Visual Arts
The Making of Modern Muslim Selves through Architecture
This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship but also redefines relationships between the nation citizenship cities and architecture.
It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define enable obstruct accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities.
More generally the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space.
Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self.
Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series.
Drawing, Well-being and the Exploration of Everyday Place
Over 200 observational drawings created every day from the same window reveal life in an ordinary English street in extraordinary times.
This visual record and accompanying prose is a unique meditation on place nature community time and mental well-being. Through this qualitative work we gain insight into the individual and collective experience and place-specific impacts of the pandemic as opposed to the quantitative statistics of mortality and infection rates that characterise daily media soundbites and scientific discourse surrounding lockdown.
Five themes are central to the drawings highlighting the environmental and social factors influencing daily life and how these can be perceived and recorded via observational drawing: ‘framing space’ foregrounds the importance of widows as an interface between interior and exterior worlds; ‘observing nature and the built environment’ celebrates the street and garden as sites of human-nature relations that support well-being; ‘watching people’ focusses on the activities typify living under lockdown including isolation socially distanced interactions and working from home; ‘drawing’ reflects on the multiple professional and personal benefits of drawing; and mindful awareness is discussed throughout affirming the value of appreciating everyday life through drawing practice.
Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life
This collection explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The dynamic of the inter-relationship between pattern and chaos is such as to challenge disciplinary boundaries critical frameworks and modes of understanding perception and communication often referencing the in-between territory of art and science through experimentation and visual scrutiny. A territory of 'pattern-chaos' or 'chaos-pattern' begins to unfold.
Drawing upon fields such as visual culture sociology physics neurobiology linguistics or critical theory for example contributors have experimented with pattern and/or chaos-related forms processes materials sounds and language or have reflected on the work of other artists scientists and scholars. Diagrams tessellations dust knots mazes folds creases flux virus fire and flow are indicative of processes through which pattern and chaos are addressed.
The contributions are organized into clusters of subjects which reflect the interdisciplinary terrain through a robust yet also experimental arrangement. These are 'Pattern Dynamics' 'Morph Flux Mutate' 'Decompose Recompose' 'Virus; Social Imaginary' and 'Nothings in Particular'.
Pattern and Chaos in Art, Science and Everyday Life
This collection explores critical and visual practices through the lens of interactions and intersections between pattern and chaos. The dynamic of the inter-relationship between pattern and chaos is such as to challenge disciplinary boundaries critical frameworks and modes of understanding perception and communication often referencing the in-between territory of art and science through experimentation and visual scrutiny. A territory of 'pattern-chaos' or 'chaos-pattern' begins to unfold.
Drawing upon fields such as visual culture sociology physics neurobiology linguistics or critical theory for example contributors have experimented with pattern and/or chaos-related forms processes materials sounds and language or have reflected on the work of other artists scientists and scholars. Diagrams tessellations dust knots mazes folds creases flux virus fire and flow are indicative of processes through which pattern and chaos are addressed.
The contributions are organized into clusters of subjects which reflect the interdisciplinary terrain through a robust yet also experimental arrangement. These are 'Pattern Dynamics' 'Morph Flux Mutate' 'Decompose Recompose' 'Virus; Social Imaginary' and 'Nothings in Particular'.
Expanded Visuality: Photography as a Patterning Mechanism for the Animated Form
animating the form have long been the concern of artistic expression from attempts by early cinema at deconstructing life's movement to the most recent features by groundbreaking digital technologies manipulating visual narratives. This text explores the conditions of expanded visuality in animating form by looking at photography as a mechanism of the animate real. In the case of Idris Khan's photographs I argue that his attempt to animate form in the image can be understood as a counteraction to George Bataille's “formless” (1929: 382) in anticipation of the mechanism for diagnosing the effects of digital technology on reopening the time of the image.
