Sensuous aggregates

On being knocked down by a car at night

There are moments in life when time and space seem to lose their hold on you. For example when I was knocked down by a car when crossing a road and everything was happening at the same time, a sort of clumping of experience in a way very different to 'normality'. Thinking about the experience from a distance I'm reminded of other people's attempts to describe the thing I might call an accelerated intuited moment. The term ‘sensuous aggregate’ is one taken from Husserl who used it to describe a ‘unified intuition’ (Farber, 2006) and is a term used to describe the various feelings and bodily knowledge that come to us through pre-cognitive thought. This ‘sensuous aggregate’ is something that I might also call a ‘feeling tone’ when describing an experience. In both 'Logical Investigations' and 'Ideas' Husserl argues that our perceptual consciousness is based in the “animation” or interpretation of sensory data or hyle. In philosophy, 'hyle' is a noun that means matter, especially matter in its original, unorganised state. In my case a road and a car in the rain at night. It can also refer to anything that receives form from outside itself, i.e. 'that which is formed'. Hyle when brought together with some form of representation, could I think be another type of sensuous aggregate. This is the intuitive or as Williford (2013, p. 1) puts it “in-the-flesh” aspect of perception, something we discover, rather than create, another possible bridge between consciousness and the experienced world. I would argue this is another aspect of what we also call our 'feeling tone'. It's the something that lies behind statements such as, "It's all going well", or "I'm anxious about something", "this is very exciting" or "I'm going to die". The general summation of my response to stimulus, determines my flight or fight response and is the overall judgement my embodied senses are making in response to what is happening out there. That judgement depends on the form I give to the perceptions I receive. 

If so, another way to approach the images I have been making is to see them as diagrams of 'sensuous aggregates'. 

Sensuous: relating to or affecting the senses rather than the intellect.

Aggregates: a whole formed by combining several separate elements.

Often more than one sense is activated at the same time when I have a feeling. So when I'm drawing I try to bring together into one representation more than one feeling tone. Perhaps a sense of cold shiver with a knotted stomach and a vision of an empty landscape on a misty day. 

Deleuze and Guattari in response I presume to their reading of Husserl, stated that art relies on the creation of sensuous aggregates. (Rodowick in Furstenau, 2010, p. 31) So art itself could in some ways be pulled into this clump of aggregates. A clump that has now reminded me of 'the paradox of the heap', a philosophical puzzle that explores the vagueness of language and the difficulty of defining vague concepts. A heap is by definition an amorphous concept, and so is a sensuous aggregate. I know what I think I'm getting at but it might only be poetry that can save me. Heap, gravel, sand etc. out of which we build roads and buildings. But not that, something else.

I thought I saw an angel

It looked like a glowing stone

It was committed to religion 

One built on death

I picked up the stone

Put it in my pocket

In the dark it opened wings out from its back

It had had a vision of my future

When I was knocked down time seemed suspended. The car lights were frozen in my mind, but I was planted into the road, slammed flat. The image that eventually arrived is now seen by myself as a sensuous diagram, starting as a very rough drawing in a notebook, it began to morph as I began to daydream what it was like to be almost dead. It was as if I was part of a scene from a film, embedded into the scenery, but still allowed to play my part. I can see the scene now, a sensuous street, at night everything has an animist soul; the lights, the glistening road, wet from continuous rain, dark shops brooding, a stolid deep red post box, looking on, mouth open as if to say something, my shopping dispersed over the damp road, broken eggs leaking yokes in the rain, as I too dissolve into the flowing waters of the gutter. But I survived and I thanked by guardian angel.

It's now over a year since the accident, but I still see myself in that moment, as if I was outside my body, yet in it. Working with people who have had traumatic accidents has reminded me that I am making images for them to inhabit as much as myself, so images will need to be made like animist objects, so that they can be inhabited by other beings, put on like clothes or crawled into like a tent. 

Reading

Aaltonen, Minna-Ella (2011) Touch, taste & devour: phenomenology of
film and the film experiencer in the cinema of sensations. MPhil(R) thesis. Obtained at: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2666/01/2011aaltonenmphilr.pdf accessed on 14. 11. 11 

Farber, M (2006) The foundation of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl and the quest for a rigorous science of philosophy London: AldineTransaction

Furstenau, M (2010) The film theory reader London: Routledge

Harvey G. (2015) The Handbook of Contemporary Animism London: Routledge

Williford, K. (2013) 'Husserl’s hyletic data and phenomenal consciousness', Phenom Cogn Sci.
1​ DOI: 10.1007/s11097-013-9297-z.

