Erin Manning for Brian Massumi : Sylvian & Fripp - Every colour you are (live '93)

Relationscapes

Erin Manning

Movement/Art/Philosophy

For Brian Massumi

The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.

Camouflage/Concept and Design : Re-Working Aesthetics/The Everyday

Everyday Aesthetics : Ordinary Lives

If the everyday can be considered an ecology where passions circulate in a perpetual state of intensification and entropic decline, the empirical self (and not just David Hume's version of it) is essentially in a state of flux. This posits the human as an organism constantly adjusting to its passionate environment, with a self that is constantly appearing and disappearing, crystallising and dissolving.

Ben Highmore

Camouflage : Neil Leach

Camouflage offers  a mechanism of locating the self against the otherwise homogenising placelessness of contemporary existence. It thereby promotes a sense of attachment and connection to place.

Camouflage may  therefore provide a sense of belonging in a society where the hegemony of traditional structures of belonging - the family, church and so on - has begun to break down. This aesthetic sense of belonging can be compared to other modes of belonging, such as religious devotion or romantic attachment.

In highlighting the creative capacity of human beings to adapt to their environment, this book offers a more optimistic account of human existence, which valorizes the present as the site of productive endeavor.

Here we might cite the work of more positive thinkers, such as Fredric Jameson who looks to the realm of representation for a mechanism of reinserting the individual within society. Jameson has  developed a notion of  ‘cognitive mapping', which serves  to overcome the lack of spatial co-ordinates within a society of late capitalism. He sees the potential of such mapping within the aesthetic  domain. What we need today, Jameson seems to be saying, is a viable form of aesthetic expression that reinserts the individual into society. The aesthetic  domain can therefore be seen to be somewhat Janus-faced. It is  both the source of many  of our problems, in a culture in which everything is co-opted into images and commodities, and potentially the way out.

Aesthetic  production should maintain the capacity  to operate as  a mediation between the self and the environment, but only aesthetic production whose design has been carefully  controlled can achieve this. The difference between productive and unproductive modes of expression is therefore a question of design. In this respect we can recognise the important social role of design in providing a form of connectivity for ‘cognitively  mapping an individual within the environment. 

Design becomes  a crucial consideration for the effective operation of camouflage.

Design plays a crucial social role in offering a form of connectivity, a mode of symbolisation, that allows  people to relate to their environment. Exquisitely designed works such as S, M, L, XL can therefore be interpreted not simply as highly aesthetic publications that could be accused of a process of ‘glossification’ — of turning the world into a designer representation of itself. 

Rather they  can be seen to be operating in the very space of contemporary culture, a space that is highly visual.

The concept of ‘Camouflage’ can therefore also respond to some of the questions that Koolhaas himself raises. In his essay on the Generic City, for example, Koolhaas offers a critique of the placelessness of the contemporary cityscape, where each city is virtually indistinguishable from the next. The theory  of camouflage, however, would seem to suggest that design itself can overcome this  condition by  providing a mechanism for relating the individual to the environment. 

Design here must be contrasted to junk. If the junk  city  has  become the placeless  generic  city, the exquisitely  designed city  can become the city  of a new form of spatial mapping. This  theory  of camouflage is therefore presented not only  as  a retroactive manifesto through which to appreciate Koolhaas’s work, but also as a contribution to the debates which he initiates.

The concept of ‘Camouflage’ will allow us, at least, to move beyond the often simplistic denigration of the aesthetic realm within recent critiques of postmodern culture, and to grasp the complexities involved in our negotiation with the world afforded through that realm. Above all, it will allow us  to recognise the important strategic  significance of aesthetics in contemporary culture in general and in Rem Koolhaas’s work in particular.

