#instead of there being 2 dimensions of understanding (in-text and greater world context) we now have a 3rd dimension (text-to-“text”)

[tyranasaurusbec]

you know what i have additional thoughts

maybe i am also too quick to blanket-ly defend the adaptation. if we want to truly engage with uglies as a whole work now we probably do need to pick at the differences. why were those changes made? what are their ramifications? (both for the plot and the greater themes) - i'll probably need to do a re-read to actually get at that but like maybe that's worth it

i think people are too quick to give hate to the uglies movie for not being 100% perfectly accurate to the book

like scott westerfeld was heavily involved in the project so like maybe those changes are him choosing to make changes to change things in the originals he isn't happy with anymore

i'll admit, i don't remember all of the plot of the books anymore because i haven't reread them since being a teen. there are definitely changes big and small. but i think people are getting caught up in small changes and letting that ruin their experience with the movie. put a little trust in the production and let's hope we get the rest of the series to see if these changes are good or not (since some of these changes will directly affect the plot of pretties)

[brookespatial400]

Start of draft

“The concept of atmosphere is interesting because it holds a series of opposites – presence and absence, materiality and ideality, definite and indefinite, singularity and generality – in a relation of tension” (Anderson, 2009).

Atmosphere 

Atmospheres are always being created and broken, as bodies explore environments they are never complete, stagnant or at peace. Atmosphere helps create certain meaning to aesthetic objects. Atmosphere of objects evoke feelings or emotions in the observer or listener. “The singular affective quality of an aesthetic object is ‘open’ to being ‘apprehended’ through feelings or emotions”. Katherine Mansfield House and Garden is full of aesthetic objects of significant value for us to interpret how she and her family lived in the victorian/edwardian era. This, creating a wide area for me to explore the idea of peoples feelings and emotions within the house as it did once exist with a family inhabiting it, but now it does not. It is subject of someones life, and it is now being explored with viewers to take their own interpretation of the living environment (Anderson, 2009).

“Atmosphere is an interesting concept, then, because it unsettles the distinction between affect and emotion that has emerged in recent work on emotion, space and society as one answer to the question of how the social relates to the affective and emotive dimensions of life” (Anderson, 2009).

“Affect with the impersonal and objective. Emotion with the personal and subjective” (Anderson, 2009).

Affect

The relationship between physical things determines a persons emotions and feelings strengthening our senses that spaces are accordingly designed for their purposes (Anderson, 2009). Being able to analyse design through the idea of affect opens up a new way of understanding the design process as spatial-temporal, experiential conditions moved by relationships, instead of being restricted to problem solving and form creations. Affect is the idea of protecting the correlation between ideas, values and objects. Interiors should be looked at as active, temporal, material processes that produce room for investigating and evolving theories of affect (Kidd & Smitheram, 2016). “These interior processes involve the relation between the emotional realm of humans to the interior’s environment; engagement with measurable and concrete materialities and phenomenology of atmospheres; static forms of interior enclosures and spatio-temporality of interior practice” (Kidd & Smitheram, 2016). The interior design process shouldn’t see affect as an obstacle, rather we should see affect as an opportunity bringing together human and non human forces (Kidd & Smitheram, 2016).

Experience 

Story telling experiences told through artefacts hold such strong connections, but how can we attain greater integration between the artefacts and the information they hold and the visitors experience? 

Katherine Mansfield House hold artefacts with strong story telling experiences and these could be strengthened through Katherine Mansfield’s short stories that are in connection with the house. Technology driven design can open up many opportunities allowing me to pass on knowledge and information from the artefacts and Katherine Mansfields stories through experience. A vital part of museum branding is to enhance identity and maintain appropriate strategies directed at highlighting the exceptional characteristics of the artefacts and the stories they hold (Falco & Vassos, 2017). For smaller museums there’s an opportunity to create live experiences with the artefacts, with the aim to attract a diverse audience. During my visit to the Katherine Mansfield House I recorded a few different sounds of the experiences I came across. I think there is a strong opportunity for theme-based storytelling to be added into the Katherine Mansfield House expanding the experience for visitors. Katherine Mansfield holds a collection of items from the victorian/edwardian era, showing how they house may have looked when Katherine and her family lived there (Falco & Vassos, 2017).

Art and architecture 

These projects have new elements inserted into existing contexts with the aim off critiquing the system of the past in the present, outlining the repressed history. Artist Sophie Calle created an installation where she positioned 30 short story texts and items that were of significance to Siggmund Freud’s own writing and belongings. The texts from Calle reveal moments of her life, including memories of her childhood and secrets regarding her adult relationships. As the onlooker makes their way through Freuds house, Calle’s biography unfolds, but in no particular order. Calle has situated the cards and objects in a way that connections can be made between the details of her life and those psychoanalytic theories of Freud’s (Rendell, 2006). Calle produces her work through her life stories creating then the artwork. The precise positioning of the objects and cards doesn’t just allow us to interpret Calle’s figure, but also allows space onto which we can view aspects of ourselves. Like the Katherine Mansfield house, the reflections aren’t far off as Freud lived in this house for the last year of his life and since it has been turned into a museum. “What interests me here in Calle’s work is the way in which the series of interlocking subjective and narrative insertions bring to the fore the museums presentation of Freud and his writing from a more personal persepctive” (Rendell, 2006).

“All our sensory systems ‘think’ in the sense of structuring our relationships with the world” (Pallasmaa, 2017). 

Embody 

Creative productions require people to concentrate both on the perspective of the world and also that of themselves, the development of knowledge from the creative piece will then advance the humans ability to imagine (Pallasmaa, 2017). 

Connections we make with the world are all produced through our senses. The body is the form of identity and self presentation, but the importance of the body is simply its physical and physiological quality. These quality are often underestimated as the foundation of embodied existence and knowledge, the complete recognition of the human condition (Pallasmaa, 2017).

“In my view, the foremost skill of the architect is, likewise, to turn the multi-dimensional essence of the design task into embodied and lived sensations and images; eventu- ally the entire personality and body of the designer becomes the site of the design task, and the task is lived rather than understood” (Pallasmaa, 2017). 

The highest architects aren’t there to create new architectural realities, they aim to reveal and express what is already existing in the space, finding the natural potentials. Katherine Mansfield is a site with a lot of potential, the historical value is a strong aspect to focus on. Expressing what is/was in the space, finding the additional natural potentials to create a space, that reflects on the Victorian/Edwardian as well as bringing in some aspects of the 21st century (Pallasmaa, 2017). The emotional and aesthetic factor within the Katherine Mansfield house, along with embodied individual recognition, is just as important in scientific creativity as it is in the creation and understanding of art. 

Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005

Falco, F. D., & Vassos, S. (2017). Museum Experience Design: A Modern Storytelling Methodology. The Design Journal, 20(sup1), S3975–S3983. https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352900

Kidd, A., & Smitheram, J. (2016). Kerstin Thompson Architects: Exploring affect in interior’s sticky design process. Interiors, 7(2–3), 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/20419112.2016.1191147

Pallasmaa, J. (2017). Embodied and Existential Wisdom in Architecture: The Thinking Hand. Body & Society, 23(1), 96–111. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X16681443

Rendell, J. (2006). Art and architecture: A place between (Wellington 720.1 Ren). I. B. Tauris.