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“The two ideas behind this are to give everyone a standard of living package containing all the necessities of modern life (shelter, food, energy, television) and to do away with all the permanent structures of building, and men would not be constrained by past settlements.

the advantage of pushing present tendencies to such extremes is that the extremes indicate possibilities not otherwise exploited and present alternatives in a clear light. perhaps the furthest limit in increasing ephemerality is either religious mysticism, or a mood controlled environment which is induced entirely in the mind – through drugs, and electrodes implanted on the brain. in this situation, all artifacts would disappear entirely and the only thing left would be a contemplative trance having much the same advantage over tangible things that st. bernard pointed out over eight centuries ago.

it may be doubted whether the mood controlled environment was exactly what he was proffering, but there can be no doubt – what with the eight century trend toward a sensate culture and the present possibility of stimulating the pleasure centres of the brain – that certain groups will be tempted to construct it. what exactly it would look like is best left to the imagination.”

CHARLES JENCKS

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Script WS [FRIDAY]

Friday 01/12

Began a workshop looking at the tool of communication and text manipulation - similar to Potlatch and William Burroughs’ cut and stick and repeat philosophy - turning language into clay. We started with texts we have been looking at and that feel relevant to our thoughts and progressions. 

Critical Vehicles - Krzysztof Wodiczko

The Tao and Chinese Culture - Da Liu

T.A.Z. - Hakim Bey

Nomadology - Deleuze and Guattari

Refugees and the Meaning of Home - Helen Taylor

Dear Navigator - Hu Fang

The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard

So I flew therough these books over the course of an hour and scanned in pages I wanted to use in my manipulations. We then arrived to choose a song to initiate our communicative explorations, and from there it was a matter of scalpels and glue. 

What I arrived with in front of me was a conversation between person and space - the in looking at the out and the out looking at the in. In my head when I was formulating the character of these two vessels in communication - not necessarily directly, more indirectly - was the vision of a satellite high up in the sky with a God’s eye view of terrain and land down below, and then contrasted that with the wanderer below. The user of the arid landscape, looking for meaning and hope in the terrain it finds itself having to explore. A sole inhibitor of a destitute land and sun-kissed horizon. With no knowledge of the eye high above, meaning was being looked for on the ground in relation to the things in view. The satellite looked on from above with a steady and humming gaze, cataloguing and reviewing the changing ground it found itself grazing. What were the intentions of these two vehicles? One of metal and electric, and one of blood and spirit. 

I want to transcribe the wording I ended with, but it misses one of the most important aspects of the text I created on paper, as I wanted to inhabit the space of the paper like it was open to wandering and exploration, and so the shape of the lines and direction of the text comes into the narrative of what is being said, and as I learnt later on as we performed, how it is read and acted out in space and time.

There was no one in him; behind his face

the Japanese fighter, interminably still,

future thoughts of war

a succession of flights of 

The bird

The city is a monumental stage

t

o

p

t

o

b

o

t

t

o

m

of the suburbs to the games with time and infinity,

I incite blanks, spaces

through three years of natural disaster.

memory of the nameless world.’

“Why are you washing your ears again and again?”

So you don’t have to hear it in another place

Then you wouldn’t be forget

“I hate the idea of performing.

and expression.

There are millions on this planet today whose silence, too, is an answer.

“When I was little, we lived

h

o

r

i

z

o

n

t

a

l

I go to a new sheet of paper.

in that street, there is a house;

just a child

The scent of the neighbourhood plantings is 

dreamed

the hosue shelters day’

dreamer, the house allows

Thought and experience are not

Reflection on creation:

What I believe I created was a conversation between person and place. it was a locale, as Heidegger described it, playing out in words and space on a page. The subjective experience of space having an unknown, inner conversation with the forcefully, all-encompassing subjective eye of space itself. 

The way I read it out, jumping from one segment of locale dialogue to one segment of space dialogue aided in the creation of an atmosphere of isolation and scale I think. It forced me to steady my thought and it forfeited my ability to fall into comfort and habit when reading from a script of ordered lines and rhythmic pattern. It enabled me to perform a form of isolation and displacement, as text was displaced around the page and my ability to read from the script was displaced. This displacement then gave me power over the tex in having to search for rhythm and comfort in the lines and spaces I found my eyes inhabiting.

The decision to read from space and locale intermittently was one that came out of a brief conversation with Steve, who simply asked how I was planning on reading from the script. I hadn’t thought about the opportunity and sense in criticising how to read from the script I was creating. I was creating spaces on the page I would have to inhabit in the future, and so to make me move around and migrate around these future head-spaces, I came to the conclusion of reading from both at the same time, forcing me into a state of rootlessness amongst the page and words. I want to continue to build on this example of forced migration in the context of reading, as I feel it has great power in its delivery of a message and the ambiance it creates in the audience. 

TBC

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CHRIS MARKER

‘The art of memory’ is a very ancient discipline, fallen (that takes the cake!) into oblivion as the divorce between physiology and psychology came to pass. Certain antique authors had a more functional vision of the twists and turns of the mind, and it is Filippo Gesualdo, in his Plutosofia (1592) who proposes an image of memory in terms of ‘branching’ that is perfectly “softwary”, [softwarian?] if I dare use this adjective.

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He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty (of memory) must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it.

Cicero, De oratore [on Simionides discovery of the art of memory], quoted Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, 2

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Louis Kahn (1901–1974), Sketch for a mural, 1951 – 1953. Ink on paper, 298 × 400 mm.

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A House of Dust

A House of Dust In Michigan Using Natural Light Inhabited by Vegetarians

A House of Roots By a River Using Natural Light Inhabited by People Who Sleep Very Little

A House of Sand Among Other Houses Using Electricity Inhabited by People Who Love to Read

A House of Leaves In a Metropolis Using All Available Lighting Inhabited by All Races of Men Represented Wearing Predominantly Red Clothing

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HOUSE OF DUST - ALISON KNOWLES

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SECOND LIFE