Saturday, November 03, 2007

Notes for Matt

Dear Matt:

I love your title. It is a perfect expression of interiority.
Here is not Everywhere.


I was finally able to see your film and read your last post on the blog. I have some reactions but would prefer to say it face to face for speed and dialogue. I would have liked to hear your personal verbal explanation of everything. The reason for this is the fact that most of the staff presented is in a collection of quotes, photos and drawings and a description of the functions of a piano. It is like your film (as you said ion the blog), a bit jumpy, it fills like a series of stills. That makes it seem that you atre always outside the subject not inside even when you look at the interior of the theater. You are looking at a ruin from outside, as an symbol. The piano is also a symbol of a connection between the finger and the sound. (as you once explained in class, I believe). I would have preferred to listen to a piece of music ..that would have been more of an interior experience so to speak.

More importantly, your film lacks “interiority” and direct experience of space, which was the main purpose of making a film towards capturing an architectural experience. Your film is flat and informational not visually sensual.

Hot Ashes for Trees said...
Video is jumpy. Boo.
8:21 AM, October 15, 2007
Hot Ashes for Trees said...
Theater/School
Treehouse
Balcony space attached to high rise
Urban Alcove
9:04 PM, October 16, 2007
Hot Ashes for Trees said...
Matt Standeven
Angels – Spiritual human being connecting to the empirical human

Weight – The anticipated consequence of consciousness creates the impulse of function

Allow me some general comments about your entire presentation to date.
We will need to talk in class on Tu after you present it more fully. Mark and I hope to have some other critics.

I must confess that I do not quite understand the connections between ideas (as presented in the quotes), images, drawings, programs etc. Yes one can make a collage of unrelated items but still we have an obligation to
explain those choices, their order and the inner logic of association when put together.. They are not self-explanatory. I will wait for your verbal presentation of explaining each quote, image and choice of program.

This jumpy, disjointed quality of al the items lacks overall coherence.
While that may be said about other students work it is more so in your case. But if one looks at them, as they are in the film and in the slides, they all have common quality: you always look at the object from outside.(as I said above about your film. Somehow the same quality is carried to your quotes and your last drawing . While the drawing is seductive (you are talented),it does not respond to our request for a notational drawing of your film.

That drawing is a conventional 2D schematic design section (made to imitate a piano organization). It is not only premature to preconceive the design at this point (no fully developed program or site), it also does not follow the studio theoretical frame work that biases an interior approach to design as opposed from conceiving of form from outside. Of course we should do both at all times, but in this particular pedagogical strategy that we have established for the studio, the interior experience of space should be the trigger of the project.

More about that later. I hope this is helpful in starting a discussion.

I love your title. It is a perfect expression of interiority.
Here is not Everywhere.

Can we make your project live up to this title?

3 comments:

Hot Ashes for Trees said...

How do you define interiority?

What is your criterion for drawing a “sense” or an “experience?”

Hot Ashes for Trees said...

The expression “jumpy” refers exclusively to the technical frame compression of the uploaded video, not content.

Hot Ashes for Trees said...

The experience that the project is concerned with is the sensorial connection to the human memory not the sensory connection from the organs (ear, tongue, nose, eye, skin) to the human mind. We all process sensory information in exactly the same we since we are all equipped with the same mechanical devices that are the human sensory mechanisms. We have a scientific and anatomical understanding of all of these senses. What they do not have a complete understanding of begins at the point where perception reaches the human memory. It is not until they reach the human memory that there is any difference between man and nature. This is what I alluded to with the Scofidio quote (verbal), the Mary Miss installation of dimensioned lumber (the hand of man) inserted into nature (plastic), and the piano mechanism (audible artifact for communicating the notes of music for centuries.) The very construction of the piano is for the purpose of connecting the process of creating music by human limbs. What better precedent structural artifacts are there than those that operate in other sensorial languages for humans to communicate that which can only be hinted at but not communicated? That is, for me, the definition of poetic? Music is an impetus for potential new connections in the memory. As of now I am drawing and connecting the mechanisms that will hopefully make those connections possible. I am trying to use what I understand of the process of human perception as a language and develop a program that will evoke an experience of individual creation. In that, I have been very careful in selecting the structures that I bring into the project for I feel they offer promise into a new means to connect sensorial perception of the body into the mind.