Philosophy Of Drawing

This article presents a brief report of a first-person investigation through drawing, discussing how serially developed drawing can be understood to express the becoming of 'now' – the present moment in time. By employing a phenomenological approach, the notion that drawing expresses this idea is treated as an assumption, meaning a hypothesis to be tested through practice and theory combined. This occurs as part of my developing research practice, where I look to ‘perform philosophy in a non-philosophical way’ (Emoe 2014). Rather than treat art as an object for philosophy, I use philosophy to question a thought that I, as a practitioner, believe is immanent to drawing as form of art – that drawing itself is a form of becoming, based on the intentionality underpinning the temporal experience of drawing.

Paper placing the drawings within 'The Elemental Force of Charcoal: Drawing at the Borough' in a wider context, with reference to seismic shifts that occurred in arts education and drawing practices of the 20th century, as well as the historical use of charcoal as a medium. It is a written version of a tour presented on 29 January 2016 at the Borough Road Gallery as part of SLAM Fridays .

A study is a subcategory of drawing in which an artist tests elements that may not be worked out with the full clarity of a finalized composition. When such sketches depict fragments of bodies or forms in freefall with no contextualizing ground, they may, in hindsight, and with an awareness of the fate representations suffered during episodes of iconoclasm, look like depictions of images that have been attacked. Yet understanding these drawings as part of the process of making rather than as reminders of dismantlement encourages an appreciation of the range of theological possibilities afforded by views of figures that are incomplete or that fail to follow laws of pictorial orientation. This essay considers the syntactical laxity found in such studies against the scrutiny of Biblical grammar publicly exercised by Martin Luther and Andreas Karlstadt, for whom word order, conjunctions and modifiers were essential to understanding the meaning of scripture.

"Le sacrifice et la création dans l’œuvre d’Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille et Sergueï M. Eisenstein », in Le sacrifice et le don : Représentations dans la littérature et les arts francophones, sous la direction de Irène Chassaing et Juliette Valcke, avec la collaboration de Ziyan Yang, Moncton, Perce-Neige, 2018, pp. 131 - 150.

A montagem é uma operação mencionada com recorrência nas reflexões sobre cinema, literatura e fotografia, mas pouco presente quando se discute desenho. Apesar disso, a montagem lhe é fundamental. No desenho, elaboram-se as partes simultaneamente à sua disposição no campo compositivo. A produção (que entendo como reprodução, explicarei adiante) dos fragmentos ocorre ao mesmo tempo em que eles são dispostos e articulados entre si. Nessa forma de edição, as marcas das emendas confundem-se com a própria estrutura das partes. Partes formadas pela aproximação (ou distância) que mantêm entre si. Tal dificuldade de identificação trata menos do resultado de uma intenção dissimulante do que de uma derivação da própria natureza promíscua do meio gráfico.

The publication of the First Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (1960), otherwise known as the first ‘Coldstream Report’, is a graspable moment of displacement. It represents a shift between an educational system based on disciplined studies of techniques and crafts and one based a conceptualism and design. As such the Report has been both grasped and demonised. It is itself an image, for it is not only invested in symbolic, representational meaning, but also is among those victims of iconoclasm – works of art, signs, inscriptions, or pictures – that act in the words of theorist Bruno Latour, “as a mediation to access something else”. The Report is an interlocutor to a set of values for education, but also for the perception of the artist’s relationship to society. This paper examines the language of the First Report, addressing how its creators sought to recast future generations of art students as intellectual-designers, and in the process cast off prior stereotypes of artists as emotional, intuitive beings, unsuited for academic rigour.

To be an artist before the Report, was technically a profession in contrast to amateurs, but it was also commonly associated with a vocational rather than a professional calling, which was decided more by the chance of natural talent than by conscious choice. In recreating the image of the artist, a new form of design education was defined that involved art history, contextual studies and fine art as integral components. The nature of seeing as verses seeing that would be rewritten in light of scientific values, securing a new position in society for the artistic as much as the artist. In considering the Report as a watershed moment for tertiary art education, this paper questions the role of labels such as professional, vocational, intellectual, rigorous and artistic; to what degree were these value-loaded epithets compensatory on the part of the Report’s authors, and how they redefined the artist as researcher.

The production, style, and aesthetic status of script was a persistent theme in eighteenth-century British handwriting manuals, known as copybooks, where penmanship was put in the service of burgeoning global commerce and the display of rationality and politeness by both men and women. Eighteenth-century copybooks also presented visual and textual reflections on concepts of art and skill, and consequently are useful documents for understanding changing aesthetic attitudes toward various forms of creative work in the increasingly commercial, imperial, and industrial culture of eighteenth-century Britain. Even as categories of liberal and mechanical arts were in the process of separation and codification, these copybooks suggest that the manual practice of writing was strongly connected to other forms of material and visual production, particularly that of drawing. This essay explores the visual and textual claims made by eighteenth-century British copybooks to argue that the practice of writing was understood as both an embodied and a gendered skill that was linked to changing ideas about artistic production in the period.

