ground : collect: compose

{resource/material guide}

sourced by
emma o’mara & ellie steere
intro:

Ground Collect Compose

->is not a manifesto but a way to discuss, contrast,
entangle perspectives.

->aims to set a framework for dialogue and illuminate

critical gestures [Feel free to contrast, submit or suggest
to our instigations. We hope for horizontal sharing of
experience and knowledge].

->is an experiment in process that we will investigate

through individual and collective actions.

To muse on —--> What is the larger effect of an exper-

iment in non-linear research on composing re-used and
temporary spaces?

How does embodied non-linear reseach effect the pro-

cess of composition? Does this process produce build-
ing atonomy, more complex material relationships or
spaces more sensitive to bodies, nonhumans and specif-
ic site conditions?
1 ground
Grounding architectural processes
non-linear research: research through spontaneous
interactions with space. Not planned through academic
research or virtual speculation [architectural computer
programs, online databases] Research predicated on
collectivity, accessibility and bodily connection with
space.
One form of this research: dance/the body
-> body as spontaneous mover
-> generation of knowlege through feeling, the senses
->human-scale absorbtion of tactile and textural
information
-> dance as both an explorative and generative process
“We behold, touch, listen and measure the
world with our entire bodily existence, and
the experiential world becomes organised and
articulated around the centre of the body.
Our domicile is the refuge of our body, memo-
ry and identity. We are in constant dialogue
and interaction with the environment, to the
degree that it is impossible to detach the
image of the Self from its spatial and situa-
tional existence.”
“Understanding architectural scale implies
the unconscious measuring of the object or
the building with one’s body, and of pro-
jecting one’s body scheme into the space
in question. We feel pleasure and protec-
tion when the body discovers its resonance
in space. When experiencing a structure, we
unconsciously mimic its configuration with our
bones and muscles:the pleasurably animatedflow
of a piece of music issubcnsciously trans-
formed into bodily sensations, the composi-
tion of an abstract painting is experienced
as tensions in the muscular system, and the
structures of a building are unconsciously
imitated and comprehended through the skele-
tal system.” (Pallasmaa 67)
Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa
“I am after the interpretations and dis-
placements which occur between various sense
stimuli; the interaction and exchange between
body and the environment outside it; the body
as environment...for the mind... where images
evolve...that total fabric wherein sensation
shapes image, taste, touch, tactile impulse;
various chemical changes and exchanges with-
in the body and their effect on the immediate
present, on memories, action in the present.
Vision is not a fact but an aggregate of sen-
sations.
I want evocation- SPACE ( a place ) between
desire and experience”
Uncollected Texts, Carolee Schneeman
“The movement of an oscillating “dis- and
re-orientation” organizes the structures as a
constantly reversible process... the remem-
bering of the order in the movement sequence,
the memoria of the passing of time and space
-become the generators of a vocabulary that
appears like an alternating current...it is
an effect that not infrequently awakens in the
spectator the impression that a figure or line
is growing out of the impulse of both and in-
ward and outward mobilization (46).”
Gabrielle Brandstetter, Dance theorist
“Estragon: Perhaps he could dance first and
think afterwards, if it isn’t too much to ask
him.
Vladimir: Would that be possible?
Pozzo: By all means, nothing simpler. It’s
the natural order.
Vladimir: Then let him dance.”
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
on poetic, embodied, fictional spaces:

“In the Gut people gather to enact vari-

ous guerrilla exercises which last from a
few hours to a few months. A basic gue-
rilla-life-theather which includes: living
alone, living together confined, loving, argu-
ing, how to build and choose together, how
to fulfill tasks, finding food and water etc…
Non-verbal communications will be set up
using…marks and signs made or found in the
landscape, and communication by mutual body
energy awareness” (Schneemann 76).

