Start semester
40 531 Body and Space Morphologies : Catharsis VIII - Acting and the Collective VIII + LISTA Field-Studio I
Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål:
Body and Space Morphologies : Catharsis VIII - Acting and the Collective VIII + LISTA Field-Studio I
Credits:
24
Course code:
40 531
Level of study:
Master
Teaching semester:
2019 Autumn
Assessment semester:
2019 Autumn
Language of instruction:
English
Year:
2019
Maximum number of students:
18
Person in charge
Rolf Gerstlauer
Required prerequisite knowledge
Admission to AHO and successful completion of three years bachelor level studies (180 ECTS), and a desire to conduct your own experimental artistic research.
NOTE:
- The elective course 40 301 Architecture & Film is mandatory for students who are planning to work for longer periods in Lista.
- Students who choose to follow the regular CATHARSIS Studio can choose between all the elective courses.
Course content
The CATHARSIS Studio
Body and Space Morphologies is a research-based teaching program that offers master studios (Catharsis, 24 ECTS) and elective courses (Architecture & Film, 6 ECTS) in explorative architectural design, sensing and thinking. We aim at preparing and enabling students to conduct their own architectural investigation understood as Research Creation – an inspired Material Practice as the artistic parallel to Scholarly Research.
Based on performativity theories, performance and performance studies, disability and neurodiversity studies as well as phenomenology and perception theories, the Catharsis studio works and investigates primal pre-architectural material/processes/phenomena/conditions and develops or performs a series of experienced distinct objects that behave relational, that inspire imagination, that provide new knowledge, architectural interests and/or architectural identities. Instead of mediating architecture through a thought process that works with abstraction, illustration and representation, and that is intentional and argumentative involving the use or development of concepts, ideas and strategies, our design process focuses on the acting, sensing and thinking with objects, and the craft of your hands in the making of them.
Students individually study the performance of and with materials of their choice. The studio emphasizes reiterated acting with a material body and gains experience and confidence in the making as a “becoming or being architecture”. Lectures critically reflect theories and research related to perception, affordance, behavior, performativity and performance in architecture.
The CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA
In collaboration with Farsund Commune (section for culture and sports), Stiv Kuling AS architects as well as private business and landowners, the Body and Space Morphologies teaching and research unit establishes for the academic year 2019/2020 the CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA.
The aim with this initiative is threefold:
a) to provide students with the possibility to spend shorter or longer periods on the LISTA peninsula in order to draw from the affordance that resides in this cultural landscape
b) through the individual works of the students to collect and show a growing body of artistic research that reflects on issues of - or that makes new subjects relative to – the Lista peninsula
c) to strengthen ongoing and/or to make new collaborations for the establishing of an International Interdisciplinary Research Creation project-proposal called The LISTA Project
The CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA is run by the architects Jan Gunnar Skjeldsøy and Anders Eik Pilskog, Stiv Kuling AS, Farsund. Their atelier will serve as common place for discussions and the supervising of those students spending longer periods in Lista.
Students interested in working for periods of their semester in Lista should contact the course leaders as soon as possible in order to accommodate for their needs such as lodging and work space. Students who are planning to work for periods in Lista must choose the mandatory elective course 40 301 Architecture & Film.
Students are not obliged to relate their semester-work to this initiative. The CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA is a supplement to the regular CATHARSIS Studio which runs as usual here at AHO. Students who choose to follow the regular CATHARSIS Studio can choose between all the elective courses.
Collaborations:
- Julie Valentine Dind, performer/artist/phd-student, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies, Brown University, Providence/USA. Dind’s scholarly papers provide the CATHARSIS studio with an updated syllabus on performance and performance studies as well as on disability and neurodiversity studies. Since its start, the CATHARSIS studio serves as laboratory in which Dind’s scholarly work is sought to be implemented into architectural education – and architecture per se.
- Jan Gunar Skjeldsøy & Anders Eik Pilskog, architects, Stiv Kuling AS, Farsund/Norway. Skjeldsøy and Pilskog, both former AHO and Studio B3 students, are long-term collaborators to the studio and since 2019 also its teaching assistants – together they sign responsible to run the CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA 2019/2020.
- Inge Eikeland, head of the section of culture and sports, Farsund Commune.
Learning outcome
You learn to develop strong initiatives for an explorative working process that acts on impulse and that creates visual/haptic experience that again stimulates towards new architectural content. As a student in the Catharsis studio you learn how to submit to performativity as the instance in which to act a real material or event. You will experience issues of optical or haptic visuality from which it is possible to construct or perform artifacts with unique architectural identities.
