colour Factory artists’ co-operative, but in an otherwise residential neighbourhood. The site consists of a large industrial space with high ceilings, a series of different sized workshops around this main zone, and on its upper floors, office accommodation, staff canteen and a workshop. The private owner and his developer wish to demolish the old buildings and develop the site for housing; however, WCC planning officers wish to see the site or part of the site, retained as offering employment within the city.

Urban Fallow could encourage the owner to consider live-work units and studios for artists to be constructed on the site and demonstrate that there is demand for this type of activity. The Council’s Estates, Arts Development and Economic Development staff have for some years, been looking for potential sites and business models to establish affordable studios in Winchester. While demand is known, the value of assisting in the establishment of such a scheme is unproven. Urban Fallow has the potential to provide further evidence and advocacy for a permanent studio facility on this site. Winchester City Council would want to work with Winchester School of Art (arts faculty of Southampton University) and the University of Winchester, and the Hampshire Economic Partnership as partners in this scheme.

The building in its present state, although unsuitable for most purposes, is viewed by creative practitioners from a range of practice, as having great potential as studio space (in great demand in Winchester where suitable premises are hard to find - and afford). In the current market conditions, the site is likely to remain ‘fallow’ for some time to come until these issues are resolved, and the market conditions improve.

 Urban Fallow will bring into sharp focus areas of vacant urban land resulting from the slowdown in construction and the halting of some major redevelopment and housing projects. It is important that these spaces, many of which are significant in both scale and location are not allowed to deteriorate and damage the public perception of a place. The project will reanimate these areas of land by offering them for use by artists, architects, performers and other professionals with an interest in engaging with the public to develop temporary events and interventions. As well as transforming the spaces and reducing urban blight, this project could also have the effect of reinvigorating interest and potential investment in the spaces, encouraging developers and local authorities to look at them again with renewed creativity and optimism.

Urban Fallow/Solentcentre for architecture and design aims to develop a pragmatic but fluid approach to public access, cultural intervention, use and temporary transformation of urban spaces.


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


CREATING CREATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY INTO TEMPORAL SITES






between the concrete and the spatial

THE WORKING PRACTICE IS FUNDAMENTALLY SUPPORTED BY ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTIONS AROUND ISSUES OF SPACES, ORIGINS, SOCIAL RITUALS AND TABOOS





CAPTURED BY APPARATUSES  
Heuristic Practices : The trace/space of the anthropological

Utilising processes and strategies and terminologies. 

Demarcation, set the boundaries or limits.

Acculturate, assimilate to a different culture.

Ethnology, the study of the characteristics of different peoples and the differences and relationships between them.

NON- SPACES, Introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. Marc Auge.

My working practice intuitively reflects and responds to what Marc Auge considers to be the condition of Supermodemity, briefly his defining parameters on the idea of Supermodemity are.

Overabundance of events. 

Spatial overabundance.

The individualization of references. 

A SOCIETY IN EXCESS.

My creative practice attempts to reconstitute spaces from this condition of Supermodemity into temporal sites, places from which to solicit a sense of a mobile anthropology, a dwelling that is both intimate and public and promotes solitudes and subjectivity.

Marc Auge states the twenty-first century will be anthropological, not because the three figures of excess are just the current form of a perennial raw material which is the very ore of anthropology, but also because in situations of supermodemitiy the components pile up without destroying one another.1

Contemporary Practitioners like anthropologists will attempt to make sense, they will attempt to resolve, to make or rather remake meaning through the processes of observing the phenomena of acculturation. My practice has now entered into a process that proposes a site for research driven by condition of acculturation. This site of inquiry will attempt to set up an anthropological place of localised relations amidst the condition of Supermodemity.

This proposed temporal demarcation, a marking out of a territory which will become adaptive, reflexive and spatial. Sets out to engender the inquiry of the ethnologist, to attempt of rather to reflect on how the place is organised. This site marks a private acculturation of material sourced from the world, from a hermetic and esoteric realm of private geographies, now processed and made available, accessible to the social.

The observer in the role of the ethnologist with others is invited to formulate their own invention of place through their own curiosity of encounter. This demarcation of space into the social, anticipates an intervention which creates a common adventure for a group in movement.

An interesting comment about gendered space in classical literature examines the relationship between what might theoretically and spatially link the interior with its exterior boundary is to found Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs written by Jean-Pierre Vemant. In this account Vemant describes the spatial and social arrangements of the Hestia/Hermes couple. Marc Auge acknowledges this relation as

“Hestia symbolizes the circular hearth placed in the centre of the house, the closed space of the group withdrawn into itself (and thus in a sense of its relations with itself);

while Hermes, god of the threshold and the door, but also of crossroads and town gates, represents movement and relations with others.”2

Auge makes the critical point that in anthropology studied by both classic literature and history it is identity and relations that form spatial arrangements which are also inscribed in time. It is this time that materially renders the temporal dimension of these spaces and with it our reading of anthropology.

