Mont-Royal Cemetery
May 18 2021
Winds 5-10 km NW
Partial sun 25 C
(with Cécile Lars and Hélène Bergeron)
St-Joseph Oratory
May 20 2021
Winds 15 km/h, gusts 40 km/h SW
Cloudy 30 C
(with Cécile Lars and Hélène Bergeron)
Ste-Hélène Island (Jean Drapeau Parc)
June 18 2021
Winds 20-25 km/h SW, gusts 40 km/h
Cloudy 25C
(with HB)
Roger Taillibert (arch.) / Olympic Stadium
July 13 2021
Winds SE 25-30, gusts 35 km/h
Cloudy 26C
(with HB and CL)
Quartier des Spectacles (practice interrupted by security guard)
June 24 2021
Winds SSE 20-30 km/h, gusts 30-45 km/h
Sunny 28C
Full moon, St-Jean Baptiste, NHL determing game
Mt-Royal Cemetery 2
June 27 2021
WindsSO 40 km/h, gusts 50-60 km\h
Sunny, damp 32C
(with Michel, HB, Cadu and Miguel Raza)
Menkès Shooner Dagenais LeTourneux, Lemay & NFOE arch. / University of Montreal
July 22 2021
Winds SO 15-20 km/h
Sunny, partially cloudy 26C
(with HB)
Old Montreal
May 26
Winds 40 km/h, gusts 60 km/h SW
Pre-storm 29C
Full moon (perigee) with eclipse
(with Hélène Bergeron, Michel Bonneau and Lori Freeman)
Dan Hanganu (arch.) / Chaussegros-de-Léry Building
June 1 2021
Winds 20-25 km/h WSW
Partial sun 28C
(with Hélène Bergeron and Cécile Lars)
Jacques Cartier Bridge
June 1 2021
Winds 20-25 km/h WSW
Partial sun
(with Hélène Bergeron and Cécile Lars)
IBM 2
July 25 2021
Winds O 15-20 km/h, gusts 30-35
Partially cloudy 28C
(with Susanna Hood, MB & HB)
Dan Hanganu 3
July 25 2021
Winds OSO 25 km/h with gusts 35 km/h
Partially cloudy 28C
(with SH, MB & HB)
continues here
Kohn Pedersen Fox (arch.) / IBM Building
June 24 2021
Winds SSE 20-30 km/h, gusts 30-45 km/h
Sunny 28C
Full moon, St-Jean Baptiste, NHL determing game
(with CL & HB)
Observations and thoughts:
Complaints as to our 'irregular' presence in the cemetery began immediately and especially if the fabric touched tombstones.
This seems somewhat ironic given that we were making visible the voices of the dead (as per Mohawk beliefs). The living were disrupted by the spirit of their dead.
We were asked if there was a wedding!
As an extension of the skin, where do garments end and 'surfaces' begin i.e. at what point does disturbance begin?
Surfaces operated as 'interfaces' surfing the interval between body, environment, and cosmos; the living and the dead.
Operated as screens absorbing and expressing the qualitative, affective nature of the interval while creating spacetimes.
Vital forces that contribute to place-making are captured and expressed in membrane: operate as captors of forces, make them felt and visible, activate the space.
Continuous perceptual shifts from line to surface to site.
Observations and Thoughts:
Very tricky winds; unpredictable gusts but city operates as a framework:
Enabled perceptual mapping of winds though surrounding buidings. Began to sense and understand how the architecture deflects, absorbs, funnels...slows, blocks, reverses wind flows; to feel how vortices form upon approaching intersections, openings, deviations...
Stronger winds change/challenge bodily habits and attitudes (center of gravity constantly shifts).
Forces you to sharpen your environmental awareness on many scales and across body-partner-wind-architecture organism simultaneously.
Every stop along the way is a knot within an event...where place calls out for lingering.
Membranes constitute a smooth space resonating with the striated spaces of architecture.
Observations and Thoughts:
"There is nothing written on it so it must be art."
No comment.
Architectural elements were inflectors of currents and turbulences.
Surface operated as 'interface' between matter and the immaterial.
