URO Strange commonplace exercise

Authors note:

The paper presents solely the authors reflection, rather than a documentation, on the concepts of corresponding spatial exercise and restless condition as an architectural practice. The authorship of the performed exercises is shared between the author, and students at the Royal Danish Academy, situating the artistic research as teaching-based research and research-based teaching. Thanks to my sister Stina S. T. Tobiasen as a co-producer and collaborator on Swarm Exercises.

Intro

This in-progress artistic-research is based upon a series of spatial exercises, searching for restless condition, as a form-taking activity (Ingold, 2013) in the occurrence of spatial production. As a restless medium the body, its gestures, and actions, are at the core of the research, as a medium through which space is formed, manufactured, and used/occupied (Lefebvre, 1991), and through which restlessness is carried. The focus of this extended abstract is a written reflection upon my teaching and architectural practice, through the concepts/notions of spatial corresponding exercises and restless conditions.

How to animate familiar spatial knowledge into restless spatial configurations?

Corresponsive Spatial Exercise

To exercise can be described as a small routine structured through a sequence of choreographed gestures carried out by the body. As a routine, an exercise is an isolated event, happening over a short amount of time and usually repeated or looped for practicing. An exercise is therefore more like a forward spiraling moving process than perceived as a closed/finished form. It is about loops/ repetitions, process, bodies, gestures, and practicing. It is a bodily practice, of embodying and animating.

The choreography of the exercise is animated through the body as medium. The exercise comes to life through the body, so to speak. Bodies are living organism, in restless condition of movement, in a constant release of energy between highs and lows. Exercising is an intense release of energy, a high intensity gesture. In his book The Production of Space, 1991, Henri Lefebvre argues that space, as an abstract indiscernible phenomenon, must be discerned through an occupying body. And this body needs to be able to deploy energy for space to be discerned, understood as being able to produce gestures, indicate orientations and directions, rotating by turning and so forth (Lefebvre, 1991). If exercises are intense bodily deployments of energy, then they might also be intense spatial productions.

Exercises are also about transformations. The transformation as an exchange between the instruction and the exercise carried out, is like the exchange between the drawing and the building.

Within different cycles of day, month, year, the body (everybody) repeatedly engage with space. Through extensive repetitive loops of daily “exercises”, certain movements or skills are adopted to a degree of being familiarized in our body, one may say they become unconsciousness gestures/movements. Even though familiarized they are not without great attraction. Gestures of organizing, arranging, cutting, moving, stacking, balancing might appear simple gestures, however they are productive gestures creating complex spatial functions such as dividing, bordering and assembly (Ørskov, 1992).

Architecture is a bodily profession, from its forming/design to the way it is manufactured/built and to the way it is inhabited/used. While the two latter seems to very clearly inhabitant architecture through physical activity and gestures, it could be questioned how the process of architectural forming is using physical activity as a medium for spatial production, besides small hand-gestures of mouse-clicking, where the techniques/gestures are restricted to a command in the digital.

The exercise presented in the visual part of the essay, departs from strange imitation of the physical ways to inhabit, or manufacture architecture. They trigger simple techniques of social interaction, surveying and arranging blocks, but become strange and unfamiliar in their context. It is to take advantage of the familiar/embodied and turn it into a gesture of spatial production. The idea of estranging things, as an artistic practice, is a way to “return sensations to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects” (Shklovsky, 1917). “By “estranging” objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and “laborious” (Shklovsky, 1917).

Simple gestures of arranging/composing, moving and replicating/looping, is made techniques of production and generators of surprise. Strange gesture of manufacturing and inhabitation becomes the choreography of the forming process (drawing and modeling/representation), to produce a responsive architecture.

Moving the exercise from focusing on owns body to respond to other bodies, initiates a disturbed space. Collaborating, as a working together, can be another generator of surprise/disturbance/unrest rather than an act set out to reach consensus. My body’s trajectory is responding/deflected by other bodies and in this corresponding act, disturbed spaces emerge. The act of corresponding is closely connected to essence of making, according to Tim Ingold (2017). To correspond is a movement of disturbance, where bodies are set in motion that continuously wrap around each other (Ingold, 2017). To correspond as a form-taking activity is an opening act of answering the environment, being wrapped up in the act of becoming with others. Corresponding exercises is a way of producing disturbed or restless spatial condition rather than clear effects.

In my architectural teaching and practice I prefer to think and work through exercises, as an alternative to method. There is a productive exchange working with corresponding spatial exercise. The exchange is a gesture happening in two directions at the same time – inwards and outwards, closing and opening. A body embodies spatial experience as a closing gesture while at the same time animates space through an opening moving gesture. There is a tying together of learning and producing in the spatial exercise. Embodied <-> Animacy is seen here as productive and educational figure through strange familiar gestures corresponding to the manufacturing and inhabiting “dance” of architecture.

As a productive generator of surprise, it forces one to think of social interactions, bodies, spaces, movements gestures, loops, practicing and collaboration as responsible ways of working with architecture.

URO – restless condition/thought model.

To render the notion of a restless condition, I would like to introduce the conceptual figure of the uro.

Uro is an ambiguous Danish word, carrying several meanings. It refers to both the object known as mobile (floating art piece) and to the condition of unrest (riots, social disturbance) and, not directly translated but closely associated, to restlessness (a condition in the body, an inability to sit still). This semantic ambiguity, both shifting between and tying together, situates the concept between an object, social movement, and a vibrating (bodily) sensation. In this sense I think about as an ideological thought-model of architecture.

The uro as an object, sometimes a diagram of a cosmic model, is a highly corresponsive figure. In a critique from 1947 of Alexander Calders mobiles, the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre describes Calder’s artworks as strange construction able to both entrap and conquer movement rather than suggesting it (Sartre, 1947).

A little breeze comes by, tangles in them, awakens them. They channel it and give it transitory shape: a mobile is born (Sartre, 1947)

The uro both traps local forces such as small fluctuations in the air, which is entangled in them as well as giving shape back to the breeze. The double motion of embodied/animacy (mentioned as effect of corresponding spatial exercise) of correspondence, taking form/giving form is truly incorporated through the figure of the uro.

As a way of highlighting and rendering the importance of the familiar and its productive force, the uro, as a crib-mobile, might also be understood through its enchanting radiating effect. The uro is through its swaying leaking meditative “sounds” pulling its observer by a magnetic force, through its repetitive spiraling and yet unseen compositions. This kind of enchantment might be described as spiral repetition, which Jane Bennet describes as “that-which-repeats-itself also transforms itself”, “it can be accidents giving birth to wondrous and unsettling – enchanting – new forms” (Bennet, 2001). The enchanted, what we might be attracted to, also contains potential productions. Making familiar gestures strange as productive force, is a way of pulling effects of enchantment through practice and eventually into the architectural artefact.

Within my practice and teaching the uro work as ideology, a guideline, structuring, guiding, instructing, keeping track, pulling, and balancing of the spatial exercises. Its exaggeration of architecture is channeled through the corresponding spatial exercises, as a pedagogical device and responsive practice.

It is an architectural fantasy/dream, hovering as a mirage or puppet master, above the building, encapsulating its full potential as a fluid restless condition. Practicing architecture through the concept of the uro, shakes, disturbs, and dismantle the static notion of architecture into an oscillating/weak/restless figure, fragile and receptible – corresponsive towards its environment, its manufacturing, inhabitation and bodies.