See also:

I swear I saw this

The topology of dreams

Drawing on experience

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Some thoughts on art and spirituality

3D Printing: Solidified drawings

The advent of the 3D printer has in several ways changed the relationship between two and three dimensional thinking. Several years ago I had to learn AutoCad, a software program that at the time was a top of the range 3D thinking and visualisation tool. The software enabled you to build simple solids around an x, y and z axis. Once an image had been built you had an easy to read wire frame model that could be rotated on screen and printed off. This was back in the 1980s and I used it to draw simple perspective wire frame objects that I then exported into a 2D drawing program and added to images that I was then developing using a paint program. I was essentially using these early computer programs as printmaking tools. At the time I clearly remember using a wax layer thermal printer that deposited transparent wax that combined colours optically in the same way that a 4 colour printer does now, but of course the layering process meant it was much thicker and the wax suggested a physicality that contemporary printers have lost. 

Wax print: 1987

The image of a tank in this print was drawn using AutoCad, I was trying to replicate the cigarette packet tanks my father used to make for me when I was a boy. The image looks very dated now but I find the excitement of 3D printing possibilities feels similar to the excitement generated 30 years ago by the introduction of painting programs and basic AutoCad wireframe modelling tools. 
More recently I had to learn 123D Catch, a 3D wireframe modelling software. This was software that allows you to take photographs of an object from as many different positions as possible and then load them up to a cloud; they were then processed in order to make  a wireframe 3D model of what you had made. I tried it with a pig model I had done as part of something else and then played with the image to see how it could be manipulated. Once you had completed the editing phase you could then export the information into 123D Make, a program that was linked to 3D printer outputs. All now obsolete as 123D Catch has gone the way of many programs before it. 

I did use some of the wire frame drawings I made of fires to make prints, but I never really got to grips with the technology.

Screenprint: 2014

However I have recently returned to thinking about how 3D printing can be used to extend my ideas. This time I'm more interested in the decision making processes involved and as someone always worried about things, I have begun to reflect on whether or not computers will eventually be able to take over creativity from us and that consciousness, that quality that all creative people love to cite as being central to their work, is perhaps over valued.

I came across an interesting way of thinking about 3D printing a couple of years ago at a drawing conference and this rekindled my interest and made me think about the potential of working in this area again. Corneel Cannearts was working with what he termed 'allographic machines'. He had adopted a Nelson Goodman term, ‘allographic drawing’ as a way to think about drawing and its relationship to drawing technologies, citing the first drawing as being done by tracing around the edge of a shadow. It was however when he introduced the term 'encoded matter', that I became very interested in the process. I have often used the term 'material thinking' when talking about drawing and his concept of 'encoded matter' felt very close to what I was thinking about. (You can find my original notes on Cannearts presentation here)

The creating of 3D forms digitally is totally different from making objects directly by using physical interaction with a material. However I have been making quite a lot of ceramics lately and at the same time I have been thinking more and more about the role of human beings in relation to the bigger picture of how things interact. (See my posts linked to object orientated ontology) A few months ago I wrote this, "What Object Orientated Ontology is proposing to do is to help us to step outside of our human centred framework and to consider how things might be if everything was simply about 'objects'. For example, the 'life' of a stone is a life that inhabits its own timeframe, a timeframe that we as humans would not be able to understand or perceive, our lives in comparison to a stone's existence being as short as a mayfly". I was thinking more and more about how creativity can be seen as 'things coming together', not just about something that only humans can do. 
Back in the studio this morning, I'm making drawings using water based paints and inks. As the grains of material flowed over the now buckling paper, pools of liquid kept forming and previously drawn on surfaces were emerging and disappearing as these pools developed, all mainly out of my control. It was a sort of dance, whereby I needed to learn to move and flow with the materials and their own inclinations. In effect my contribution is just one part of a process that also includes what water does, what paper does and what pigments do. When I make ceramics I'm very aware that my fingers are very limited as to what they can do, arthritis prevents any fine control, so I have learnt to follow what the clay needs to do. So how does this way of thinking work when using 3D software?

The first time I used the technology I very quickly became interested in how the hollow shells could be manipulated, and in the image of a divided pig above, you can see that the surface that the pig was on when I took the initial photographs has become an integral part of the new image. What interested me at the time was that the camera could not differentiate between one thing and another, a fact that seemed to ask questions of our word orientated world view. We separate the ground from the object because we have separate words for them, but what if there were no defining words? The technology was in some ways 'thinking' without my intervention.

