Situationist Drawing Device

Architecture & Technology Part 1, Diploma YR5 2011

The Situationist Drawing Device was developed as a desire to extend the capacity of the body to act in the world. It is an extension to our body, we wear it to use the equipment, we navigate through space to experience a new perception of the environment. In connecting various parts of the body, the device records a journey taken in an altered state of perception through drawing. A choreographic notation of vision and movement are interpreted from the markings on the drawing board.

The device is designed and fabricated such that when it is used on site, the interaction between the human body and this specific site condition is heightened through the existence of the intermediary and interpretative tool. The device provided the initial reading of the site and was conceived as a concept model for the ideas that I developed for the Scrap Metal Refinery.

The project emerged at the boundary, the point at which two conditions meet. Bordering, yet disconnected, a place for dwelling, learning and play exists alongside a place of industry amongst the discards of society.

The site is located in Dunkirk, Nottingham. It is on the boarder between two communities, residential and industrial, separated by a rail bridge. Intrigued by the two different conditions, a threshold, under the rail bridge, I began experimenting through the development of a spatial device to dissolve the boundary conditions.

Initially the first device aimed to alter our perception of the boundary through the simple notion of seeing forwards and backwards instantaneously, where two conditions on either sides of the boundary were combined and blurred.

Device Concept

As each eye retina receives different images, both conditions blur into one and simultaneously alternate - phasing in and out over the other. This blurring effect, as known as retinal rivalry, creates a new perception of the site. Device was initially adapted from Pseudoscope [Greek, false view] which is a binoucular instrument that reverses depth perception. The idea of reversing left and right eye vision was adapted to reverse forward and backward vision.

Site Perception Drawing

Expanding from the static point, it was developed for use along a route bisecting the borderline, incorporating a bodily experience as one navigates through the newly perceived space.

Final Device

Device Diagram

Situationist Drawing

Residential & Industrial Visual Mapping

Drawing Interpretation

Residential Vs Industrial Visual Mapping

Residential Vs Industrial Visual Mapping Tests

An extract from Re-Thinking Technology Essay:

Reversing the notion of loss of consciousness through the mediations of technology

The writing below focuses on the ideas behind the technology device, a drawing machine that records how we perceive the environment. Through investigating some of the theories behind rethinking technology I aim to illustrate the architectural implications devised from the device. In particular, I will be questioning - if the device records how we perceive and interact with the environment, could the drawings set a precedent for how architectural spaces are experienced? In doing so, as Peter McCleary suggests in Some Characteristics of a New Concept of Technology, could technology generate new perceptions of our environment that questions a new way of thinking towards foreseeing new possibilities of concepts in architectural design?

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The underlining theme for this essay is based on the notion of loss of consciousness through the mediations of technology. The loss of consciousness I would like to address refers to the withdrawal of user’s conscious awareness from the environment, in the process of using technology. The conception of the environment in withdrawal from our perception is an analysis of Peter McCleary’s concept on the shift in our perception from ‘transparent’ to ‘opaque’ through the mediations of technology; which was derived from Martin Heidegger’s example of ‘ready-to-hand’ and ‘present-at-hand’ analysis. Nevertheless, controversial to this statement loss of consciousness - withdrawal of user’s conscious awareness, I would like to demonstrate the ideas behind the technology device that I have produced in my studio project. The device is a drawing machine that records how we perceive and experience the environment. It is an extension to our body in the sense that we wear it in order to use the equipment. Connected to various parts of our body it tracks our bodily movement as we navigate through space. Thus, technology device is employed here as a mediator between us and the environment; accordingly to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s examination of how instruments become incorporated into the body schema such as ‘the embodied relations of a blind man and the world through the mediations of his cane’. Through the mediations of technology the user acquires knowledge of the environment, therefore as the title suggests, the technology device reverses the notion of loss of consciousness.

To consider the notion of loss of consciousness I will begin by examining Peter McCleary’s analysis in depth. In his thesis he states that ‘the world is opaque to man, the world itself recedes from man.’ He describes that throughout the historical transformation of technology we have encountered the gradual experiential loss of the environment. He takes up on Martin Heidegger’s analysis of ‘ready-to-hand’ relationship with technology and explains that ‘we have experienced the gradual loss of transparency (encountering the world through the equipment) and gain in opacity (experiencing the characteristics of the equipment and the equipment encounters the world)’. In consideration to this concept, if the user’s conscious awareness is in withdrawal from the environment through the mediations of technology but technology performs to mediate us and the environment, consequently heightening our conscious awareness of the environment. Therefore, the fundamental question I would like to address is if technology performs to provide us with better understanding of our world, as McCleary proposes, could technology bring informative response towards how we perceive the environment and transform our perceptions of how we perceived the world free from technology? If the device captures how we perceive the environment through analytical drawings, could we then appropriate these recordings towards constructing a new space? Does this open up new possibilities for architects, a design methodology that would be appropriate-to us and the environment?

