RE: [-empyre-] Critical Spatial Practice

["Sally Jane Norman" <s.j.norman@newcastle.ac.uk>]

this is much easier to understand, thanks Kevin. To link it back to your ultra-compressed question though, might one not see the crafting of an environment open to sensory discovery as itself being a form of instrumentalisation? How do you define the instrument? I think this term has more pejorative connotations than it deserves - what do we work with, what's left if the instrument is maligned? Is it abusive to say that Cage's Variations IV, geared towards sensory discovery, instrumentalises our perception by ordering it temporally and spatially via a compositional act? Might the instrumentalisation implied in some of La Monte Young's or Turrell's work, trapping one's senses in the enigma of impossible wavelengths, be seen as a kind of hyper-instrumentalisation that frees them through blind and constantly thwarted fixation? Or maybe this is becoming even more cryptic than your question!
 
I enjoy the wild side!
 
best
sjn

________________________________

From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Kevin Hamilton
Sent: Mon 10/09/2007 2:09 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Critical Spatial Practice



Hey Sally Jane thanks for giving me a chance to clarify that wordy 
question -

I've benefited a great deal from recent work on the history of 
certain senses, on how the eye or ear is trained to perceive in 
certain ways and to certain ends. Harun Farocki's work, for example, 
has been of help to me in the way it surveys a myriad of sensory 
(mostly visual) disciplines. In such practices, eyes expect to see 
only certain things, and cannot see others. Or in /Hearing Things/, 
Leigh Eric Schmidt shows how certain Enlightenment technologies, or 
even proto-cinema Vaudeville entertainments, taught ears not to 
listen for the supernatural.

In an admittedly sloppy stroke, I've come to think about such 
approaches to the senses, and others we've learned about through the 
likes of Crary or Stafford, as instrumental in that they discourage 
discovery or contingency in the interest of specific productive ends. 
The surveillant eye perceives aberrance only to register and quash 
it. The disbelieving rational ear listens for the unexpected in order 
to reproduce it.

I would contrast this to an experience of the senses in which 
discovery or subversion is possible and even anticipated. I'm 
thinking here of sensation in which the senses are not primarily a 
means to production of certain effects; rather, they are a field for 
confrontation and discovery of the apparently non-sensible. In the 
best dialogue this happens - we allow ourselves to be altered by the 
experience of another - and I gather through other accounts, in 
animistic approaches to space. But I find such intersubjectivity 
typically described in terms of language, and not sensation.

In my experiences of rich spatial engagement, in which reflexivity is 
more than a tactic, openness to sensory discovery has been key.

Yikes, this does sound on the wild side, now that I read it.

Kevin


On Sep 9, 2007, at 3:53 PM, Sally Jane Norman wrote:

> 2) How can we understand and influence the material, social and
> political specificities of temporary or habitual perceptual practices
> without instrumentalizing sensation in the service of aesthetic
> affect or political effect?
>
> That's quite a question Kevin! I think I need your definition of 
> what you see as "instrumentalizing sensation". Some people might 
> say that it's inherent to art making. Framing perception might be a 
> "softer" term. I'm curious.
>
> Let's take a walk on the wild side - nice to "hear" you here.
>
> very best from Geordie land
>
> sjn
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: empyre-bounces@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Kevin 
> Hamilton
> Sent: Sun 09/09/2007 9:38 PM
> To: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: [-empyre-] Critical Spatial Practice
>
>
>
> Hello all.
>
> Thanks to Renate and Tim for initiating the topic, and for doing such
> a great job of publicizing it across the lists. Thanks to Millie and
> James as well, for launching a month of good discussions.
>
> Though I'll only be speaking here for myself, my connection to the
> topic of "Critical Spatial Practice" [CSP] is inseparable from my
> relationship to a few other people (who also read empyre). I've been
> talking, reading, and working with Nicholas Brown, Sarah Kanouse,
> Sharon Irish and Ryan Griffis on efforts surrounding this topic for a
> few years now. Others here at Illinois have also gathered around the
> topic in the interest of discussion, production, tours and writing. I
> would point to the individual projects of these colleagues, and some
> of our group work, before I would point to my own projects as
> examples of CSP. That said, I'm happy to participate in this
> discussion by introducing my view of our conversations and concerns.
>
> First, and simply - how do I use the term? For me, Critical Spatial
> Practice is a useful term for describing efforts to understand
> THROUGH ACTION the ways in which political and social subjecthood is
> a spatial, and therefore bodily, sensory concern. Attending to how
> subjecthood is granted or denied through organization of space and
> senses; how justice and injustice is carried out through the same;
> these are familiar theoretical concerns. Projects that I encounter as
> Critical in their engagement with Space employ theoretical
> examination primarily as part of action, constantly attending and
> adjusting to the ways in which one's presence constructs new spaces
> for others. To borrow from Mobility Studies, these projects pay
> attention and respond to the ways in which one person's movements
> occur in relation to, or even at the expense of, the lessened
> movements of others - especially when posed as "critique."
>
> /// Broad Questions
>
> These are some questions I keep coming back to in my engagement with
> the topic:
>
> 1) I've been surprised to see the thread so far focussed so much on
> questions of reception. As such, it's also been largely a discussion
> of Art, with some (to me) familiar assumptions about Art's capacity
> for fostering at least personal transformation, if not social change.
> How might we talk about examples of CSP without resorting to avant-
> garde models in which enlightened cultural producers educate,
> influence or enhance through "secular spiritualism" (phrase from
> Chris' posts) or perceptual/ethical superiority?
>
> 2) How can we understand and influence the material, social and
> political specificities of temporary or habitual perceptual practices
> without instrumentalizing sensation in the service of aesthetic
> affect or political effect? Can we talk about particular sensoria as
> more or less free or rich outside of an ends-oriented approach?
>
> 3) What about Art has been, or continues to be, useful to "Critical
> Spatial Practitioners"?
>
> And some questions to ask of particular projects:
>
> 1) To what ends are a group's efforts to mis-use, re-use or enliven
> particular spaces put by the economic conditions that make a project
> possible?
>
> 2) Who is a particular project for? As an artist I tend to think
> about this question in terms of "audience," but for many of the
> projects I associate with CSP, this terminology makes less sense, and
> even hinders the work. We might ask who a project is "for" in terms
> of justice, or even in terms of discourse. Whom does a project stand
> for, or from whom does it seek a response, if any?
>
>
> /// Some examples
>
> Here at Illinois, there are certainly a collection of examples that
> recur in our exploration of these questions. Nick Brown and Ava
> Bromberg included many of these and more in their current project, /
> Just Spaces/. (http://justspaces.org/projects.htm.) We've also talked
> a good bit about the works of Multiplicity, The Long March, Suzanne
> Lacy and Stephen Willats. Several of the artists from Mass Moca's
> Interventionists exhibition have come through here as well in the
> past few years, and the successful incorporation of that show's
> language into institutional practices - conference panels, job
> descriptions, graduate theses - have given us plenty to talk about.
>
> We could do worse in this thread than to pick a project from such
> examples and discuss it. But with those examples on hand as a way of
> vaguely orienting how I've experienced the subject of CSP, I'll
> provide some more background on how I came to the topic, and then
> wait for Catherine to post as well.
>
>
>
> /// CSP at Illinois
>
> Critical Spatial Practice is the name of a reading group here at
> Illinois, now in its second year of (fairly minimal) University
> sponsorship. We borrowed the term from the work of Jane Rendell, who
> inspired us during a visit to campus as part of a symposium about
> walking. In between our individual busy schedules we've been reading,
> researching, writing, and planning on more projects than we've
> actually realized. We ask questions about how the spaces we live in
> are produced, and we look to apply what we learn from those questions
> toward the construction of new, even temporary spaces where we live.
> We try to do these things at the same time. (For a good introduction
> to some of our common themes and concerns, I would point to the just
> published collection of interviews we conducted for Critical
> Planning, a journal out of UCLA. http://www.spa.ucla.edu/critplan/
> current_issue.htm)
>
> What I find valuable in our group's discussions is a hesitance to
> separate practice from theory when it comes to understanding and
> influencing spaces. For example, if racial injustice is constructed
> in part spatially, through everything from Indigenous Land Law to the
> proliferation of racist sport mascots, then any effort to create a
> space of reflection and critique is also implicated. Rather than
> seeking spaces of refuge from negative influence, the projects I find
> most helpful about CSP engage reflection in action, through
> (difficult) processes that require critique to be part of specific
> social commitments. A central challenge here is to keep critique as
> an action, and not an attitude or position. (An interesting post by
> Gene Ray to this end just appeared on Thing via http:// <http:///>  <http:///>
> transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1189078355).
>
> The most useful metaphor here, and one that began my engagement with
> the topic, is still that of a walk. In 2003-2004, we organized the
> year-long symposium series Walking as Knowing as Making, an imperfect
> spatial act (not an "intervention") here at Illinois. Other events,
> like Nick and Ava's Just Spaces (http://www.justspaces.org <http://www.justspaces.org/>  <http:// 
> www.justspaces.org/> ) have had
> more focus, more attention to there own spaces, and certainly more
> academic rigor. But through a combination of uncomfortable speaker
> rosters and roaming meeting locations, we stumbled onto some
> productive imbalances.
>
> A walk constructs the walker, through where she walks and what she
> senses, but a walk also constructs the space around it, through that
> walker's presence in a place. To attend to and understand how this is
> happening minute-by-minute is to call so much attention to steps as
> to cause a misplaced foot or two. But through oscillation of
> reflection ("who am I IN this space" "who am I FOR this space") and
> action (moving onward), a path might be wisely altered as informed by
> experience. A conversation with a co-walker might change through new
> knowledge gained from seeing and being seen. If this sounds romantic,
> it's because we're not walking right now - you're reading and I'm
> typing.
>
> (I think here too of the metaphor introduced by Erin Manning and
> Brian Massumi at Sally Jane's Flows Conference in Newcastle this
> summer - that of the gentle "steering" of a co-walker to the right or
> left through a series of infinitesimal adjustments in relation to one
> another.)
>
> The metaphor of the walk keeps in play the phenomenal and the
> political, the influence and presence of bodies and senses in the
> construction and experience of just and unjust spaces. Also
> important, the walk has been so blithely celebrated by so many
> cultural producers at this point that we have plenty of warnings to
> keep in mind. For starters, contemporary psychogeographical
> experiments and the embrace of de Certeau's tactics by walkers may
> engage space, but "critique" is often relegated in this work to the
> realm of symbol, where it is easily smoothed into operation by city
> planners and creative industries.
>
> I'll end there for now, having set out a few broad questions, some
> account of our history with the topic here at Illinois, and some
> theoretical concerns I've had around the topic. I'd be happy to take
> up any of these, but also want to give a chance to the threads
> already started to respond and continue. The thread this week about
> Interfaces is one that is also of great interest to me, though it's
> not come up as often in my work on CSP. After Catherine posts, we'll
> see where the conversation goes.
>
> Kevin Hamilton
> Assistant Professor of New Media and Painting/Sculpture
> University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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