Some distinctive drawings by the brothers Carracci were categorized by certain seventeenth-century writers as " caricatures. " This essay attempts to square this ad hoc categorization with the multifarious images this categorization demarcates. The intuition informing this categorization (a categorization used even by modern scholars) is well-founded, and I will explain why. The categorization of these drawings as caricatures makes sense when we locate the drawings in a larger historical framework, in which the caricatures emerge as experimental portrait drawings charged with the function of teaching both the artist and his students how to see and show the world anew. Having identified the didactic function of the caricatures, I will go on to show how they accomplish their goal. The artist's drawn-experiments play at the limits of recognition both for themselves and others—they make explicit that at the heart of recognition itself. It turns out that whatever it is that caricatures show us, and whatever it is that we see in them, is informed by the society we live in. Both the drawings themselves, and the possibility of understanding them pivots on ones given social comportment. Thus, the didactic goal at the heart of this practice is a reciprocal one: whereby the drawings show us the generalities that we use to see while also showing us how we see them.

This practice-based research sets out to explore new ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the notion of aura in art. It departs from Walter Benjamin’s widely known critique of aura, the thesis of which is that aura as ‘uniqueness’ of an artwork decays with the rise of technological reproducibility. Benjamin affirms with the decay of aura also the loss of the transposition of religious projections of distance onto fascist politics. His thesis had a major influence on contemporary critical theory where aura is still approached with great reservations. These concern a relapse into religious structures, which mirror, so the thesis argues, the fact that aura has been, also in Benjamin’s ambivalent conceptualization, left ‘territorialized’ in a regime of transcendence in art.
The main research question has been: What could aura mean for painting in the expanded field, especially in relation to digital imaging? The outcomes of this research are paintings, works on paper (both involving the input of digital sources), digital films and writings. The thesis develops a reading and visual ‘mapping’ of aura in the framework of Gilles Deleuze’s (and Félix Guattari’s) ontology of immanence where difference and its repetition as differentiation replaces the static metaphysics of ‘origin’ or ‘essence’.
Splendor Solis, a series of book illuminations from the Northern Renaissance proved to become a major visual source for experimentation. Aura is introduced in this alchemical work as the ‘splendour’ of Becoming, the deframing power of the differential processes that accompany individuation.
As a sensation experienced in intuitive art practice, aura affects and is affected by a field of interacting multiplicities and the potentiality of temporal differentiations, which reach beyond any ascertained subjectivity into virtual collective questions and problems. Aura suggests as an ‘echo’ of Becoming an involvement with affects, and the research follows strands between qualitative intense moments that activate a ‘wound’ and extend to what Deleuze calls a ‘wound
i
that existed before me’, an experience related to the synthesis of future, which confronts an individual with its emerging double.
Constructing, or ‘mapping’ aura as visuals on an axis that involves media of ‘uniqueness’ and digital technology gives those outcomes an ontological status of ‘simulacra’ or assemblages, far from the traditional associations aura would evoke. Touching both experience and experiment, so the thesis argues, aura in immanence can provide an access to the virtualities of the ‘new’ in art practice.
The research introduces a visual scenario or ‘conceptual persona’ for intuition, which as method of this research folds both practice and writing. Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished play Empedocles at Etna, provides a metaphor or metamorphosis encompassing aura’s and intuition’s involvement with immediacy and duration.
The practice documentation of the thesis reflects the strands of the research as plurality of its differentiations, allowing the dynamics of its method in action to reflect the dynamics of aura.

From early modern to modern times, drawing was firmly anchored in the realities of European society as a cultural technique . Based on this fact, the present volume asks for the first time about the significance of drawing and drawing education in other cultural areas. Indigenous methods of drawing and sign-learning in Arabic, Asian, Latin American, North American and European countries are addressed, as well as historical transfer processes of didactic methods, aesthetic norms and educational institutions of drawing instruction.