The Architectural Plan

An Anthropology of Architecture

Embodiment and Architectural Form
Process-Relational Philosophy

Building The Drawing

The drawing as analogue allows more subtle relations, of technique, material and process, to develop between drawing and building.
Immaterial Architecture
The Illegal Architect
Jonathan Hill

Oak Tree
Oil
Paper
Plaster
Rust
Sgratfito
Silence
Sound
Steel
Television
Weather

Frosted Light
Index of immaterial architectures

TRANSPARENCY : LITERAL AND PHENOMENAL
Colin Rowe, Robert Slutzky

Interactions of the Abstract Body
Josiah McElheny

Object Lesson
Interactive Abstract  Body (Square)
The Spatial Body (After Fontana)

Tracing Eisenman
Stan Allen
Indexical Characters

FABRIC=MASS+ FORM
Alan Chandler
The interest in fabric formwork is in its deployment in a building process, which is faster than conventional formwork. Fabric formwork is inherently more sustainable due to the minimising of both concrete and shuttering, and more radically, allows the constructor to intervene in the process of casting even as the cast is taking place.


ANTI OBJECT
Kengo Kuma
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.

ReThinking Matereriality
The engagement of mind with the material world
Elizabeth DeMarrais, Chris Gosden, Colin Renfrew

The Affordances of Things
Towards a  Theory of Material Engagement
Aesthetics, Intelligence and Emotions
Relationality of Mind and Matter

Material Agency
Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach
Carl Knappett, Lambros Malafouris

At The Potter's Wheel : An Argument for Material Agency
We should replace our view of cognition as residing inside the potter's head, with that of cognition enacted at the potter's wheel.

The Neglected Networks of Material Agency : Artefacts, Pictures and Texts

Material Agency as Cognitive Scaffolding

The Cognitive Life of Things
Material Engagement and the Extended Mind
Lambros Malafouris, Colin Renfrew

Minds, Things and Materiality
Michael Wheeler

Communities of Things and Objects : A Spatial Perspective
Carl Knappett

Imagining the Cognitive Life of Things
Edwin Hutchins

Things and Their Embodied Environments
Architectures for Perception
Structuring Perception through Material Artifacts
Charles Goodwin

Leach Pottery, Studio and Museum
A Potter's Book
Bernard Leach

Adventures of the Fire, Vessels Through Time
Ceramic Pavilion
People make space, and space contains people
Ceramic space and life

Gordon Baldwin
Objects For A Landscape
David Whiting
Vessels-Spaces that cannot be drawn, rather they  need to be experienced.
Imagining a Vessel in a Rock on a Beach, 2006,(charcoal on paper)

The Architecture of The Ceramic Vessel
The use of the vessel in the investigation of our world.
The exploration through the dichotomy of the analysis between exterior and interior, of one pot to another and from  the message they convey.

MATERIAL MATTERS
ARCHITECTURE
AND MATERIAL PRACTICE
Katie Lloyd Thomas

PLENUMS : RETHINKING MATTER, GEOMETRY AND SUBJECTIVITY
Peg Rawes

ARCHITECTURE
IN THE AGE  OF DIVIDED REPRESENTATION
The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production
Dalibor Vesely
The Nature of Communicative Space
Creativity in the Shadow of Modern Technology
The Rehabilitation of Fragment
Towards a Poetics of Architecture

The Projective Cast
Architecture and its Three Geometries
Robin Evans
Architects do not produce geometry, they consume it

Analysing ARCHITECTURE
Simon Unwin
Geometries of Being
Architecture as Making Frames
Space and Structure

Enchantment and Sites of Sensual Engagement : Periphery/Boundaries and their limits.

Outpost 140323

Wonders On The Periphery Of living.

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

The Wonder Of Minor Experiences.

A Brief Phenomenology of Enchantment.

Enchantment entails a state of wonder, and one of the distinctions of this state is the temporary suspension of chronological time and bodily movement. To be enchanted, then, is to participate in a momentarily immobilizing encounter; it is to be transfixed, spellbound.

Jane Bennett.

The moment of pure presence within wonder lies in the object's difference and uniqueness being so striking to the mind  that it does not remind us of anything and we find ourselves delaying its presence for a time in which the mind does not move on by association to something else.

Philip Fisher.

The dialectical principle of the intertwining of the world and the self.

My body is made of the same flesh as the world, this flesh of my body is shared by the world and the flesh of the world or my own is a texture that returns to itself and confirms to itself.

The Intertwining-The Chiasm.

The Visible and the Invisible.

Merleau-Ponty.

The Concept Of Sculpting Invisible Materials.

Intervals/Sequences/Iterations : Between Drawings/Templates/Prototypes.

The Eyes Of The Skin.