'architecture must be defined in the first instance in terms of proto-architectural forces, from which architectural forms proper are processual precipatives: derivatives. When a built form precipitates from the design process, dropping into the open fields of life, the "derivative" reactivates, becoming a derived force. Its now concrete surfaces become transductive membranes actively modulating architectural body-events of inhabitation.' Massumi
Pedagogical Translations
Urban Flow Mapping: Given an architectural complex, use the membranes to explore currents, turbulences, vortices, created by the architecture. Study every part of the entire exterior space of the complex noting how flows are deviated by surfaces, corners, columns, obstacles, etc. and how various heights and expanses affect their trajectories. Pay attention to sunny and shaded areas to see if they affect the nature of currents differently. Draw up a map and elevations of the wind patterns on that specific day.
Ephemeral Wind Structures: Students work in groups of 4-5 with one 80' mobius membrane, bungies (that can be hooked to the 10 perimeter bands) and 5' rods (to create folds). Working with the wind (topologically) they continuously create and tansform floating structures that are captured on film. In the studio, they then freeze-frame images of potential tensile structures.
Students work in pairs and are given a long Ripstop strip, one extendable pole and several bungies. They are assigned a site in which they have a week to experiment and to construct (in single or several groups of two) a structure that will take shape under specific wind conditions of their choice.
For Part II
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'In-between is a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given - such that they might be joined up but on the way to being given.' Ingold
'Submerged in the air like a swimmer in water, the wind-walker (...) forms a vortex in the wind's passage as it sweeps past (...)' Ingold
'It is the rythm of movement - swiftness in attack and counter-attack - the highly controlled release and witholding of concentrated energy, and the composition of two grappling lines (snakes) that inspired the choreography of the brush dance...
... a series of destructions and reconstructions of balance - deliberate or accidental imbalance of one character is compensated by the imbalance of another. In this way the unstable balance prevails, and the whole work is simultaneously animated with a constant traversing of space.' Yen
'Turbulence defines relationality...Nothing is fixed or stable, and everything is contingent on everything else. Sustaining this uncertainty, keeping things unfixed and in play, and suspending the process of rigid definitions, are parts of an active process called thresholding...this process of thresholding requires attentiveness to states of co-formation and changes in and between things. Thresholding is a particular mode of being on the edge.' Cottrell
'la calligraphie a pour vocation d'exprimer l'essence dynamique des événements.. Elle fixe ces "moments expressifs" qui semblent se manifester dans les choses et qui, en fait, sont la réponse de notre imagination motrice au spectacle du dehors.' Billeter
'la calligraphie a introduit enfin la notion de rhythme et de souffle...le Vide n'est pas une présence inerte (...) il est parcouru par des souffles reliant le monde visible à un monde invisible.' Cheng
'Dans la calligraphie comme dans la danse, tout le corps est en mouvement, toute son activité est unie dans l'acte d'expression.' Billeter
'Attending to the turbulent qualities of all things opens up new ways of thinking about the relationships constituting the world.' Cottrell
'Architecture-related events are typically categorized as falling into the domestic-inside and urban-outside. But the architectural surface, understood in this way as the dynamic form of becoming-body event made visible in concrete form, is not just a divider between inside and outside. It is not just a separatrix but an active membrane. Walls, roof, and floors establish a regime of passage between the open fields on either side of them.' Massumi (2019: 49)
'The "screen" suggests a piece of cloth that is open to experiences (open to the wind, open to the spirit) and that stores this experience.' Flusser
'The thought of a non-conforming and unverifiable form, a form forming itself, of the self-formative form - in consequence, of the formative force of this very form, or again, of the form in its force, of the form or idea as force (...) - is what constitutes the drawing of art or the art of drawing (...) that constitutes the element, the moment, or dimension not for formalized but formative, ostensive, and dynamic form across all artistic fields.' Nancy
'To exist is to sketch oneself (s'esquisser). One would like to write exquisser - to open oneself to a form which shows itself in the movement of its uprising (surgissement).' Nancy
Observations:
What is it about this activity that maintains a state of engagement, what continues to thrust it forward in its repetitive renewals?
The experience recalls first and foremost that of insitu (observation) drawing, playing the line : the feeling of being entirely immersed in place and in time, of an intimate and purposeless dialogue with the elements of place, of being one of its elements... in the thick of place. And yet, of never being in control.
It also recalls in a playful manner the manipulation of a kite, a sail, a puppet, a fishing rod, a bow and arrow, of the reins of a horse, of the train of a gown-cape, the drawing of the muleta...
