Comments for Dionysios

Last comments on the blog about the film on Oct 11…Dan B said about your film… very good.it is much stronger visually ...it is still mostly about geometry and abstract space.the viewer is allowed inside (interiority)...that you achieve.... what is still not present sufficiently is a suggested link to the notion of "HEAVEN"...that is the "narrative”, the story and program for your film based on your metaphor. Yes, you show the sky,manny times, and the sky is a symbol of heaven but most people will not get it. The question is, how can you introduce in the film new elements that may make the mental association to the "concept of heaven" easier to achieve. Lets talk about that…


October 26, 2007
New comments in response to your Japanese system of symbolic
Representation….

It seems that you went there in response to my asking for a narrative (story, symbolic program) about the “notion of "HEAVEN"...that is the "narrative". Is that correct?

Here are my comments about your last posting. I am than a little irritated that I have to spend the time to respond in writing which is a lot more time consuming while you took class time for real estate investments! That is the grand narrative you are communicating within your present tense actions, that is voting with your feet.. that is more important than the degree project….if you get my metaphor…..be that as it may…….you wrote and I comment……


“I am currently exploring a reading giving to me by a professor titled, "MA Space-Time in Japan" which is a correlation of exhibitions by Arata Isozaki. “

That is great but you seem to ignore the readings given to you by your current teachers and the theoretical frame they suggest….you have to pay attention to both..!!! otherwise you fail in the present tense……



"After the discussion a week ago on the potential to this theory of programming defined as the 'Generational Archive for Living' “

Too general, too vague too ambitious, to and this is the most problematic for our studio’s theoretical frame, too typological (that is highly coded in a cultural sense, linguistic, in a memory sense and not in the present time as Morris reading suggested by the notion of “ presentness (our class reading), sensorial and open ended mode open for re-interpretation, in other words too fixed, this is the core argument between structuralists and post-structuralists (I will expand in class about this)


“ I have began to consider how one might be able to assimilate the various other typological programs within this condition of existential archiving.”

That is the problem with your proposal…that is not the task….if at all, it is only a beginning of a structure borrowed from an other culture, which is not a problem (we may even encourage it) but it has to be made into a lived experience in your film and in your future project , manifested sensorialy (all five senses) and not depending on the observer’s knowledge of that culture and/or be given a legend/dictionary of meanings…your diagram’s written staff I could not read…



“As discussed the resolution or adaptation of the archives functional requirements to begin to break from social, cultural economic and political constraints; is in direct response to the 'free-space' of existential living conditions required by the premise of the class as noted in my text 'Perceptional Programming”

Good term not yet developed….but why invent a new private terminology when we established a way to speak under the studio theoretical frame based on the readings ( from Lackoff , Piaget and Morris etc)


"However i was finding myself playing with ambiguous linguistics and unable to notational speak of these adaptations, i found the Western culture of architectural propaganda is to strictured to allow for such fluid dialectics required by modern man and the individualized perception of Syneasthesia. "

I (and may others) argue that this East West false dichotomy is another kind of propaganda which is not helpful……


“However the discussion of the Japanese concept of Space-Time in this pamphlet MA, is proving to be the comparative cognitive thought process that may be able to begin to restructure the Generational Archive. Issues of MA as various typologies (spatially, culturally and theoretically) are in tension with Western theories and through a notational process of interjected these conditions into a fabric purely conceived by western theory i may be able to bridge between these variations into a single notational domain that can produce a strong dialectic as to construct a thesis on.”

I FEEL THAT I MUST REISSUE YET AGAIN , FOR YOU AND OTHERS A SUMMARY OF WHAT WE REGARD AS THE CLEAR PEDAGOGICAL FRAMEWORK OF OUR STUDIO WHICH WE EXPECT THE STUDDENT TO GRASP AND FOLLOW. The particulars, the specific program and site, are up to the student but not the theoretical frame. You all chose this studio for gthat reason among others. I hope that is clear.




Posted Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Your task to develop a proposal for a Degree Project Program. The term 'architectural program' has many meanings. Marc said in class three things. I am repeating them here to make sure that you : It can be a (1)mixed program (mixed use),and (2) it does not have to be only quantitative but be in qualitative terms (experience) and (3) it should be argued (the choice of and the approach to designing it) in the light of the studio theoretical framework and your own developing interests as you discovered in making the film.
That will take some work to propose and write about it. That is the task before midterm.

The discussion of metaphors/synaesthesia etc. and the translation of this research into a degree project concept (precis) , program and site is just begining.
Summary (yet again) of our proposed “Theoretical Frame” for the studio October 26, 2007

Architectural experience, as a mode of knowing, originates and exists primarily in direct
experience, the “being here” of bodily experience.

It is the disembodied quality of many recent developments in architectural theory and architecture teaching that this studio attempts to address.

