Emergent Cartography wind-light-dampness-heat-smell-sound across Ripstop (with the participation of Hélène Bergeron and Cécile Lars), 50’ x 5’, 2020
The students were asked to feel for moments of equipoise in their co-composition with the wind. At what point in time and space (position, direction, angle, pressure) the edges or folds they were creating with their line segment seemed to come together (fall into place) in a dynamic balance.
Drawing on Emergent Cartographies
...he who desires to see, or rather to look, will lose the unity of an enclosed world to find himself in the uncomfortable opening of a universe henceforth suspended, subject to all the winds of meaning.
— (Didi-Huberman, 2005: p.140)
The role of drawing and particularly freehand drawing in architecture (education) has lost much of its bearings in the last decades. As an educator in architecture primarily interested in the teaching of drawing I have been privy to its decline, which has lead me to reflect on and explore, in the context of both my teaching and a Phd, its potential future contributions to processes and modes of perception and conception within the discipline.
Over the last years I have endeavoured to think of drawing from alternate perspectives, always one step removed from its direct correlation to building, with a shift from the conceptual to the experiential, the representational to the presentational, the recursive to the heuristic, and as a potential underlying process that could operate osmotically from the outside-in, inside-out, affecting ‘peripherally’ the nature and process of design: as a mode of topological feeling-thinking-doing that could continually germinate, modulate and dephase processes. This engendered a reconsideration of the potential implications of drawing, starting with its etymological signification following Nancy, through words such as ‘sketch’ (esquisse, entwurf): ‘a projection toward what continues to come, […] to open oneself to a form which shows itself in the movement of its emergence’ (Nancy 2013 : xiii) or ‘design’ (dessin: dess(e)in) : ‘[…] informs, deforms, and transforms a broad ensemble of forms around it, forms of objects but also forms of customs and forms of thought. Above all, it spreads imperceptibly something of its desire, of the new sensibility and sensuality for which it is the drawing/design’. (ibid.: 57) Drawing then as movement, gesture, resonance above enduring mark, dynamic formative procedure over product, force over form; a praxis of the interval, the in-between to be differentiated from between, ‘a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given […] an interstitial differentiation, a fission/fusion reaction, a winding and unwinding, inhalation and exhalation’. (Ingold 2015: 147, emphasis added) Drawing, not as mediation joining or translating distinct entities but as immediation: a coming-together into relation for the sake of ‘collective’ change and becoming; an event of co-composition that emerges as a ‘thirdness’ in excess of its constituents. (Massumi 2018) The question is how can drawing be transduced (as opposed to transposed) into architecture; how can the vital forces captured and re-activated through drawing germinate or induce potential meaningful architectural eventifications? What can drawing reveal for future architectures about lived spacetimes that other forms of exploration may not?
These questions have brought me to approach drawing as an experimental situated praxis, a practice of collective nomadic inhabitation (as opposed to habituation), for generating vital existential thresholds from the rhythms of our world. Drawing as a heuristic medium for exploring and thinking spacetimes in the making and in their ecological immediacy: for experiencing and capturing emerging relations transversally across micro and macro, molecular and cosmic, corporeal and incorporeal registers, temporally and spatially. As a means of kinaesthetically, somatically feeling-thinking possibilities from an always emergent background of changing relations, how can drawing foreground the affective, qualitative formation of spacetimes that resonates with and across the body-environment organism, the actual and virtual?
The most recent course of experimentation inserts itself where any architectural project might: in-situ, and as a quest of what I have coined ‘si(gh)tedness’: site as a point of entry into an architecting process; not a beginning nor a constriction to location but a middling and an angle: a perspective that inflects an event, a loco-motion : a movement of contraction-dilation from outside to inside. Site (in the sense of ‘landscape’) is but a co-constitutive player in the event, in a more-than-geographical relationscape, one that binds different orders of magnitude transversally across cosmic and molecular scales, past and future temporalities, actualities and virtualities in a singular intrinsic-extrinsic interrelation. It does not pre-exist the event of drawing but emerges with it, triggers the genesis of timespaces; it is a mode of individuation. A mineral-vegetal-animal-atmospheric, corporeal-incorporeal assemblage; a land-wind-light-dampness-heat-smell-sound-life and thought producing machine waiting to be captured, actualized, and to proliferate otherwise. Here, the drawing ‘surface’, as artist Sharon Jewel writes, becomes a ‘substrate across which the world variously passes and takes root’. (Jewell 2014: 2) Drawing in this sense cannot depict site, it can only perform it. Si(gh)tedness emerges, becomes with/through the gesture the affective movement of drawing, the surfacing of qualities and relations into affective tonalities; body-surrounds and drawing are simultaneously and conjointly produced, individuated together in the process.