'La forme est le rythme de la matière, l'articualtion rythmique de ses puissances et de ses résistances qui sont actualisées par une technique que le rythme lui-même a sucitée. Ni le matériau ni la technique ne peuvent engendrer le rythme. Mais elles ont en lui une existence inédite dont il est le seul fondement.' Maldiney
'Depending on how the forces of the environment hit the hull and sails, the spine will toggle the boat into different postures or "points of sail". ' Massumi
Observations and Thoughts:
Surfaces become much more animate and topologically variable within an architecturally defined exterior space. There seems to be a better symbiosis between body, surface and architecture. In open spaces the forces tend to be more undirectional.
The experience of drawing from with the surfaces is very different than that of the external standpoint... the embodiement of a mode of 'formative form'!
"landing sites"...are affordances that partially resolve the vagueness of the surrounds, not into regions of clarity but into sites of ambiguity: just resolved enough to evoke the potential for a response without prefiguring which response, for what function. This polyvalency is meant to break the mold of habit, and invite the body to improvise on its manner of inhabiting, reintensifying the experience of the built environment. The idea is to create the conditions for the emergence of new modes of life arising relationally, between the body and its surrounds. (...) There is no longer a body in a building, but a body-building(-life): an integral "architectural body" wrapping the differential between body proper and its built environment into a single, continuing process of becoming, more intensely alive again. Reanimate architecture. Massumi (2019: 40)
'Essential to the architectural design process are techniques for transducing form-making, or form-taking, becoming-body-events from one level and scale to another. Each transduction moves the process to a new associated milieu (a different duplexing of open generative fields).' Massumi
'a living line, which must perforce find its way as it goes along, has continually to attend to its path, adjusting or "fine-tuning" the direction of its advancing tip as the journey unfolds.' Ingold
'The "manner "or "mode", as a property of the gesture of drawing, refers to nothing other than the singularity of form - and this singularity as so far as truth, essence, or characteristic comes to light there (...), each time singular, unique and exclusive to the drawn thing. (...) its essence consists entirely of the manner, mode, and allure of its gesture, the force of its movement, the weight and the lightness of its mark.' Nancy
'Whenever I quiet the persistent chatter of words within my head, I find this silent or wordless dance already going on-this improvised duet between my animal body and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits.' Abram
'l'éphémère est un présent intensifié par un maniérisme du temps (...) "maniérisme occasionnel" (...) Car la manière seule est capable de capter l'arrivée de l'événement, son "il y a", en substutuant au fait d'être l'acte d'advenir. Du temps comme apparition et disparition, "intention d'être".' Buci-Glucksman
Guidelines for Line Navigation:
Walk until you find the wind...the wind is not going to find you.
Currents are generally constantly changing, varying in location, direction and intensity; you must stay attuned to its shifts and continue to walk and move to maintain a rhythm.
For maximum resistance (uplift) line-surface must be perpendicular to wind direction.
If there is any problem or loss of control, SIT.
Keep your arms in the air if you want to maximize the chances of capturing wind.
Keep your arms and body moving creatively if you want line variation.
When in the loop, the one anchored in the line navigates with both arms and body, the one holding losely simply directs the line without forcing.
You will not be able to communicate verbally in the wind so develop a body language for communicating with your partner.
Maintain more than one anchoring (holding) point to avoid ripping the fabric.
The more you practice the more you will get to know the wind and how to play with it.
Environment:
Once you have gained confidence in navigating the line, look for relations between it and your environment: how is the line affected by your environment, how do the line-surfaces operate: how do they contribute to your understanding of space?
Body:
Pay attention to how the forces at play affect your movement and sensation of spaces: what you feel, how the event has affected the way you perceive and experience space as lived or ‘ecological’ space, how it has changed the way you experience or think of familiar places. The experience may also trigger the recollection of chidhood body schema.
'A topological figure may be thought of as the form of all the forms that express it. (...) They are forms of expression. It is a form of transition. If the topological figure is not in any of the particular forms that stand out from it, then it can only be inbetween them.' Massumi (2019: 3)
Humansnails
Humansnails go along glued bodily to second skins or shells
(architectural surrounds).
First shells: shaped volumes of the beloved medium of human snails.
First shells: shaped volumes that form by virtue of actions humansnails take within second shells (architectural surrounds).
First shells: relatively large atmospheric globular samples of the
beloved medium - medium as oneself?? - that wraps around humansnails.
First shell: on-the-spot humansnail-made wrappings of sited awareness.