This time I felt more prepared for these issues and wanted to be able to control or at least set up an illusion of control within the situation.

I began the process with a drawing, I have made several of these images of people wrestling, their heads merging together as they feel out each other's body, ready to throw as soon as they find a weakness in the other person's stance. I'm always searching for images that I can use as allegories and this was one I felt was getting somewhere. I was thinking that in opposition we become more and more like the person we oppose. So the next stage was to make these images in clay.

The figures became more merged as I made them, arms belonging to both figures and I thought these were a better resolution to the problem than the initial drawings. It was at this stage that the possibility of going on to use 3D printing presented itself. I had been fascinated by the way that clay's 'clumpiness' sort of controlled what was coming out and I was interested in how when you fire things, you have to let go and see what happens. The surfaces were finally resolved by applying two different types of wax with soft cloths, again something I hadn't predicted, but which came about as a result of me trying things out.

So how could I use the computer technology and still allow for the material to think for itself?

The first stage is imaging and I was using a special camera that had 4 sensitive lenses.

The ceramic was placed on a turntable and the camera on a tripod. (You don't need to do this in order to get 3D information, you could simply move the camera around the object and take images but I felt this too random). What was interesting was that you could set the object up to be scanned in such a way that part of it was always hidden, or in shadow as far as the 3D camera was concerned. I.e. you can control how much information to give the software to work with. Gradually as the image is rotated the 3D skin is built up and you see it emerge on screen. 



Sometimes the missing areas are due to reflection but the more the object is rotated the more information gaps are filled. However a 3D printer abhors a vacuum and when there is a hole, as can be seen emerging in the image above between the neck/head and the arm, the software will deduce that something is needed to fill the gap. The blue image below, shows what happens when the software begins to render the image for 3D printing, it somehow deduces what to do by responding to surrounding surface details and fills in the gap with its own 'invention'. 

When you come to set the image up for 3D printing there are a series of options that allow you to engage with the areas of missing information. One area you can manipulate is the orientation of the image in relation to the base plate. Once set, (and this is always necessary because the x, y, z axis as set on the camera is not the same as on the printer), you can ask the computer to add supporting structures to any areas that would in effect be floating and these are the columns that are  holding the structure up. The strange rounded 'feet' are the result of the camera not having the bottom of the legs on one side of the ceramic in the frame when images were taken. The computer software has 'guessed' what these would be like. This combination of actual readings, the computer guessing how to resolve areas it didn't have any information for and the fact that it needed to invent structures to hold up 'floating' forms, finally resulted in the images below. 

I am now beginning a second set of models, whereby I'm trying to increase the sense of scale that the supporting structures provide. Can I trigger a reading that is even more like a 'monster attacking a city'?

The process has moved the idea on quite a long way. I'm fascinated by the way that the more you let go of a process the more it seems to run in directions that make much more sense than if you were in control. In particular in this case it has taken me right back to films I saw as a boy in the 1950s and 60s. They must still haunt my imagination. 

Model of the monster in the film, 'The Angry Red Planet'

Rodan from the Godzilla films

Both these films rely on model making and filming the models from a low angle so that they appear much larger then they really are. I have done exactly the same with the 3D printed model, an aspect of 3D drawing and thinking that I put up a post on a couple of years ago; 'when making models to work from'. 

One of the most interesting contemporary artist working with 3D printing technology is Nate Boyce.

Nate Boyce

Boyce is interested in the illusion of space as emerging from the history of painting and at the same time is a sculptor interested in how form occupies mass within space. In the middle ground is 3D printing, a process relying entirely on a drawing convention that emerged from the Renaissance. 

Sumit Sarker

Sumit Sarker also works under the name Kriksix. He is based in Manchester and is working to combine marble sculpture with 3D printing, alongside augmented reality and projection mapping. He is looking to create totally immersive audio/visual/sculptural experiences, and is able to perfectly fit together stone, plastic, wood and metal because of the holistic digital nature of the shaping process. The video below shows how drawing is again central to the thinking process he goes through and it reinforces my own understanding of how drawing is central to all 3D digital thinking. 