Critics of Ocularcentrism.

Juhani Pallasmaa.

Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ontology of the flesh as the ultimate conclusion of his initial phenomenology of perception. This ontology implies that meaning is both within and without, subjective and objective, spiritual and material.

Richard Kearney.

Sculptural Spacings/Bindings.

Creativity, materials/matters of concern caught around the creative act of a self amongst others.

Temporal Interrelations.

Adaptive Bridging Strategies.

Playing with materials, to bring forth the synergies of thinking/making/imagination.

Working so as to form or 'seed' gaps amongst the process of exploration.

The display of agency, of un-learning perspectives, discontents, alterity and literal landscapes.

Sites of sensual engagement through alternative forms of individual and social participation.

Energies, entropic to living things.

Natures/Intellectual Spaces.

Indexical Traces/Flows of Energy.

Artists/Makers on the process of material transformation, mobility, thought, body, through an embodied/subjective/multisensory experience. 

Raveningham, allows the thinking of the existential qualities of natures materials in an intimacy/nowness with the natural world. An enmeshed world, working on natures terms, of movement, change, life, growth, and decay.

For Olafur Eliasson, the practice sets out to examine the way an embodied sense of a place can be restructured as a function/site of a sculptural spacing that questions ideas around embodiment, perception, architectural programming. 

The landscape without objects/without hylomorphic thinking.

Tim Ingold.

The Periphery. 

Frontiers and their Disappearance.

Borders and Limits.

Wim Nijenhuis.

Individuation, the process of 'becoming something' and the 'being there' of 'something.'

Modern information theory claims that both the clay and the mould are engaged with matter and form. The clay is in a metastable state that possesses potential energy, unevenly distributed, but capable of effecting a metamorphosis. This quality of the clay is the source of its form. The mould places a limit on the expanding form of the molecular organisation of the clay as it fills the mould. The mould does not form the clay passively, but communicates a resonating action throughout the clay that alters the clay's molecular organisation.

Paul Virilio, distinguishes two orders around the frontier, that of place, characterised by a stability of form, and that of speed, characterised by the fading of form.

Primarily the city is formed and informed by heterogeneous speeds, by the difference between inertia and traffic, the form of the city is thus finally an unstable effect. The city exists through traffic in all its forms.

Keywords : Vectorisation, Distinctive Oppositions, Hylomorphic Schema, Form-Matter-Model,  Place, Speed, Inertia, Traffic, 

New Figure/Grounds.

Geometric marks, vectors across a surface that might suggest some opaque system of musical notation, of points/notes connected forming a constellation of lines and angles. Workings on and between that are synonymous with the field/environ of the canvas, in such a way as it is no longer possible to speak of the classical figure ground relationship.

The Luminescence of Space.

Towards a more delimited spatial conception, a loss of centre.

Charles Maussion.

Rethinking, gestural, expressionistic, lyrical abstractions, atmospheric figuration. 

Keywords : Colour Field Painting, Lucio Fontana, Mark Rothko, Orhon Mubin, Spatial Conception, 

Spatial Representations : Apparatus~Fictions~Readings~Embodying~Inhabiting~Folding

Reflexive Pavilion : Conversations through void~like subjectivities.

Structural Modalities/Making/Tensions : Spatial Formulations  to gather/interact with discursive research.

Drawing is a philosophical trigger/Roni Horn : Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities

Brian Massumi refers to all arts as 'occurrent' because any and every perception, artefactual or natural is just an experiential event.

It is an event both in the sense that it is happening, and in the sense that when it happens something new transpires

Semblance and Event, Activist Philosophy and the Occurrent Arts.

Brian Massumi 2011.

Drawing is a philosophical trigger.

Roni Horn.

Creating modalities with their own experiential qualities.

Outpost Studio 14/03/2022

Occurrent Assemblages : Knowledge Objects

Choreographing

Events and Demolition

Trace and Encounter

Data Captured/Visualizations

Material/Semiotic Flows/Subjectivity : Towards Disentanglement

Social behaviour is trapped in inescapable patterns of interaction coded by techno-linguistic machines, smartphones, screens of every size, and all of these sensory and emotional devices end up destroying our organism's sensibility by submitting it to the stress of competition and acceleration.