My earlier usage of long durational photographic devices (large pinhole cameras) was an attempt to realise the identity and relation of a place (its spatial activity and fixity) is totally contingent to its method of register and the particularities of fixed and temporal details. In fact these surfaces rendered from these devices are evidences of historical spaces of hidden social itineraries.

1  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of super modernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page 41.

2  Marc Auge, Non-Places, introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. (London: Verso, 1992) page58.

Fragment, research/Mechanisms of Seeing/The Architecture of Image

Architectural Apparatuses of Affect : Daniel Libeskind/Small Voids/Cameras

light; the darkness is a silent solid, the light etches its surface, it is simultaneously sign and cypher. The light etching itself on the dark surface is akin to a revelation, an epiphany before the building is transformed by its users and movement.

Daniel Libeskind’s building will, when finished, offer a path for the visitor, the path of history that crosses the void of commemoration. This void is the body of an absence—that of the Berlin Jews who perished in the Holocaust. The void makes us meet this absence, but we meet it by passing through it. When an absence, in the form of a void, meets the surface of daily reality, memory marks that surface. The Holocaust has created such a void, which, in projects such as the Berlin Museum with the Jewish Museum, is brought to the surface and given a place and a house. The void intersects the surface of time and creates a place of passage, of commemoration, of ritual in our daily life. The void is linear sign: lest we forget. But the incisions in the walls of the main exhibition spaces, spaces which house the historical material about the city of Berlin, create voids through which light is let in. These calligraphic empty spaces create a near biblical writing on the wall.

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.


Russell Moreton, 10 Days in the Laundry






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.

 


Time as it accumulates on a photographic surface.

This performative investigation utilizes a large pinhole chamber which is given mobility via a sack-barrow. This apparatus produces through its very inclusion into spaces a “spatial practitioner” in its own right. My aim is to utilize this device as a means of registering “worksites” both in the duration of the event and in its pre-performative state. The mobility of this research could be used to illustrate a constantly changing set of dynamics throughout the site and its event. The use of perhaps adjacent wall spaces or even a

“sandwich board” would render a tangible re-presentation of spatial information for the visitor. Darkroom facilities or conversely off-site arrangements would be organised.






Artist Statement 2009/10 Days

SITE is anti-place hovering precariously over the abyss of no-place.1

This “undoing of place” might instigate a threshold and a situation/room from which to reflect upon critical spatial, sociological and psychological conditions and perceptions.

Practitioner with earlier experience in ceramics and glass, recently completed visual arts course at Winchester, now at Canterbury studying spatial practices. Interested in drawing, photography and interventions that can explore our sense and experience of place. My work seems to harbour a need for a reflective solitude, a sense of dwelling amongst absences. The use of materials from the locality (field chalk) imply a personal geography drawn from the direct relationship to an inherited Earth. There is the suggestion that the absence recorded by the trace is an inclusion, a legacy set into a field of materiality, but it might also suggest a metaphysical field of thought. This act of drawing becomes its own experimental field of exploration, a sort of “in­ between reality"( Merleau-Ponty) an enmeshed experience. Perhaps all that remains is some sense of a material memory encountering the realm of the insubstantial.

Interested in collaborative projects and ventures that might facilitate issues of “site” as being the very undoing of place. Site for me is part of the rehearsal for the construction of place, site holds relations and intimacies/geographies that will be over-written by methodologies destined to be terminated to create place.




What is an Apparatus? Giorgio Agamben
by the term “apparatus” I mean a kind of a forma­tion, so to speak, that at a given historical moment has as its major function the response to an urgency. The appa­ratus therefore has a dominant strategic function.
I said that the nature of an apparatus is essentially strategic, which means that we are speaking about a certain manipulation of relations of forces, of a rational and concrete intervention in the relations of forces, either so as to develop them in a particular direction, or to block them, to stabilize them, and to utilize them. The apparatus is thus always inscribed into a play of power, but it is also always linked to certain limits of knowledge that arise from it and, to an equal degree, condition it. The apparatus is precisely this: a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.
I wish to propose to you nothing less than a gen­ eral and massive partitioning of beings into two large groups or classes: on the one hand, living beings (or substances), and on the other, apparatuses in which living beings are incessantly captured. On one side, then, to return to the terminology of the theologians, lies the ontology of creatures, and on the other side, the oikonomia of apparatuses that seek to govern and guide them toward the good.