Yours & Mine

A Change

Performer or interpreter

woman vs’ man

A triggered memory

mine: yours:

- skin - gar-ment - skin - shield - skin - armor - fragile - skin - desir-able - skin - touch - skin - GARMENT - Georges Tetsset’s “The Mutant Bodt of Architecture.”

Skin is our wrapping paper; it is how we identify our self’s; colour pigment, freckles, birth-marks, ect. Skin embodies us as one, making interior all our organs, muscles, bones, ect.It isolates us from another.For us to embody someone else it is done through this skin on skin contact, touching another; a hand shake, a hug, a kiss or sexual intercourse. Skin be-comes a special part, a key part of this embodiment of another.

George Teysset implys that the garment becoming a layer of skin through the idea of armor? A garment protects us, not just from the weather, but from oth-ers! Their touch, their gaze. Clothing modifies the appearance, and covers up. In many was it is an amour, a protection, hid-ing the most fragile and private parts of us, shielding our vul-nerability. A garment embodies us and becomes embodied by us.

An interview by Fashion Projects, New York, on April 20th 2009, discussed Gabi Schil-lig’s month residency at Van Alen Institute in New York City. Over this time Schillig talks about her investigation in the relationships between the body and its surrounding space. Gabi is asked questions relating heavily to the transportable, transformable felt structure that became a performance structure, parasite to the streets of New York City.It is in this paragraph the Schillig explains the impact of her de-sign in the city that I drew strong connections and foundations for my project

“What was specifically interesting to me was to bring the materiality of the felt into the urban landscape, a materiality that is usually considered to be alien to the harsh, static and rigid surface of the city. Any form of textile materiality in the city constitutes an oddity. Textile structure, in conventional usage, re-lates clearly to the human body, figure and scale, and thus has the power to produce something new. Within the urban/built environment, the soft geometrics and tex-tural surface of textiles allow different social space and interactions to emerge.”

It is this ending sentence “textiles allow different social space and interac-tions to emerge.” that intrigues me and perhaps encouraged me to the first ideas of the power of materiality and what it would mean to change it, creating hope-fully “different interactions to emerge” Gabi uses materiality to create something new, however I was look at materiality not necessarily to create anything new, in fact I want the object to still be able to perform in its designed way. E.g. when you press a lift button it will take you to your desired floor. But the change in materiality I want to create a new experience and a level of curiosity and won-der. The object is still recognized in its functional state but its materiality change causes a different experience through touch and observation for the viewer.

Think about thisWHo is the performer? who is the interpreter?object? or subject?

Who took this photo?

Jane Rendell is exploring the idea of “object” and “subject” but also the link and differ-ence between “performer” and “interpreter.”Through looking at Eco and Claire Bishop, Jane introduces this other element I had never thought about, the idea that art perhaps cre-ates a performer, but not just the “subject” who is suggested to be that the artist of the “object” the art, but also the interpreter.The object becomes the performer to the in-terpreter as they experience the piece. This in its self is highlighted by Rendell to be a complex and uncontrolled power of past experi-ences, knowledge and faith that cause us to feel and understand the ‘object” in our own unique ways. However the interpreter perhaps becomes the performance to others. As each viewer has a unique experience and expression of the art or object it causes them to become observed by others, the subject “the artist” as well as others in captured in curiosity of the object. This is something I’m looking at in my pro-ject, as I change the materiality of the “ob-ject” coursing curiosity I create a platform for interpretation. The views will become the performers in my installations of the objects as it is their performance in interpreta-tion of the object that is the real successes.

In response to Jane Rendell”s Site-Writing, The Architec-ture of the Art Criticism.

My Woman What does your Man look like?

Luce Irigaray, “An Ethics of Sexual Difference.” “Subject and discourse, the subject and the world…” “The subject has always been written in the masculine form, as man, even when is claimed to be universal or neutral.” Luce writes I piece that frames the man as the “subject” powerful and controlling. She goes back in time where she justifies the male dominance by the gender of God. She illustrates a gender of who “desire” and “demands.” In one example she talks about the “place” a woman represents for a man, but then sheds light on the negativity of this saying the has become “a thing.” Reading the piece it is clear of Luce’s feminism, though I was not sure I always agreed with her as I found her sometimes found her to look over the capabilities and strong’s for a woman, almost framing woman just as the “men” she speaks of would as and “object.” What intreged and linked mostly to my project was a quote :

“When an encounter with an object surprises us we judge in to be new, or very different to what we formally knew or from what we supposed it ought to be. This course us to wonder...- Rene Descartes. The Passion of the Soul. Article 53.

Luce inserts this quote as she links wonder to desire and passion and ad-dresses the sexual trance between man and woman, perhaps again diminish-ing a woman calling her an “object” or perhaps that is my misinterpreting. However it did get me thinking about the power of wonder and desire and how I could use that in my project to encourage an encounter, an embodiment. This quote talks about the initial surprise, a change from the expected as the very first step and I think this is very true you need to firstly notice the object before you can even wonder and perhaps encounter.

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Elizabeth Grosz takes the eyes of both a philosopher and architect in her interview with Kim Armitage and Paul Dash. The interview strongly looks at the intertwining relation-ship between the body, architecture and the connection and embodiment be-tween the body in space. The question to what and who we design spaces for?

“Space is open to how people live in it. Space is the ongoing possi-bility of a different inhabitation.”She suggests that although space is designed it is mostly the product of the community, subject to its inhabi-tation. She goes beyond the building and facade and suggests that embod-iment is reactivating thoughts and expectations; it is a mental embodi-ment as much as a physical inhabi-tation. A space is not always about conventional usage, “embodiment… re-activating thoughts, experiences and expectations.” With this idea she suggests the notion of “becoming” in space is a product of the interac-tion between technology and bodies.

“A cycle of realities from cities to bodies, complex relationships and discourses into reality. I like this notion of the mental embodiment, it is stimulated perhaps by something in their physical embodiment; maybe a smell or something they saw. This em-bodiment of thoughts and even conver-sation perhaps even extends and makes a story out of something physical. For example an object like a old toy, then seen years later in a photo, a conversation about the toy with a friend of a memory stimulated by the seeing the toy again… the embodi-ment extents far past the physical, even in capturing another who perhaps didn’t physically encounter the ob-ject in the beginning, however they have still embodied the conversation through the memory. It has become this conscious “unphysical” story of embodiment. Waiting to be continued.