Uncollected Texts, Carolee Schneeman; Parts of a Body

House 1968
another tool for non-linear research:
language & poetry
-> poetry is an act of expanding the field lyrical combi-
nation, challenging the edge.
->the built environment is a physical manifestation of
our scripted imagination, we can use language to bore
outward and reinstantiate the flow of our song to the
earthly chorus.
->nonlinear verbal communication can be both gener-
ative and reflective,. a constant flow, an attempt to pull
from subconscious and undefined realms of communi-
cation
->can extend past the verbally deliniated imagination
on the limits of language, our fixed, representational
vocabulary:
“Language secretes a kind of perceptu-
al boundary that hovers, like a translucent
veil, between those who speak that language
and the sensuous train that they inhabit. as
we grow into a particular culture or lan-
guage, we implicitly begin to structure our
sensory contact with the earth around us in a
particular manner, paying attention attention
to certain phenomena while ignoring others…
according to verbal contrasts contained in
the language”(Abrams 255)
Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams
{Spell of the Sensuous is an important piece of ecological philos-
ophy that looks at the mechanism of language as both an illumi-
nating and limiting framework for spontaneous expression of the
senses and how it has delineated our relationship to the natural/
nonhuman atmosphere.}
on poetic language:
“I think poetry is what happens or is con-
veyed on the outskirts of sense, on the
outskirts of normative meaning. I’m trying
precisely to work on that edge, on that fault
line, is richer, deeper, fuller than those
things that are given in writing that passes
for direct” (Moten 104)
B Jenkins, Fred Moten
Fred Moten is an Oakland based poet who plays into
the creative empowerment of the bibliography. He
often includes a wide range of references, transparently
acknowledges and dioulouges with these voices.
We are attempting to conjure this spirit through
dynamic referencing and oscillation of voices.
“These sentences will awn the ethereal in
formations of slow, climbing subjunctives;
they will match the speed of that which has
not occurred and that which is not yet known,
and will show the stillness of that speed
These curved enclosures will thin the plain;
they will gasp where they void, will void
where they cleave
These places will gather in a succession of
hollows, just edging above the grass, in effi-
gy of the known, fraying; they will slant and
hold and fray above the void, in around the
plain.”
Poem from Plans for Sentences by Renee Gladman; #33
Renne Gladman is poet interested in architecture,
layers, memory, verbage, blurring the representation of
writing and drawing.
On air, connecting currents:

“the invisible atmosphere was thus the as-

sumed intermediary in all communication, a
zone of subtle influences crossing, mingling
and metamorphosing” (Abrams 254)

“this invisible yet palpable realm of whiff

and scent, of vegetative emanations and ani-
mal exhaliations, was also the unseen reposi-
tory of ancestral voices…a kind of collective
field of meaning from whence individual aware-
ness continually emerged and into which it
continually receded, with every inbreathe and
out breath.“ (Abrams 254)

Spell of the Sensuous, David Abrams

-> air as instigator, substance of collective memory,

interaction with landscape
Working with SCORES! As part of this process we pull
from Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s use of “scores.”