To better understand the technology device as a mediator between the body and the world I would like to demonstrate the ideas behind this device as an extension to our body. Specifically, technology has been produced as a desire to extend the capacity of the body to act in the world - we wear it and navigate through space to experience a new perception of the environment - where parts of the device functions as an extension to our bodily parts, providing a prosthetic relationship with the body. As explained by Jonathan Hale, Bernard Stiegler considers that: ‘The prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua “human”’. Technology as an extension to our body ‘prosthesis’ is not seen as a replacement but added to our bodily parts. The device consists of two parts: the first part consists of set of mirrors as an attachment to our eyes and the second part consists of set of pens that records how we perceive, which becomes an attachment to our hands. Therefore, through this particular technology device we are drawing how we perceive as we navigate through space.

The idea behind this device is that it restricts our visual fields to manual movement, in order to track the subconscious eye movements. That is to say, often, we respond to our surrounding through automated response. So in this example, since the visual fields are manually controlled, the user is able to think before responding to look towards a direction. Interpreting from Gestalt discovery, ‘one perceives one’s surroundings as requiring one to perform certain actions or as being appropriate for certain forms of behavior. The actions one sees one’s environment as requiring are determined by what one can do in that environment, together with one’s current task.With the task in hand one has to manually operate the device in order to respond to auditory stimuli. One hears something then thinks to extend the visual periphery towards the audial activity. Therefore it would be reasonable to think that the technology device captures activities that happen around us, thereby performs to heighten ones spatial awareness through audial tactility. Consequently, the drawings are an analysis of how the user perceives the environment. Architecturally speaking technology here performs as a tool for site analysis.

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In the act of seeing this subjective world, where both conditions are blurred, our experience has now reversed from opaque experience back to transparent experience of the environment. Interpreting from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theories, ‘we perceive the world through the medium of the experiencing body’, hence it could also be said that we perceive the subjective world through the technology device that is an embodiment to our body. Jonathan Hale explains that Taylor Carmen had once said: ‘As bodily perceivers we are necessarily part of the perceptible world we perceive; we are not just in the world, but of it.’ Technology, like flesh in its intertwining of body and the world (as explained by Merleau-Ponty), can be interpreted as a means of communication. Technology device communicates the dialectical relationship between us and the world. Therefore it would be appropriate to suggest that the subjective world can be seen as an extension of our mind.

To better understand the phenomenon of the technology device as an embodiment to our mind that communicates us and the world, I would like to consider Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ thesis. It has been described that cognitive process is a coupled system that reciprocates in a two-way interaction between the human organism and an external entity. In a general sense the technology device could be considered as the cognitive system since it provides us with a better understanding of the world. Taking up on the scenarios of the technology device, the way it restricts our visual fields to manual actions moreover amplifying audial tactility are epistemic actions which aid and augment cognitive processes thereby gaining user’s conscious awareness of the environment. Furthermore we are actively engaging with the embodied technology to experience a new perception of our external environment hence this coupling of embodied technology and a better understanding of the world can be analysed as an ‘active externalism’.

To extend this concept of extending our mind through embodied technology I would like to further consider a term ‘Hermeneutic technics’ that Don Ihde discusses in A Phenomenology of Technics. He considers the phenomenology of technics as two categories of embodiment - ‘Technics embodied and Hermeneutic technics’. So far we have considered the human-technology relation as an embodiment to our body, extension to our body, where we are bodily engaged with technology to act in the world. It is now worthy of mentioning the concept of hermeneutic relation. Ihde describes that hermeneutic refers to textual interpretation, where the embodied relation occurs through reading. Through interpretation of the drawings we gain a hermeneutic relation with the world we have perceived, Jonathan Hale had described: ‘Embodied knowledge of material reality is thus reduced to an interpretation of data - a linguistic abstraction of reality.’

Further, since technology device is considered as extending our mind into the newly perceived world and our experience of the world is constructed through analytical drawings. Could we then imply that, to interpret the drawings would be to de-construct the existential relation between us and the world; and to employ the analytical drawings towards foreseeing new possibilities of concepts in architectural design would be a methodology to re-construct how we perceived the world. Does such architecture impose a performance-based methodology, where external forces dynamics of forces of the surrounding governs the design processes, a harmonized relation with its surrounding. Does such thinking utilize the utopian visions where material architecture is sited in harmony with pre-construction state of nature?

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