Knowledge of:
- phenomenology of architecture (vs. architectural phenomenology)
- performativity, performance and performance studies
- body & space morphologies
- foundational preparations for an advanced haptic visual and experimental artistic research
- the role of acting with and through a material (vs. the making of a product or proposal) in an experimental artistic research that shall lead to unique architectural content and/or identities
Skills:
- Manufacturing physical works and the craft(s) deployed in the making of these artifacts
- Narrative drawings and other works or media that bring out, construct and/or perform clear haptic visual identities
- Performativity in speech and action
- In the making and exploring of independent and new visual material
Competence:
- In acting on impulse with material, objects, environments and/or events
- In developing distinct initiatives and choosing the craft in which to act or work them
- To conceive of and present/communicate unique architectural content/research through a visual material and the phenomena or conditions experienced in it
- To present own haptic visual material together with verbal and written reflections on process and/or performance
For students in their sequel Catharsis studio:
- Knowledge of the relevance artistic research keeps to perform unique architectural content and/or identities
- Expertise in the making and exploring of independent and new visual material
- Competence to enter a discursive space in architecture on the basis of your own work and research on relational objects
Working and learning activities
- The main activity is a semester long individual artistic research work that studies the performance of and with materials or events
- Mandatory reading is handed out on the respective course days, a recommended reading list is available online
- Weekly 2-3 lectures
- Weekly table talks / supervision
- Weekly summing up w/ student driven content
- Fieldtrip with workshop in Lista (Landscape Affordance Object Relations)
- Study trip to Lista and Southern Norway with the focus on architectural and/or artistic necessities
- 4 public reviews
- 2 sessions with individual reviews (not public)
- Final public review with external censors
- Preparations for a final exhibition with written detailed resume
- Publication & Book Making
Curriculum
Catharsis VIII – Acting and the Collective VIII
The topic is CATHARSIS; an inspiration to “Act The Collective” or to “Act Because Of The Collective” either as the architectural “relief from strong or repressed emotions” or, as the subversive antonym to it, “causing repression and/or strong emotions”. How to free and architecturally act a desire driven emotive collective, or how to conceive architecture in response to such a collective, is the task for these semesters. Students are to develop their own personal architectural program in relation to a social construct, a built autonomous construct and a desired connection to nature/environment. The studio works on the subthemes of “expression, language and the inexpressible”.
Semester Task
Spatially to release your necessity to make something because of something. To act, react or enact the collective (a chosen group of individuals; e.g. spectators, visitors, dwellers, workers, travelers, onlookers, mourners, guests, ill, suppressed, free, animals, people etc.) through a distinct architecture / architectural awareness. To experience, reflect upon and describe the necessity/necessities made.
The Performance and Performance Studies Syllabus by Dind is handed out / made available on the moodle-plattform at semester-start
Recommended Literature (not mandatory)
Abraham, A. A new nature: 9 architectural conditions between liquid and solid Allen, S. Points and Lines
Arendt, H. The Human Condition
Arendt, H. On Violence
Artaud, A. The Theater and Its Double
Balso, J. Affirmation of Poetry
Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Barthes, R. Empire of signs
Barthes, R, & Heath, S. Image, music, text
Beaulieu, A. The status of animality in Deleuze’s thought
Beistegui, M. Aesthetics after metaphysics: From mimesis to metaphor
Benjamin, W. The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
Benjamin, W. Walter Benjamin’s archive: Images, texts and Signs
Benjamin, W. On Hashish
Bennett, S. Theatre audiences: A theory of production and reception
Berger, John. About Looking
Berger, J. Why Look at Animals?