Dom Sylvester Houédard: Exhibiting Spiritual ‘architypestractures’ and Cosmic Dust
This chapter explores the work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) (1924-1992) a Benedictine monk artist and poet from Prinknash Abbey best known for the typestracts and concrete poems he made on his Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s. This essay engages with the exhibition ‘Dom Sylvester Houédard: tantric poetries’ which the author curated for the Lisson London Gallery in the spring 2020 and that foreground Houédard's knowledge and practice of Tantric Buddhist and Hindu spiritual methods. Houédard engaged with the Tantric method practices of mantra mudra yantra and mandala to produce a body of work that can be seen as pivotal in the emerging narrative of a transhistorical avant-garde and its engagement with Tantric Hindu and Buddhist practice.
The chapter proposes the interdependent relationship between pattern and chaos through a discussion of the presentation of Houédard's work in this exhibition and the interplay between two separate physical spaces: the geometric patterns of his ‘spiritual architypestractures’ in one room and the chance even chaotic representation of the impermanent flux of life in the other room ‘environmentpoem’.
Instead of the Feeling of Home
We wrote this piece because we no longer knew where home was. We are a family artist practice. In 2020 we left the UK and moved to Portugal. The feeling of home didn't come with us. Our chapter uses creative non-fiction and drawings to describe and explore how we compensated for our lack of feeling at home. We describe how familiar objects move around the home in a healthy home rhythm. We describe how the feeling of loss and longing concentrates around objects. We refer to Henri LeFebvre's idea of rhythmanalysis. One way we cope with the absence of home is to reward each other with frequent treats from the bakery. We use five drawings by different members of the family to show the stages of eating a palmier biscuit.
A Type of Chaos
Typography the visual representation of language primarily communicates meaning through written printed or digital forms. Through this tangible embodiment of language typography offers an outward symbolic meaning an external reality in the form of a ‘Sign’. Language however can also reflect onto itself revealing a materiality whereby a meaning is formed on the visual surface foregrounding text as form released from the constraints to represent or communicate. Visual language (words) can also be viewed as pattern where arbitrary formations communicate different things. A disruption in this pattern forms a type of chaos where language and its communicative role becomes unfixed. This chaos however extends language enabling transformation as a new visual form where meaning still resides.
Representing Kinematics and Dynamics by Pattern Breaking in Nature, Art and Music
We explore some aspects of two-dimensional visual images with respect to how they can portray movement (kinetics). Patterns not necessarily regular or repeated can suggest movement by distortion or ‘pattern-breaking’ involving something ‘unexpected’ in the visual imagery. This unpredictability can be associated with randomness or chaos. We explore some effects of regularity and pattern breaking in music and sonic effects (such as Chladni and Lissajous figures). In landscapes networks can show growth as well as distortions that represent flow of materials (such as tree profiles and river networks). ‘Scientific’ concepts such as Fourier series phase changes and catastrophes produce creative possibilities not just for research in science and technology but with implications for cognition design and graphics
Contagious Pattern: The Spread of Appropriated Patterns by Contemporary Artists
‘Contagious Pattern’ examines connections between the biological virus and appropriation. Three artists – R. H. Quaytman David Mabb and Philip Taaffe - who do not reference viruses directly in their use of pattern are examined dynamically through metaphorical aspects of the biological virus to explore generative kinships to the artists' use of pattern. Bracey argues that the emphasis on aesthetics and materiality in these artists' work act as a distinctive alternative to dominant notions around appropriation in art. The metaphor of the virus can be a productive tool for interpretation of artists work one that belies the usual harmful associations of viruses.
Embodied and Coded: Drawings as Viral Systems
This paper explores the intersections between the function of a virus within a cell and an algorithm designed to generate lines within an animation. The viral metaphor is used as an interdisciplinary framework for understanding and perceiving the function of generative ‘data drawings’ within the animation ‘in the same breath’ which responds to the Covid-19 pandemic.
A virus puts information into a cell and this information contains a set of instructions to generate more copies of itself. Similarly an algorithm interacts with a hand made drawing by using a set of instructions to generate multiple copies of lines from the drawing.