‘Si(gh)tedness’ as a process of drawing (out) site can not rely entirely on the authorship of a single individual but must emerge collectively from chance operations and tangential tendencies, generative vectors of deferral in excess of intentionality, and may be understood and rendered productive through the concept of the diagram[1]. Following Deleuze, the diagram makes felt the intensive quality of forces in the transduction of possibility of fact into fact[2], from chaos to determinability. It is what enables confused, indiscernible sensations and insi(gh)t(e)s to become clear and durable while infusing a sensibility into the geometry of site. Apropos Francis Bacon, Deleuze speaks of a ‘third eye’ that immediates the optical and the tactile: it concerns neither the one nor the other alone, nor their combination but something that emerges across and in excess of both that he calls the ‘haptic’: feeling the qualitative force of sight, a ‘touching with the eyes’ that is distinct from sight, perhaps nearer to the proprioceptive and kinaesthetic. (Deleuze 2003) By collapsing visual coordinates the diagram dismantles the optical world and tactile relations, creates a clean slate, only to modulate them through the rhythmic contraction-dilation power of the haptic and to reintroduce them differently, intensified, into the optical whole. It operates as a ‘scrambling’ relay from which something new can emerge. This is the meaning ‘sight’ takes on in ‘si(gh)tedness’ and the diagrammatic immediating force in the encounter of sight (haptic) and site (relationscape) is what si(gh)tedness activates in drawing.
Lines are freed from fixity, geometry, representation and signification so as to yield to the power of sensation and its resonances. In Deleuze’s words, the ‘diagram is the operative set of asignifying and non-representative lines and zones […] its operation is to be suggestive […] to introduce possibilities of fact’. (Ibid.: 82, added emphasis) The diagram is a ‘catastrophe’, an indiscernible zone of chaos, but is also a germination of order that opens up to sensation. Diagramming thus, is a procedure of abstraction, a ‘technique for extracting the qualitative-relational arc’ of one experience and carrying its potential across processes of composition; it attunes to the genesis of events. It is with the diagram that a cartographing of relations of forces, of elements of chance, a selection and redistribution of ‘givens’ and conditions may be practiced and experimented.
To bring drawing into site in this manner required other than marking space, ‘measuring’ it with the body or depicting it with a pencil. It called for a means of capturing the ephemerality of forces in interaction from a subjectless standpoint where the human (body) is but one contributing element in the process among others and it is their collective co-emergence, co-composition that becomes ‘visible’. What was sought for was a medium that could operate in the interstice, at the limit of their shared encounter to ride the topological surface of their changing relationscapes and simultaneously present it, draw it out. This implied thinking drawing differently, scrambling the relation of mark-support-‘object’ and bringing the support directly into space as mark(er)/line, wall/support and object conjointly. And this is the role that the Ripstop[3] lineaments came to play in the experimentation[4] of si(gh)tedness. Linear strips tactically hung or strung across sites in tentative relationscapes ostensibly[5] disrupting familiar apprehension and habitual modes of navigation across space while foregrounding sensation and dispersing or sculpting sited awareness; modular, mouldable filaments weaving the site’s occurrences across several scales of action in a choreography of body-surrounds. The force of winds: speed, acceleration-deceleration, and intensities modulated into flows and rhythms by their assemblages with surrounding architectural bodies as the germinal activator of topological variations captured by the membranes is expressed through their encounter with light. Or perhaps it is the light vibrating and reflecting in contraction-dilation, cold-heat, dampness-dryness that captures the winds and the winds, the membranes. Regardless, the molecular weave of membranes and the molar lines of architecture interpenetrating across urban interstices, traversed by the cosmic forces of the site and transformed into a cartography of lines/planes of always varying fluctuations and intensities are drawn out by the play of light.
With the participation of vibrant (student) bodies lured by the coming-into-eventfulness of the field of relations the event-fabric thickened. Navigating through the ‘drawing-in-the-making’ as a means of discovering from within how surfaces/lines in co-composition with various qualitative forces, at the limit of their shared encounters became topological, and begin to trigger potential for experiencing, moving and drawing differently through and with the site. It is both a way of experiencing and exploring drawing’s generative potential as a force for thinking-feeling the temporality of spatial relations and passages and for ‘framing’ spacetimes from the ‘associated milieu’ of a nomadic architecting event.
Perhaps one could say this experimentation is more a means of thinking drawing differently than a practice of drawing as we might expect it but it nonetheless suggests how opening up ‘drawing’ might foster ways to design-ate form and thought nonconceptually in the sense that it present, monstrate and ostentate, in this context ‘si(gh)teability’ as a formative, re-formative, trans-formative, de-formative force of form or thought: a way of seeing-sensing potentiality emerge as a property of the ‘co-gesture’ of drawing. Drawing may tempora(ri)lly with-draw from ‘form’ in its formative movement but only to capture its generative, transformational vital forces and to activate them in various manners of expressibility, which may constitute one of the primary potentials of a drawing practice for the future.