Synesthesia refers to cross-modal associations, an interface of virtual (non-sensorial) perceptions with normal sensory perception, These are associations of modes rather than replacing one perceptual mode for another. Such as “where am I ?” (space/time) ,"smell" colors, "see" sounds and "feel" tastes. “touch” texture. Inter-sensory associations are the basis for becoming inter-subjective emotional states between the “I” and the “other” in human collective experience.
Synesthesia is not a concept, but a material experience occurring in the brain and imbedded in cultural behavior-language/art. Others suggest that these primary metaphors might be hord wired in the brain (see neurophilosophy).

Rules of the game are from from Phenomenology (Merleau Ponti and Don Idhe)

Two different strategies for interpretation (of grasping, holding in memory)

1. Hermaneutic strategy

the use of story devices and (metaphorical naming) in order to create an immidiate thought context.

the story creates a condition that immidiately sediments the perceptual possibility- perception takes shape within and from the power of suggestion of a language-game.
2. Phenomenological strategy
centering on the subject , the way in which
perception functions is made thematic

the instructions of how to look, rely on certain knowledge of the
mechanisms of subject as active percievers.

Although these aspects of our cultural/linguistic behavior can not be realy ever separated , for operational purposes as producers/makers of objects/ cultural artifacts to which others will attribute meaning (interpret) later, WE in this STUDIO emphasize the phenomenological approach over the Hermaneutical (narrative,symbolic, interpretatice) approach. The reason for this is the great misunderstanding that architecture can represent a story, a metaphor…see Neslson Goodman…architecture is a non-representational art form..also see Rolland Barth in Eiffel Tower---as a “concrete abstraction”…….concrete, sensorial first, abstract after…..



From: Philosophy in Flesh Lakoff

Chapter 4
Primary metaphor and the subjective experience

domains are mostly sensory-motor domains

The four parts of the theory of primary metaphor
Subjective (non sensory-motor) experiences and judgments, on the one hand,
Sensory-motor experience, on the other, are so regularly conflated –
undifferentiated in experience- that for a time children do not distinguish
between the two when they occur together. …During the period of conflation
associations are automatically built between the two domains. Later during a period of differentiation ,children are able to separate out the domains,
but the cross-domain associations persist…. Universal early experiences lead to universal conflations (children’s body sensory-mptor and concrete operations see Piaget stages of development of spatial cognition)



Each primary metaphor has a minimal structure and arises naturally,
automatically and unconsciously through everyday experience by means
of conflation…..

Complex metaphors are formed by conceptual blending. Individual memory and cultural memory (language, systems of symbols)

Narayanan’s neural theory of metaphor…permanent neural connections ?????


Distinct conceptual domains can be co-activated, and under certain conditions connections across the domains can be formed, leading to new inferences.

The Sensory-motor structuring of subjective experience

In “Metaphors We Live By”, we gave evidence that conceptual metaphors are mappings across conceptual domains that structure our reasoning, our experience and our everyday language. We pointed to the existence of experientially grounded mappings, for example:
More is Up, as in “Prices Rose”…….. This correspondance between quantity and verticality arise in our everyday experiences..


Merleau-Ponty argued:

The social is not collective consciousness but intersubjectivity
a living relationship and tension among individuals.

the fact that Husserl determines the living
present as the ultimate, universal and absolute “form”


Inseparable from the concept of appearance, sense, evidence or essence…


Only form is evident, only form has or is essence, only form presents itself
as such.


“The Present Tense of Space “
Ch 10 in The Continuous Project Altered Daily
by Robert Morris
“a state of being I will call “presentness”; two kinds of Kublerian historical development ( is he referring to the book “the Shape of Time” ? or to the film maker), citing precedents, some of them widely separated in time and space; and three formal characteristics of the paradigm underlying the kind of work that now seizes presentness as its domain……..”
“Time is in this newer work in a way it was never in past sculpture…More at issue is the shift in evaluation of experience (direct experience) This experience is embedded in the very nature of spatial perception”
“Mental Space” has no location within the body. Yet without it there is no consciousness, Julian Jayyness suggests that mental space is a fundamental analogue-metaphor for the world, and that it was only with the linguistic development of terms for spatial interiority occurring around the second millennium B.C. that subjective consciousness as such can be said to begin. (link to Piaget and the children’s metaphoric world view, and to sensory-motor phase of cognitive concept of void/space in children similar to the beginnings of same in early humans)
Some times ago George Herbert Mead divided the self into the “I” and ‘me”. The former, the “I” has to do with the present-time experiencing self, consciously reacting. The latter , the “me” is the self reconstituted from various indices…”
(sensory-motor direct experience) rather imaginalistically (like children in the early metaphorically (see Piaget and the source of primary metaphors for Lackoff”)