Have the man-made become as to the point as the snail-made.
Arakawa and Gins
'Rien de tel (que le plan cristallin) avec le plan cosmique, flux et fluidité, qui introduit un tout autre type de transparence et de temporalité. Car il s'agit ici de peindre l'entre-deux du ciel et de la terre, l'air et l'eau, des nymphéas à l'infini, comme Monet, en perdant tout horizon et tout arête dure et réfléchissante, au profit d'un plan aquatique. Le miroir est d'eau, et l'espace très haptique des touches colorantes illimitées va jusqu'à sa propre dissolution. Peindre le temps, c'est donc en saisir les effets saisonniers et les heures du jour, nuages, couchers de soleil, eaux dormantes pour perdre toute pesanteur, voire tout ancrage du regard (...) "Je veux peindre l'air dans lequel se trouvent le pont, la maison, la beauté; la beauté et l'air où ils sont, ce n'est rien d'autre que l'impossible". C'est dire que le plan cosmique et fluide retrouve un temps saisonnier de type japonnais (...) Temps fluide ou agité, eau et vagues saisies dans leur acmé, temps d'espacement et de passage, temps cosmique des surfaces où l'on est toujours dans la nature et pas devant. Et, surtout, un temps fleuve, qui laisse place au vide et à l'insaisissable, aux "fleurs du vide", pour parler comme Zéami. Un tel temps présuppose donc de s'identifier à l'éphémère cosmique, de le vivre comme une valeur positive, pré-écologique, et sans doute étrangère à nos traditions monothéistes dominantes. Car si l'Occident a valorisé massivement un éphémère mélancolique, spleen baudelarien ou intranquillité de Pessoa, il a sous-estimé l'éphémère comme simple affirmation de la vie au sens de Nietzsche, un éphémère de l'impermanence acceptée.' Buci-Glucksmann Esthétique de l'éphémère
'Wind twists and turns, forming swirls and eddies. It may come from this or that direction, but the direction is not the point of origin, nor do I register its arrival as a tap on the cheek. Rather, it brushes by my skin on its way to nowhere, and I feel as I do my own body in its posture and movement. I take it in and breathe it out again, creating an eddy in its flow.' Ingold
Words from Miguel Raza:
I arrived without any expectations, not knowing what it would be like or feel like. Probably a part of my brain thought I was about to fly a kite, but it was very blurry in may head. I think it is an important part of the experience, not knowing exactly what we’ll do and how it will feel. Then when we first started and I was amazed by the power of the wind. I couldn’t imagine that the force of nature would be so powerful, yet most of the time unnoticed. After 2 minutes I wanted to experiment more, I wanted to get more wind. Then started a long hunt for the wind. The wind is complex and unpredictable, it comes from certain places and at certain times but it’s hard to understand it clearly. It takes time.. And that’s one of the most important things about the Urban Surf(ac)ing experience, it takes time.. It reminded me that anything worthy in life takes time, I started engaging more.. I sometimes got a bit discouraged when we couldn’t find the wind. Where is it? Where are these invisible forces? North our south? Maybe on the hill? After one hour of exploration, we experimented a climax.. The wind was hiding on one specific hill at this specific moment. It offered a sustained and generous strength.. This specific space started offering new layers.. There was no physical walls, but there was a construction going on around us.. Some « virtual » walls that had this specificity of being dynamic.. I call them « virtual », but there were real.. It was another dimension of materiality, that prior to this experience I had no knowledge of.. In the middle of the climax, I was feeling so connected to the experience and I wanted to keep dancing with the wind.. I remember thinking « bring us anywhere you want to bring us, we’re all yours ». The resistance was becoming the core of the connection, the core of the experience.. As long as we kept dancing together, experimenting together, the excitement would remain transcendent.. It was a moment in time indeed.. An invitation to experiment a new form of « virtuality », an initiation of a new connection with space and the force of nature.. The experience got me out of space weirdly.. Out of the space I generally experiment.. There was a sensation of freedom, which is somehow counter intuitive.. I wouldn’t think that freedom appeared when I was in resistance, somehow in the middle of « virtual » walls.. But it did appear.. Probably I understood that freedom can also be about connecting creatively with the modality of our environnement.. It’s about approaching the different dimensions of « reality » with an open mind, with a childish spirit.. It was a moment in time..