Franco "bifo" Berardi

And : Phenomenology of the End

Signs and Machines : Capitalism and The Production Of Subjectivity
Maurizio Lazzarato

Sketching out an aesthetic genealogy of capitalist globalization. Berardi shows how we have arrived at a point of such complexity in the semiotic flows of capital that we can no longer process its excessive currents of information.

Panopticons~Contested Social Structures of Surveillance

 Speculative architectural volumes and surfaces around issues of ethics and aesthetics.

Tarkovsky filming the Instant : Flux and Quality in Nature's Time

Reflective Narratives around The Instant.

Art and Aesthetic Patterns.

The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature. 

Filmic Modalities

An Ecology of Mind

We are so accustomed to thinking of aesthetic phenomena as a discursive or representational construct, that we often forget that without arousal of perception, no aesthetic experience is possible.

Going beyond what it may represent into the important psychic information it contains

Bateson credits art with playing the role of confronting the quantitative limit built into consciousnesses

Art assists mind in recognizing that the potentiality of heightened consciousnesses exist and that it resides in you and in me

Flux and Quality in Nature's Time

Perception of Environment/Relational Situations

Tim Ingold

Each thing framed dwells in the world differently.

The frame and framing, through its configuration, must never offer a gap or a bridge through which as it were, the world could get in, or from which the picture could get out.

The picture frame reminds us that the work of art, while it hangs in our room, does not disturb our day-to-day sentient and perceptual ecologies.

It is like an island in the world that waits until one approaches it and which one can as well pass by and overlook.

On The Picture Frame, Simmel

Art becomes art by virtue of literal and institutional framing

Aesthetic contemplation blurs reals and emotional space in a way that produces tangible affects in the world

The thinking hand that mediates a haptic bridge in which creating and holding, becoming and grasping are all practical everyday activities extending the thinking body

Objects that stand in two worlds at once and becoming drawn into the movement of practical life through the virtue of being held in the hand

The intermingling of persons and objects in pictorial space and the aesthetics of the intermingling of function and form in everyday things

The pictorial space is one in which persons and images intermingle and passions can be aroused. 

Art and Agency, Alfred Gell

Nature as “Comfort Zone” in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky by Donato Totaro 
 

Volume 14, Issue 12 / December 2010  18 minutes (4324 words)

In this essay Totaro analyzes the unique thematic and aesthetic import of Tarkovsky’s use of nature.

Tarkovsky relies on nature and natural phenomena to underscore and often dictate the time-pressure (rhythm) of a shot. The movement of time, its flux and quality, flows from the life-process that is recorded in the shot. Even though the fires, downpours and gusts of wind are staged, re-shot or recreated there still remains the spontaneous element of “nature’s time” within the filmic time. Each of the natural events and elements (water, wind, fire, snow) have their own sustained rhythm. Tarkovsky uses these natural rhythms to express his own, that of his characters and the temporal shape of the film (23-24).

I would like to conclude this analysis of Tarkovsky’s unique use of nature as a ‘comfort zone’ by saying a few things about his two science-fiction films, Solaris and Stalker. Solaris is based on the great same-titled science-fiction novel by Stanislaw Lem. The many philosophical and ethical differences between the novel and film can be summarized by the fact that, whereas the novel begins in space on the Solaris space station orbiting the planet Solaris, the film begins with a 45 minute prologue on earth, which establishes the importance of home, family, and ‘mother’ earth to the psychologist Kris Kelvin (and by extension all humans), who is soon to leave for outer space. The theme of the human body as landscape and the biological link between humanity and nature is established right from the opening, a (second) slow motion close-up shot of plant life swaying under a crystal clear stream that slowly pans right to reveal the hand of a man wearing brown trousers and a dark leather coat standing amidst waist high reeds.

http://offscreen.com/view/nature_as_comfort_zone




Waverley Abbey
Reflected ruins in flooded interior

Photogram formed from a design collage for The Reading Room, Waverley Abbey.

Intuition of the Instant : Gaston Bachelard

Espace-Milieu : Painting as Environment/Sensual Engagements

 Aerial/Generative Drawing.

Social Mappings. Winchester Cathedral : 

Space for Peace 2011.

Cyanotype from performative drawing.