Start semester
40 628 Body and Space Morphologies : Catharsis VII - Acting and the Collective VII
Emnenavn på Norwegian Bokmål:
Body and Space Morphologies : Catharsis VII - Acting and the Collective VII
Credits:
24
Course code:
40 628
Level of study:
Master
Teaching semester:
2019 Spring
Assessment semester:
2019 Spring
Language of instruction:
Norwegian / English
Year:
2019
Maximum number of students:
15
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.
Course content
Body and Space Morphologies is a research based teaching program that offers master studios (Catharsis, 24ect) and elective courses (Architecture & Film, 6ect) in explorative architectural design, sensing and thinking. We aim at, prepare for and enable students to conduct their own architectural investigation as an artistic parallel to scholarly research.
Based on performativity theories, performance studies, 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 architecture”. Lectures critically reflect theories and research related to perception, behavior, performativity and performance in architecture.
Collaborations:
- Julie Dind, performer/artist/scholar, Performance and Performance Studies, Brown University, Providence/USA
- Jan Gunar Skjeldsøy & Anders Eik Pilskog, architects, Stiv Kuling AS, Farsund/Norway
- James Carpenter, architect/light sculptor, James carpenter Design Associates Inc., New York/USA
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 (Object Relations)
- Study trip to Japan 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 VII – Acting and the Collective VII
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, travellers, 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.
Body and Space Morphology - a syllabus
Body and space morphology is about the relationship between body and space.
How it manifests itself to be human in a room; outdoors, indoor, outside and inside, and within the manmade room. Alone or together, as one amongst the thousand, or as the thousand above the one.
Body and space morphology is about your body and the room you have within.
How it manifests itself to be human in architecture; what it inspires us to, and what it inspires as an architecture, towards an architecture. Seeing the offer that lies in architecture, the perversion of it, the infrastructure, the poesy, the container, the gate, darkness or light from darkness.
Body and space morphology is about meeting the wall.
How it manifests itself being human between the walls; knowing or not knowing the self, loneliness, longings and all that is imaginable. Seeing change, insights and outlooks, transparency and visibility, hideouts in an omnipresence of the stage. Seeing light come and go, seeing chairs and mirrors shrink and grow. Seeing how all things inhabit and capture the room. Beining between and at the walls. Looking at how they swallow and devour the things. Seeing how the walls become.
Body and space morphology is about the problem of body.
How it manifests itself to face the unknown; what presents itself as new or what just became in front of you. That which yet not has a name, although it shows itself, can be touched, heard, smelled and felt. That which stands sound and nevertheless can leave, that which can or cannot be moved; moves us.
Body and space morphology is about the distance in space.
How it manifests itself to stand still; moving just a little, approaching things nevertheless, every thing, to jump, penetrate, going into things, turning around, looking up and down, taking on the things, looking back and keep moving on.
Body and space morphology is about what we do not know and approach anyway.
Without a map there are only lines and without a compass directions just get more, then the word world is exploded before recognition has become, and it is resemblance and closeness that which implodes us astray. This you might endure and as you wish.
Body and space morphology is about “to act necessities”;
wanton and radically so, using your hands, using the other, using your head but not meaning a thing, acting abstract, acting the figure, autonomous it is and dirty it will get, serious too; ridiculous and radically so.
Recommended Literature
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
Barthes, R. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
Barthes, R. Empire of signs
Barthes, R, & Heath, S. Image, music, text
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 Berger, John. About Looking
Berger, J. Why Look at Animals?
Berger, J; with Dibb, M., Blomberg, S., Fox, C. & Hollis, R. Ways of Seeing
Borges, J. L. Labyrinths
Calvino, I. Invisible cities
Deleuze, G. Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation
Deligny, F. The Arachnean and other texts
Descola ,P. Beyond Nature and Culture
Descola, P. The Ecology of Others
Derrida, J. The truth in painting
De Toledo, S. A. Cartes et lignes d’erre / Maps and wander lines: Traces du réseau de Fernand Deligny
Druot, F., Lacaton, A. & Vassal, J-P. Plus
Ellis, B. E. American Psycho: A novel
Fehn, S. The poetry of the straight line_Den rette linjes poesi
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
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
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
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
Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of PerceptionM umford, Lewis. The transformations of man
Kolhaas, R. & Obrist, H. U. Project Japan: Metabolism Talks
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
Skinner, B. F. Walden Two
Sontag, S. Regarding the Pain of Others
Sontag, S. On Photography
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
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
Woolf, V. Kew Gardens
| Form of assessment | Grouping | Grading scale | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portfolio assessment (Vurderingsmappe) | Individual | Pass / fail | Attendance & participation – individual studio work: 20 weeks fulltime study. The work has to be conducted and performed in the studio - the working material is present at any time. Presence & participation - collective studio discussion: Weekly talks, lectures and studio discussions. Frequent work reviews. Workshop and fieldtrip. 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 - 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. |
| Workshops | Lista field-trip and workshop w/ James Carpenter (New York) and Stiv Kuling (Farsund) |
| Excursion | Study trip to Japan |