Miguel
'...The concrete surface describes the limit of the event: the point beyond which the body's extension does not pentrate, deflected instead into lateral movement following the topological spread of the figure's undulations. The figure for its part is reanimated - brought back to compositional life in further iteration continuing its formation. This two-way movement of mutual extension is a transductive relation. The figure folds out into the life of the body, as the body's movement is infolded into the composition of the figure, becoming a formative force for its animate form.' Massumi (2019: 66)
'The "surfacing of experience" as a bodying (...) When Spuybroek or Arakawa and Gins speak of the perceptual body in ways that suggst embodied cognition, they are figuring the body as a co-generator of emergent dynamic forms rather than as receiver of already-constituted static forms. This is a way of speaking about the integral abstract surface of architectural becomings-body in other words.' Massumi (2019: 68)
Observations:
Finally finding a lighter, more sensitive Ripstop to work with enable a more acute haptic sounding and drawing of forces, currents, flows of air as it moved in space. The nature of the flows resounded with that of architecture, changing dramatically with different configurations of space.
'Surroundings can pose questions by virtue of how their elements and features are posed (...) Depending on what activates what in question-posing surroundings, or on what stimulates bodies to move through these surroundings, answers will tentatively surface, or further questions will.' Arakawa and Gins
'A building without human bodies is like a sail without wind.' Massumi
Or is it a sail without human bodies is like a building without wind?
'Having observed near and far how the body moves through its surroundings, having thought lengthily of still other ways to surround it, and having built a few tactically posed surroundings, we now notice ourselves to have been tracing an architectural body, or at least a landscape for one. We see architecture not merely as that which stands by and gets linked up with, as structures that life lightly avails itself of in the passing; not passive, not passively merely hanging around to provide shelter or monumentality, architecture as we conceive it actively participates in life and death matters.' Arakawa and Gins
The first thing the nomadic surflines set out to do was to inhabit the city, find a urban territory itching to deterritorialize, sail on its various rhythms, taking the pulse of its flows and turbulences, attempting to liberate its light, modulate its textures, feel its haptic aerial breath, and ephemerally resurface smooth out of its striated spaces. What appeared throughout their journey, in the encounter of fixed and fluctuating matter, was the vital power of urban interstitial thresholds composed in the mutual translation and traversing of striated-smooth space. It brought to life what was imminently there for the making and transforming, in potential future co-compositions. As mutant line-surfaces, the membranes became a formative power of expression, blurring distinctions of exterior and interior. Moving between architectural solids, structures, forms, brushing against or fleetingly clinging to their geometricized, historicized surfaces, molding their topographies just long enough to engender their dissipation, topological involutions. What stood silent and cristalline against the background of inert perspectival forms and framings anchored to seemless horizons seemed to liberate its power of involution in the vortical deviations of the membranes’ ghostly lineings. The force of winds : speeds, accelerations-deceleration, and intensities transformed into rhythms by their assemblage with the massive slowness of striated bodies was the main activator of these topological variations captured by the membranes in their encounter with light. Or perhaps it was the winds that captured the light, and the light, the membranes…or yet again the light resonating in contraction-dilation, cold-heat, dampness-dryness that captured the winds and the winds, the membranes. Regardless, molecular lines of membranes and molar lines of architecture interpenetrated across urban interstices, milieux traversed and transformed each other in a cartography of planes.
Perhaps the affective intensity of membranes in flux derived in part from their nomadic matter-of-flux, the ‘clothes-tent-space vector’ of the nomad’s outside, when what foregrounded were trajectories (souffles), and the subordination of striated architectural urban space to the informal multi-directional fluctuations of smooth space moving and morphing between its points, its verticals and horizontals. Intensities : wind, sound, light, the haptic made visible in the nomadic skin-clothes-sail vectors of the traveling interval.
Observations:
The dominant tendency is to manipulate and control the 'muleta'.
Eyes fixed on the line to see its formation takes precedence over other senses and faculties.
Perhaps we need to work in the Buto manner, by seeing with the hands, the back, the elbows...
Not to resist the wind but to flow with it, to let the wind flow with and disrupt/shift other bodies' tendencial movements.
Images that best reveal the merging into a singular organism are often those that capture unintentional, accidental or distracted instants.
What the loop produces is a continuous circuit between body and wind (as opposed to the back and forth or directional exchange of the single line) that enables an exchange of energy. The build-up of energy can intensify while releaving the body's effort by supporting it.
