'Empty every night'
“(They all speak of the opening of place, of the discretion of its giving and the indiscretion of its gifts: Shakespeare’s caskets, the crates, suitcases, tins in Goethe, the jars of Kleist, of Simmel, Bloch, and Adorno, Keats’ urn, Kierkegaard’s drawers and secretaries, Mallarme’s cineraire amphore, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s golden pot and Henry James’ golden bowl, casket (and castration) in Freud, geodes and jars in Rilke and Celan, la valise and la cruche in Ponge, Kafka’s suitcase, Beckett’s ashbins, la vase in Lacan, el cántaro roto of Octavio Paz, Alladin’s lamp. Likewise all archives, books, libraries. (And all brackets and parentheses.) They are the topos of literature, l’espace litteraire, and that of graphic art, of painting, sculpture, architecture. And of music. In them the spaces of our languages present themselves.)”
— Werner Hamacher, ‘Amphora (Extracts)’
in Assemblage, No. 20, Violence, Space (Apr., 1993)
This semester we will ascertain place (— just not geometrically), and pixels (— just not colouring), and act (— take action) upon its architectonics to question what is inherent in the representation of things — those which are on the raster screen and on the picture plane and on the imagination.
This course takes a part in the composition of a four year report on the architectonic image, its materialities and its engenderings. It is aimed to students which are interested in speculative ways, through technic and poetic gestures, of treating images and how to think architectonically their concerns and connections, of both material and immaterial domains, to the practicing of theory and architecture. Each student will work on one moving image (the act-clip) annotated by diverse didascalie (pl. διδασκαλία; caption, stage direction, note) while purposing the common repository of the course’s visual and written materials. Such doings should be considered an exercise of the effective keeping of distance, just like “as Benjamin determines aura: ‘a remoteness no matter how near’, their remotenearness, their dis-stance” (Hamacher)— thus setting off a particular investigation on the field of action of the great visual scramble: pixels, figures, cuts, colors, sections, faces, drops, etc.
The subject of the course proceeds through a methodological emphasis on composition (“to put together, to collect a whole from several parts”, from com “with, together” (see com-) + ponere “to place” (past participle positus; see position (n.)) disrupting the attention to creativity that design discourse accredits to novelty and specialisation. Instead, by focusing on the architectonic gesture of granting of space, this approach is aimed to facilitate a direct ‘placing-with’ that does not conflate to the region of habitual thought those constellations aiming at diverse temporalities, origins, pedigrees, quantities, forms and locations. For such purpose, the course lectures cover a variety of topics ranging from sound design to philosophy, ecology to digital imaging, meteorology to literary tropes, art history to physics, etc. The course weekly exercises, on the other hand, build upon iterations on the same source images into their act-clip and the aggregation of further detailing. As a final submission students are expected to deliver (additionally to their act-clip) a meta-clip to critically unfold the doings of their exercises.
Also during this semester we offer the course VU CODE in combination with VU ACT for those students interested in thinking about expanding the notion of ‘site-context’. The VU ACT confronts its definition of place to the emancipation of images from their environment, exposing them to a scaleless distance; for this reason VU CODE turns scalarity, the many scales of the planetary-garden (Clement), into its motif to attend ‘site-context’ representations and it employs the usual tools of the classic architecture project (line drawing and simple hatching) into its means for exploring the strata of a ‘grounding’ of images, one that considers the question: how to render this continuum between nature and technics?
VU CODE will be held on Thrusdays between 10-13H.
Course Materials
An image bank would be provided, as well as text excerpts and layout examples. Adobe programs After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop would be used as software but proficiency is not required. Licenses for such software would not be provided.
Language
The course will be provided in English and so is the preferred language for all other communications.
The course ACT is a 3 ECTS VU course, which means that lecture/discussion/participation as well as the submitted exercises compose your final grading (60% for the submitted exercises and an extra 40% for active participation during the live sessions). Our sessions will not be customarily recorded nor made available online. Live attendance (presence or online, TBD based on COVID-19 regulations applying on the date) is a general requirement. For those students unable to join every week (with exception of illness or by reason of force majeure) between on Tuesdays 10-13H, it will not be possible to take part in ACT this semester.
Submitting all completed exercises is mandatory to be considered eligible for grading. Attendance and participation to all sessions is required.