References:
Deleuze, Gilles. 2002. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published in 1981)
Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2005. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. J Goodman. Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. (Original work published in 1990)
Ingold, Tim. 2015. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge.
Jewell, Sharon. 2014. ‘Contracted Site: Artist on Paper, Drawing’ in TRACEY: Drawing and Visualisation Research Journal. www.lboro.ac.uk/microsites/sota/tracey/journal/insit/2014/jewell.html (Accessed September, 2020).
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013. The Pleasure of Drawing, trans. P. Armstrong. New York: Fordham University Press. (Original work published in 2009)
Massumi, Brian. 2019. ‘Immediation Unlimited’ in Immediation II. E. Manning, A. Munster, B. M. Stavning Thomsen, (eds). 501-543. London: Open Humanities Press, pp.501-543.
[1] I am referring perhaps more specifically to the biogram. Biograms, as postulated by Massumi, are lived diagrams that rely more directly on proprioception to induce memory, they operate as devices or triggers for calling forth past kinetic experiences synesthetically and proprioceptively.
[2] Matter of fact is a coagulation of a set of non-representative relations; it exposes the body beneath the organism; the diagram explodes the organization of the organism and puts its elements in relation with forces: internal, external, variable and eternal, so as to create another relational whole or fact that changes the nature of its elements.
[3] Ripstop is a highly sensitive and resilient fabric used in the fabrication of parachutes.
[4] Unfortunately the experimentation was cut short by the Covid 19 crisis and remains at an embryonic stage at this point.
[5] Fabric was also chosen, paradoxically, for its nomadic reference and quotidian familiarity. (It will later evoke the topological interface of invisible streams of information, network of flows that weave through the contemporary city.)
Key concepts:
Organism that persons, bioscleave, sited awareness (Arakawa & Gins)
Body topologic (Massumi)
Immediation (Massumi, Manning)
Formative force (Nancy, Focillon)
Transversality (Guattari)
Diagram (Deleuze), Biogram (Massumi)
Inflection (Cache)
Surfacing (Whitehead, Manning, Massumi)
Individuation (Simondon)
Molar/molecular (Deleuze & Guattari)
Work in Progress: Wind Partition
A preliminary scroll drawing (7ft) that was extracted from stills (traced and superposed) of the videos above to create a score for musicians and dancers to improvise from. Once completed the intention is to create a large life-size möbius band of sequences of scrolls placed free standing in the center of a room for dancers and musicians to perform with, moving in and out of the möbius loop.
The scrolls will then be further developed into scores for movement through space and/or a narrative that could generate an architectural project.
A future installation might put in play one or several of these strips stretched across a selected site and onto which a projection of the same site in real time would be cast. The toplological surface would activate and make visible the atmospheric power of site.
Pendule du Suroît is a solo performance involving a 50' strip of Ripstop on the Lachine canal. It captured, without human intervention, the rhythm of wind on a specific day and time in view of a future performance.
.B-Sketch: Bodyings and Wordings
Line and body become indiscernible in body-surrounds assemblages: body-worlding movements and metamorphosis. Infolding, unfolding into oscillations in volition, force-fields of affective energy propelling in-tensive body extensions in spatium; turning interior-out exterior-in into surface spatiations: actual and virtual bodylines in continuum weave themselves into differential relations of complicity in movement, in-volution.
Line traverses, occupies and becomes in the space-of-the-body: space-body in-fusing in movement, as it dances; always in the third person singular-plural, becoming other in multiplicity. Casting cartographies, choreographies, energetic maps of möbius movement constellations, consonating interior-exterior sp(l)aces from multiple angles of sensation, investing them with a diversity of affective textures and tonalities.
What it learns from the space-of-the-body is to become body-without-organs: an unimpeded flow of energy propagating through its countless regenerative tentacular filaments; an empty interstitial matter, a-dimensional skin transmuting into surface energy with the power to attract/repulse and transform intensities; a wiggling magnet-maggot assemblage, luring and absorbing affect-forces, ruminating and secreting them on its backless/frontless surface in dermic mutation; dissolving any organiformed intruder into surplus fluency, mists of atmospheric sensations, floating affective formations: interiority-past turned futurity-inside out. The bodying line: an in-visible, virtual cluster of forces ready to dissolve the instant it approaches the surface, inhabited and inhabiting other bodylines, endowed with the capacity to become any matter: animal, mineral, vegetal, atmospheric, oceanic or pure flux. Its virtual plane of immanence in-fused with utmost intensity, vitality, appetite; virtually activating potential as it seeps into the interstices of worldings and reverberates back into the surface, to be ruminated again and re-actualized in revitalized thrusts of movement, bodyings.
Drawing is line’s dancing plane of immanence, palimpsest of consistency, enabling movements, gestures, affective flows and their traces to coexist, enveloping intensities of all potential bodyline-worldings.