Viruses are variously described by scientists as ‘non-living’ ‘inert’ ‘dormant’ or as ‘living entities’. They occupy a liminal space that does not conform to standard definitions of living organisms such as an ability to reproduce to metabolize or maintain homeostasis. I propose that the data drawings inhabit a similar liminal space that is entangled between the haptic and the digital. The patterns of lines that the coding generates are typically random and unpredictable. They mutate over time through instabilities that are inherent within the system. They are driven by data from the sounds of living bodies. This process generates organic flows of movement that evoke biological systems. It gives a haptic quality to the data drawings that is paradoxically more pronounced than the original hand made drawings.
Simplifying Complexity: The Visual Language of Neuroscience
Many fields of science have their own specialised visual language that requires training to read and understand. Each language is made up of an ‘alphabet’ of visual elements representing theories or processes within that field and these are combined to create scientific conceptual figures. Graphic design practice is an important tool in the analysis of such figures allowing the visual elements to be identified and extracted and then compared and contrasted to reveal their indicative features. This enables a nonscientist to begin to understand the building blocks of a scientific visual language as demonstrated here for the field of neuroscience. Having gained this understanding a graphic designer can then engage in meaningful collaborative work with scientists in that field.
Order?
There is order in language and it thrives by means of deep aesthetic primary patterns. Anthony Howell has advised that ‘sentences may be considered as objects’ and the visualisations presented here venture to pick a sentence up and turn it to the light so that we might see facets that are otherwise too implicit to notice or else so far buried as to seem invisible.
Meniscus
The primary site of investigation for this article lies within the problematic relationship between the moving image sequence (film or video) and its representation as a series of video stills for documentation in a textual format. The works presented in this article aim to present an alternative ancillary format to such documentation allowing for the temporal dimensions of video sequences to appear achronologically - all at once or out of order.
These practical outcomes therefore might offer comment on – or perhaps even collapse – the distance between the video still and the video sequence and its associated shortcomings in certain contexts. Beyond this further points are considered: do such works present a paradigm shift – with the video still becoming the sum of it's moving image parts? If so does the video still begin to occupy its own space as an individual artwork emancipated from its role as documentation for source footage?
Shatter
An exploration of pattern disruption in the creation of contemporary craft that reworks ceramic textiles and archival imagery.
Mottled Geometries: The Lure and Allure of the Pattern in the Carpet
Mottled Geometries considers ambiguities of perception as afforded by the textured matter of carpet patterning. The carpet is subjected to the intricacies and intimacies of close textural looking in which encounters with patterned carpets are conceived as affecting patterns of perception and consciousness as they dissemble dissolve and disappear. The carpet that hangs behind Sigmund Freud's couch is considered with the ‘unstable subject’ of Freudian psychoanalysis figuring as a carpet-in-the-making on the loom with the uneven patterns of the surface revealing the knots and fibres whereby both subject and carpet are formed.
Distance and Disruption: The Organized Disorder of the Body in Illness
Advancements in modern medicine and innovation in diagnosis indicate that we are all likely to experience illness of some form or another in our lifetime or through the lives of those we care about. Through the author's work with patients and those their share their time with this chapter contribution examines the development of her work through film and other media towards understanding the impact of illness as a lived encounter and the significance of “Waiting” as a profound disrupting feature of the alienated self in illness. In doing so she refers to the ongoing discourse surrounding Cartesian Dualism and the mind body problem explored through illness as a phenomenological consideration by Toombs and Carel and Steven Eastwood's thought-provoking film and accompanying essay The interval and the instant: Inscribing death and dying.
Drawing Fire
Fire is the indispensable metaphor a peerless symbolic talisman: light and heat spark and ash consummation and cleansing. Fire grows it sweeps it breathes it licks it smolders. Everything it touches is absolutely changed roughly translated into ash by the licking flame. It is chemistry and poetry at once. But how do you draw fire? It is an object with no surface. I can hold it in my hands but it will cost me. Does it have volume? Does it have geometry? Fire happens at the edge of chaos and order. How do we draw such a thing?
Mimesis: Nothings in Particular
Mimesis
- In classical Greece mimesis demanded beauty and truth but nowadays describes wider representational appreciations from the banal to the disquieting.
- Phenomenology suggests our core existential pattern is perception: building the chaos of raw data into understandable experiences. Mimesis translates these subjective events for broader audiences through art and literature.