Berger, J; with Dibb, M., Blomberg, S., Fox, C. & Hollis, R. Ways of Seeing
Beston, H. The Outermost House
Boal. A. Theatre of the Oppressed
Borges, J. L. Labyrinths
Cabañas, K. M. Off-Screen Cinema: Isidore Isou and the Lettrist Avant-Garde
Calvino, I. Invisible cities
Deleuze, G. The logic of sense
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia
Deligny, F. The Arachnean and other texts
Derrida, J. The truth in painting
Derrida, J., & Mallet, M.-L. The animal that therefore I am
Descola ,P. Beyond Nature and Culture
Descola, P. The Ecology of Others
De Toledo, S. A. Cartes et lignes d’erre / Maps and wander lines: Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny
Diamond, J. The World Until Yesterday
Dillard, A. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Dind, J. V. The Sought For Butoh Body: Tatsumi Hijikata’s Cultural Rejection and Creation
Espeland, A. Vårherres palett
Fjeld, P. O. Sverre Fehn. The thought of construction
Fjeld, P. O. Sverre Fehn. The pattern of thoughts
Flusser, V. Towards a Philosophy of Photography
Frampton, K. Labour, work and architecture: collected essays on architecture and design
Giannachi, G. & Stewart, N. Performing Nature: Explorations in Ecology and the Arts
Gissen, D. Territory: architecture beyond environment
Godard, J-L, & Ishaghpour, Y. How video made the history of cinema possible
Hays, M. K. Architecture theory since 1968
Hejduk, J. Architectures in Love. Sketchbook Notes
Hustvedt, S. The blazing world: A novel
Hustvedt, S. What I loved: A novel
Ingold, T. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture
Ingold, T. & Janowski. M. Imagining Landscapes: Past, Present and Future
Ingold, T. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill
Kahn, L. Essential texts
Kittler, F. Optical Media
Kittler, F. & others. ReMembering the Body: Body and Movement in the 20th Century
Koestler, A. The Roots Of Coincidence. An Excursion Into Parapsychology
Koestler, A. The Act of Creation, a Study of the Conscious and Unconscious in Science and Art
Koestler, A. The Ghost In The Machine: The Urge To Self-Destruction
Kolhaas, R. & Obrist, H. U. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks
Kracauer, S. Theory of Film: the Redemption of Physical Reality
Krauss, R. & Bois, Y. A. Formless – A Users guide
Kwinter, S. Architectures of time: toward a theory of the event in modernist culture
Leatherbarrow, D. Uncommon ground: architecture, technology, and topography
Lopez, B. Field Notes
Maclagan, D. Outsider art: From the margins to the marketplace
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception
Mumford, Lewis. The transformations of man
Peiry, L. Art brut: The origins of outsider art
Richter, G., & Friedel, H. Gerhard Richter: ATLAS
Scarry, E. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Serres, M. Malfeance: appropriation through pollution
Sharma D. & Tygstrup F. Structures of feeling, affectivity and the study of culture
Shryane, J. Blixa Bargeld and Einstürzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music
Skinner, B. F. Walden Two
Sontag, S. Regarding the Pain of Others
Sontag, S. On Photography
Sontag, S. Antonin Artaud: Selected
Stein, E. On the Problem of Empathy
Stein, E. Potency and Act, studies toward a philosophy of being
Stein, E. Finite and Eternal Being: an Attempt at an Ascent to the Meaning of Being
Tanizaki, J. In Praise of Shadows
Thoreau, H. D. Resistance to Civil Government, Or, Civil Disobedience, Or, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Thoreau, H. D. Walden, Or, Life in the Woods
Vesely, D. Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation. Question of Creativity ...
Viola, B. Reasons for knocking at an empty house: writings 1973- 1994
Viala, J. & Masson-Sekine, N. Butoh: Shades of Darkness
Woolf, V. Kew Gardens
Woolf, V. To the lighthouse
| Form of assessment | Grouping | Grading scale | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe) | Individual | Pass / fail | Attendance & participation – individual studio work: 20 weeks full-time study. The work has to be conducted and performed in the studio (or at LISTA) - the working material is present at any time. Presence & participation - collective studio discussion: Weekly talks, lectures and studio discussions. Frequent work reviews. Workshop. Book making. Final exhibition. Final review with invited guests-critics. Exercises (practical and theoretical), Project (individual presentation and submission) and Text/Essay as well as. Presentation/Exhibition: For each of the reviews, assignments are announced and the students hand in visual and textual works which is complementary to the actual physical work made available and presented in the reviews. The final exhibition includes visual haptic material and a final book (including an essay of ca 5-10000 words). |
| Workload activity | Comment |
|---|---|
| Attendance | Project: 20 weeks fulltime study. The individual work has to be conducted and performed in the studio (or in LISTA - see "om emne" or "course content") - the material is present at any time. Lectures & Discussion: Weekly two studio talks (lectures, screenings and/or work demonstrations etc.) and one weekly summing up (class discussion). Reviews, Exhibition & Publication: Four public mid-term work reviews (one to three days each). One individual work review / inventory. A final exhibition and making of publication (book). A final review with guest critics. |
| Excursion | Study trip to LISTA and Southern Norway. This will be a combined excursion (field-trip with workshop) for the whole CATHARSIS Studio. During regular excursion week. Those who do not have the opportunity to participate in excursion will receive a task / a project that replaces this. |
| Workshops | The CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA - optional program on individual basis Please see above under "om emnet" (norwegian page) or "course content" (english page) for a description of the optional CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA program. Important: Students interested in working for periods of their semester in Lista should contact the course leader as soon as possible in order to accommodate for their needs such as lodging, work space. Students who are planning to work for periods in Lista must choose the mandatory elective course 40 301 Architecture and Film. Students are not obliged to relate their semester-work to this initiative. The CATHARSIS Field-Studio in LISTA is a supplement to the regular CATHARSIS Studio which runs as usual here at AHO. |