Lawrence and Anna Halprin were a landscape architec-

ture, choreographer and dancer duo big in the 50s-70s
Bay Area scene. They laid a groundwork in both per-
formed choreography and performed creation of public
space through drawing, poetry and dance.
2 collect
Our aim is to source materials locally, to reuse what can
be found
->collecting withouot consuming or extracting natural
materials
-> to develop new relationships between materials and
our bodies while being conscisous of manipulation
attempting to limit the amount of material manipulation
allows for materials to be repurposed yet again, extend-
ing the life cycle of a resource, and its flexibly function-
ality
“Like Stengers and like myself, Latour is a
thoroughgoing materialist committed to an
ecol- ogy of practices, to the mundane ar-
ticulating of assemblages through situated
work and play in the muddle of messy liv-
ing and dying. Actual players, articulating
with varied allies of all ontological sorts
(molecules, colleagues, and much more), must
compose and sustain what is and will be.
Alignment in tentacular worlding must be a
seriously tangled affair!” Harraway 42
Staying With The Trouble, Dona Haraway
On control: “The desire to document the to-
tality of the world or to create, through
sheer volume, a simulation of such a totali-
ty-the ultimate, if unattainable, goal of the
archivist/collector-masks a palpable fear of
the unknown, of the unexplored. There is a
certain satisfaction in being able to control
one’s surroundings, to organize and system-
atize the seeming chaos of the world around
us. architecture both reflects and embodies
this illusion, the stasis of its finished
product disguising the variability and dyna-
mism of its process.”
“You Are How You Collect,” Matt Roam
“Perception will no longer reside in the re-
3 compose
lation between a subject and an object, but
rather in the movement serving as the limit
of that relation, in the period associated
with the subject and object. Perception will How to organize/compose materials without the goal
confront its own limit; it will be in the of control? How to create conglomerations that both
midst of things, throughout its own proximi- relate directly to site and to the specificity of
ty, as the presence of one haecceity in an-
materials? How to negotiate structural irregularity and
other, the prehension of one by the other or
the passage from one to the other: Look only ephemerality?
at the movements.”

Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism

and Schizophrenia

On technology:

“The technological system methodically de-

stroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natu-
ral world, constructing a world fit only for
machines. The ideal for which the technolog-
ical system strives is the mechanization of
everything it encounters.”

Black Seed Journal


“In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their
place
Is an open field, or factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, older timber to
new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for
building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened
pane
And a shake the wainscot where the field-mouse
trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a
silent motto.”
Excerpt from T.S. Elliot, The Four Quartets
on building reform, challenging standard arhcitectual
practice (which often produce sterile & heterogeneous
spaces):
“Making buildings allows us to engage in a
slow, determined practice of reform, find-
ing ways to adjust and reorientate exist-
ing infrastructures, economies and technical
knowledge to produce outcomes that start to
demonstrate that different ways of creating
a maintaining the built environment are not
only necessary, but possible” (17)
Material Cultures: Material Reform
“Modern architectural theory and critique
have had a strong tendency to regard space as
an immaterial object delineated by material
surfaces, instead of understanding space in
terms of dynamic interactions and interrela-
tions” (Pallasmaa 64)
Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa
on temoporality, memory and inter-relationships:

“The appearance of temporariness is a means

of resistance to the occurrence of a solu-
tion, it pushes the predictability of a
frozen outcome away by stretching its own
weakness, therefore allowing a state of pos-
sibility to further remain open.”
“And suddenly memory reveals itself.after
the people are dead, after the things are
“The question of support is one of perfor- broken and scattered, taste and smell alone,
mance, and its territory requires a naviga- more fragile but more enduring, more unsub-
tion through what it does rather than what it stantial, more persistent, more faithful, re-
is. So that the project, the spatial project main posed a long time, like souls, remember-
is about the opening of a territory for com- ing, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all
plex and fleeting concerns to take place, like the rest, and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny
pleasure and ownership, engagement and eman- and almost impalpable drop of their essence,
cipation, social interaction and mobility. the vast structure of recollection.”
The question to ask for its assessment is not
whether or not it does perform but how, and Proust, In Search of Lost Time
how well? How sustainable and operational are
the relationships established by a project?”

Celine Condorell, Networked Cultures

LIST OF REFERENCES:

Carolee Schneeman, Uncollected Texts

Material Cultures: Material Reform
David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot
Juhani Uolevi Pallasmaa , EYES OF THE SKIN
Dona Haraway, Staying With The Trouble
Matt Roam, You Are How You Collect
Impulse Zine
Anna Halprin, Lawrence Halprin The RSVP Cycles:
Creative Processes in the Human Environment
Deleuze and Guattari A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism
and Schizophrenia
Black Seed Journal
Renee Gladman, Poem from Plans for Sentences
Fred Moten, B Jenkins
Elizabeth Ellsworth, Places of learning
T.S Eliot, The Four Quartets
Celine Condorell, Networked Cultures
Proust, In search of Lost Time