- Heidegger states that things under our noses are invisible. These simple themes underpin my drawings which represent things first caught out of the corner of my eye. Graphite patterns immediately reappear as the objects that provoked them. My images are easy to follow and in turn I have followed in the steps of writers like Beckett and Perec as well as artists (from Chardin to the Precisionists and Pop Art) and photographers (Walker Evans Wright Morris). As everyday snapping on mobiles proves fascination with ordinariness is timeless and that like death and taxes mimesis will always be with us.
Global Ghost Map
This essay reflects on how drawing might engage us in a subjective connection to elsewhere. John Snow's use of mapping to evidence cholera as a water-borne disease current digital representations of place and the politics of contemporary disease outbreaks are considered. The artist goes looking for something while sitting still in place – seeking geographical indicators of human activity on the screen and translating these images through a process of mark making. Different registers of value are indicated by the sharp or poor image and patterns and traces of movement are deliberated as a process of unintentional drawing on the planet's surface. Empathetic connection to the other openness to visualising the patterns unfolding during times of pandemic and ecological crises are proposed as means of moving towards a different understanding of Planetary Health – that all life both local and distant matters.
Knotting Across Species: Creating Order from Chaos
How do different species use knots and does this process of making link us with other animals? This chapter explores knotty materials and how they are formed by different creatures in different environments. It explores the relationship between materials methods and situations and finds that the knots which link together all organisms are in the structure of our DNA.
Designing for the Real World: The Importance of Chaos
There is a side of urban planning and architecture that planners urban designers architects and their clients ignore at their peril: the un-categorised difficult to pigeonhole contingent activity that is the life force of cities and buildings. They see this activity as chaotic in need of control and moulding. Yet what this essay argues is that far from needing to control this what can emerge from this seeming chaos is a different resilient and more humane pattern for living.
Drawing Dynamic Patterns: The Protein Maze
Any visual representation is an abstraction from the complexity of living process and requires selecting some point of view. We are an interdisciplinary team of artist molecular scientist and philosopher of biology interested in drawing as a way of investigating the dynamic patterns of living processes. This short chapter presents a fragment from our project ‘Representing Biology as Process’ (2017-2021) in which we develop new methods for drawing processes at the molecular cellular and organismal scale. Here we focus on a few maze drawings we created as a metaphor and a model for the protein folding energy landscape. We detail how the maze drawing acts as a template in which to draw the dynamic pattern of the processes of protein folding binding and more.
Proteins are a fundamental and highly diverse unit of organisation common to all living organisms. An overwhelming majority of biological processes at the molecular level depend on the function of protein molecules and this is central to current efforts in biological and medical research.
The creation functional states and eventual release or recycling of a protein are spatiotemporally dynamic processes that have unique rhythms and patterns to observe. Here we are interested in the problem of representing protein dynamics and their multi-dimensional reality.
The current conventional image for representing protein folding (thermo)dynamics in biology is the ‘Folding funnel’. This is broadly speaking a downward-pointing cone adapted with additional geometric features to represent attributes of the energy landscape . In this model some features are represented well others are not. For example the cone suggests that proteins fold to a lowest energy state whereas in fact they may simply fold to a stable state (not necessarily the global energy minimum) that is relatively thermodynamically stable given the physiological constraints. In its current state the ‘Folding Funnel’ image does not function well as an intuitive image or teaching aid for example because the landscape fails to represent the undirected exploratory stochasticity of the trajectory experienced by an individual protein molecule.
Here we conceptualise the protein folding landscape as an n-dimensional manifold as it is commonly perceived. The images we create through drawing are a flat projection of that manifold.
It is common to reduce these high dimensional descriptions in order to create a more tangible representation – the process of creating a 2d or 3d view of high dimensional objects is termed ‘projection’.
In this collaboration we explore how representing protein dynamics can be addressed by participatory one to one drawing sessions and group ‘drawing labs’ where both artistic and scientific inputs interact with and affect the image to enhance iteratively the quality of connection with and observation of the phenomena of investigation.