Sumit Sarker: The evolution of a sculptural idea

See also:

3D animation

Computer generated art and coding 

Thinking through an alternative idea about space and matter

Letting things ‘happen’

One of the common difficulties we all face is being able to let things happen. We have a tendency to predict what we want an outcome to be, but within art practice this can often be a hindrance rather than a help. Within Buddhist thinking in order to be in the now, to live life without worrying about ‘self’ or trying to break away from the all-consuming need to be unique, you need to develop a form of concentration that sits outside of the self, you might think of this as a type of concentration that might focus on on a mark or a brushstroke or a piece of paper, this is when drawing becomes a practice very like meditation.

The philosopher Heidegger had a concept that he called ‘at hand’. As in what you have at hand, what is simply there to be used.  ‘At hand’ is what you do when you just pick something up and use it, you might for instance need the door propping open and use a chair because it was ‘at hand’. Richard Wentworth has a collection of photographs he calls ‘Making do and getting by’, which are examples of this type of activity. Basically it is unselfconscious making.  When you draw you are sometimes doing exactly this, just responding to what is there. In everyday life, even though we might try to, we are rarely able to control the outcomes of our actions, and we can embed this acceptance in practice. Acceptance is perhaps a key word here. One aspect of Buddhist thought is that if you are to develop acceptance you need to learn to avoid craving for things.

You could argue that one ‘craving’ some of us have is for sense to be made, and we sometimes use theory to help us make that sense. However, when you are in the process of making something you are often lost in the making. So how can you reconcile the fact that you are often asked to write about what you are doing and the fact that when you are drawing you need to ‘let go’ and allow the process of making to take over.

Barbara Bolt states; “Heidegger’s discussion of responsibility and indebtedness provide us with quite a different way to think about artistic practice. In the place of an instrumentalist understanding of our tools and material, this mode of thinking suggests that in the artistic process, objects have agency and it is through the establishing conjunctions with other contributing elements in the art that humans are co-responsible for letting art emerge.”

She is arguing that artists work directly with their materials and this ‘cooperation’ with a material, such as charcoal on paper, or clay or metal, allows for their work to ‘emerge’. This is a type of material thinking. It also puts a focus on art making as a process, rather than looking at it as a series of objects to be contemplated. This relates again to the concept of acceptance. If your pen nib breaks for example, you can either get a new one or in that moment respond to the new mark making possibilities it has; if your paper has a flaw in it you can build this in as part of the image making process. This is again using what is at hand. If this is the case the final outcome is always unknown, therefore it is more likely that we will discover new things.

So how can this work? Think of making work by setting up situations where your materials can behave naturally.  How does gravity affect them, how far can an ink spread or how thickly can paint be laid down, how does an applicator affect what is being applied? Think of how you might help these substances fulfill their potential. If working with images there can be a dialogue between this process of materials discovery and image development. Watercolour washes can hold within them the potential to also be read as people, landscapes or still-lifes and so can charcoal drawings, but they will become very different things. If you are working on a computer this is exactly the same process, what is the potential of Illustrator as a tool? It will shape and change your imagery as much as when you are trying to make an image using a pencil. The point is, you must be attuned to the possibilities that present themselves and remain sensitive to the media being used, rather than trying to force the materials to make what is already in your head. If not you will always be disappointed by the fact that what you are doing is not as good as what you wanted it to look like before you started making. Of course you need an idea to enable you to start, but ‘letting things happen’ might allow you to discover something far better than your initial idea. This is a deeper insight into materials handling.

Another way to look at this is an acceptance of accidents. Life itself has evolved because of successful mutations or errors in the process of replication. In order to ‘accept’ these changes an organism needs to adapt to them and adaptations contribute to the fitness and survival of individuals.

Going back for a moment to think about mimesis (see earlier posts) Stephen Halliwell points to "world-reflecting" and "world-simulating" theories of representation. In this case we have a “world simulating” theory of representation. The work evolves and emerges in a similar way to how other things in the world evolve and change in relation to their environment. This type of interaction is one of autopoiesis. The deeper implications of this are fleshed out in Fritiof Capra’s book ‘Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter’, which is a wonderful text that allows the reader to build a wider framework within which to think about our interactions with the totality of any environment.

 

David Hockney ‘Accident Caused by a Flaw in the Canvas’

Further reading

 

Bolt, B (2004) Heidegger, Handlability and Praxical Knowledge Melbourne: IBTauris

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Halliwell, S (2002) The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems New York: Princeston

Capra, F. (1997) Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter London: Anchor

Sennett, R (2009) The Craftsman London: Penguin

Pallasmaa, J (2009) The Thinking Hand London: John Wiley

http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/deliberate-accident-art

http://v2.nl/publishing/the-art-of-the-accident

Richard Wentworth 'Making do and getting by'

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