CONTENTS:

Tobias Teutenberg
Introduction: Towards a Global Perspective on the History of Drawing and Drawing Education

Lamia Balafrej
Figural Line: Persian Drawing, c. 1390–1450

Nino Nanobashvili
The Epistemology of the ABC Method: Learning to Draw in Early Modern Italy

Peter M. Lukehart
Evidence of Drawing: Giovanni Battista Paggi and the Practice of Draftsmanship in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy

Alexander Klee
Forming a Common Language: The Teaching of Drawing in the Habsburg Empire from 1850

Johannes Kirschenmann, Caroline Sternberg
“You Have to Draw with More Attention, More Dedication”: The Relevance of Drawing for Artistic Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich and its Significance in International Contexts

Werner Kraus
Picture and Drawing Education in Nineteenth-Century Java

Elena S. Stetskevich
Drawing Education at the Russian Academy of Sciences in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century

Veronika Winkler
Drawing Books and Academic Demands in the Viceroyalty of Peru

Oscar E. Vázquez
Drawing, Copying and Pedagogy in Mexico’s and Brazil’s Art Academies

Harold Pearse
Drawing Education in Canadian Schools: Late Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Century as Seen Through Drawing Textbooks

Rikako Akagi, Kenji Yamaguchi
The Evolution of Drawing Education in Modern Japan: The Impact of Traditional and Introduced Methods on the Artworks of Elementary Students in the Meiji Era

Ok-Hee Jeong
A Historical Review of Cultural Influences on Korean Art Education

Xin Hu
Drawing in China: Art and Art Education in the Wake of Modern China

Judith Rottenburg
The École des Arts du Sénégal in the 1960s: Debating Visual Arts Education Between “Imported Technical Knowledge” and “Traditional Culture Felt from Within”

Charlotte Bank
Art Education in Twentieth Century Syria


Open Access Publikation: https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.457


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As a both graphic and narrative medium, the relationships between comics and other media have been continuous since their encoding as such in the late XIX century, and architecture is not alien to this overlap. Academic disdain notwithstanding, the presence of comics in architecture can be traced back to Le Corbusier and his storyboarded Lettre a Madame Meyer (1925), wherein the Swiss architect introduced the client to his design concepts through a series of footnoted sequential vistas, his sequential renderings of the Ville Contemporaine in L´Esprit Nouveau (1922), or his well-documented infatuation with Rodolphe Töpffer, the Swiss fathers of modern comics, who would be featured in the magazine as early as in 1921. Lina Bo Bardi’s magazine A (1946) would invariably feature a comic strip by Picardo on its cover, and the architectural journals of the 1960s, consisting of ‘underground’ or ‘little’ magazines such as Archigram, Utopie, Street Farmer, or AAQ, but also of canonical publications such as l’Architecture d'aujourd'hui, or AD, turn to comics and cartoons as an communication device that captured the ethos of the time.

Moreover, graphic narrative has regularly been found as a useful tool to tell architecture: That was certainly the case in the utopian scene of the 1960s and 1970s, where it became a representation mode by default, but also, throughout the XX Century, comics, cartoons and/or sequential narratives have been used in different degrees by a multitude of architects ranging from Peter Cook and Archizoom to Norman Foster or Jean Nouvel. Framed within a bigger, ongoing research project, Telling Architecture(s) looks at the exchanges between architecture and graphic narrative both from a historical and theoretical perspective, studying the appropriation of comics by the former, but also explaining the mechanisms, abilities and potentialities of the latter in the representation of architectural space.

Drawing is a process by which the mind commits itself to ideas that can only be expressed visually, but is also an embodied form of knowing, crossing distinct areas of inquiry and pedagogy — from arts to humanities and sciences. As this field becomes increasingly heterogeneous, claiming for a multimodal research landscape, stable areas of knowledge production are rare and crossover problems emerge.
The renewed interest on drawing beyond those areas to which it is commonly associated – fine arts, architecture and design – is a symptom of its underlying presence in the various pedagogical, laboratorial and expository contexts: as notations, diagrams, illustrations, gestures, models, methodologies and traces standing for a researched idea or phenomenon.
Nevertheless, its status and roles within the University today are still relatively overlooked, confined to the specific needs of departments, laboratories and classrooms, where its presence tends to go unnoticed. This invisibility is partially explained by drawing’s level of indeterminacy in dealing with ill-structured problems, the common ground of its communication processes and the apparent simplicity of its outcomes.
In organizing this book, we identify the need to counter an analytical urge that only focuses on complex things in order to reduce them to simple equations. In drawing research, we must recognize that sometimes we need to reveal the hidden complexities that are the secret of drawing’s simplicity.
The discrete but systematic use of drawing in such heterogeneous fields as computational sciences, simulating the sets for game programming; in biology and microbiology as illustrations and perceptive tool of direct and microscopic observations; in geography, as visualization of an experiential space; or in journalism as an alternative instrument of reportage – just to pinpoint the tip of the iceberg – is opening new lines of inquiry on its creative, cognitive and communicative aspects. But above all it shows drawing’s conceptual sophistication in problem solving, innovation, learning and expertise.
We believe that the cognitive and expressive processes of drawing in the University can be defined more clearly within a framework that recognizes what all these territories have in common: by confronting its differences, we can also find its common ground.
This publication bears testimony to the emergence of a trend of research regarding the use of drawing in the University as a visual or performative strategy, and its capacity to inform and be informed by its disciplines: from visual arts and design to medicine, from sports to cognitive sciences, from geography to criminology, from engineering to communication sciences, from archeology to biology, from architecture to ethnography. To discuss drawing within the University is to question the distinction between invention and research, arguing for a double movement between both. As Paul Carter (Carter, Paul (2007), “Interest: The Ethics of Invention”. In Barret; Estelle; Bolt Barbara (2007), Practice as Research – Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I.B.Tauris, pp. 15-26.)  put it:

"The condition of invention – the state of being that allows a state of becoming to emerge – is a perception, or recognition, of the ambiguity of appearances. Invention begins when what signifies exceeds its signification – when what means one thing, or conventionally functions in one role, discloses other possibilities (…). In general, a double movement occurs, of decontextualization in which the found elements are rendered strange, and of recontextualization, in which new families of association and structures of meaning are established. This double movement characterizes any conceptual advance." (Carter, 2007: 16)
 
As a conceptual tool, drawing shares the creative impulse and the main driving forces of research — curiosity, speculation and confrontation between patterns of thought — through explorative, move-testing or hypothesis-testing experiments. Therefore, the contributions to this study emerge from a reflection on both written accounts and studio practices in response to these questions:
- What cross-disciplinary perspectives are open to drawing in a contemporary University?
- How can drawing contribute to an image based research in the University?
- Is there specific visual imagery in scientific practice?
- How can drawing be involved in problem solving?
- What engagements can be imagined between drawing and verbal language?
- How is drawing involved in performance based practices in the University?
- What roles are assigned to drawing in laboratorial and studio contexts?
- How does drawing relate active perception with cognition and creativity?
- How can drawing enhance teaching and learning strategies in the University?

As a result, we noted the recurrence of frameworks and the emergence of core themes within the heterogeneity of contributions, and accordingly divided this book into six parts:
Enhancing Education Through Drawing concerns the impact of drawing as a learning methodology in artistic, design and scientific practice, through innovative strategies and alternative outcomes;
Visual Imagery and Scientific Practice analyses the production and use of sketches, diagrams and illustrations in the context of scientific work, as records of the process of knowledge production;
Creativity, Cognition and Active Perception focuses on the shared circuits between creative and perceptual processes and their instrumental role in discovery, mind shifting and experiential knowledge.
Thinking Drawing in Research establishes a critical and philosophical ground for discussing the role of drawing within the University, focusing on the relationship between research, practice and alternative modes of knowledge, based on subjective, emergent and interdisciplinary approaches.
Modes of Conception: Reports on Practice describes case studies in studio-based research, focusing in the process of invention through drawing and its relationship with concepts such as skill/deskill, know-how and experience. 
Acting Through Drawing explores the complex relationships that exist between drawing, performance and performativity, reflecting on the role of drawing as an instruction, an instrument and a record of a performative action.
Intertwined with the papers there are experimental contributions from independent artists and researchers, presented at the Drawing in the University Today Exhibition, curated by Pedro Maia, Cláudia Amandi and Natacha Antão, in the Faculty of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto. These works cover practice-led research on a wide range of topics, such as drawing machines, dialogical and collaborative practices, anthropology and cultural memory, medicine and pedagogy, the relationships between image and language, drawing as reportage or performance recording.

Acknowledgement
We are very grateful to all of the authors, whose patience with the process of assembling such a comprehensive review of the field has resulted in a valuable resource in this book.


Paulo Luís Almeida, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto
Miguel Bandeira Duarte, School of Architecture, University of Minho
José Teixeira Barbosa, Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto

This petition argues that erotic comics are an important cultural record of the way in which diverse sexualities are understood and portrayed, and sexual fantasies explored. An Erotic Comics Anglophone Archive (ErotiCAA) will preserve these works for research by scholars in many different disciplines.

One of the biggest problems facing anyone researching pornography/erotica or comics, and therefore doubly so for anyone researching erotic/pornographic comics, is finding and gaining access to primary materials. So we have decided to have a go at establishing an archive in the UK to collect and catalogue English-language porn and erotic comics.

We intend to approach a number of libraries and research institutions to host and/or fund the archive. Persuading them to support us will be a lot easier if we an show that there is a need for this archive, so to help with that we’ve started this petition.

We’ve already got this kick-ass logo designed for us by Alison Lucy Stone and meetings set up with a couple of big libraries. Help us out by signing the petition? And if you’d like to be more involved, please tweet Dr Anna Madill @UKFujoshi or Dr Jude Roberts @tangendentalism - we’d love to hear from you!

Raphael's most successful productions during his early career in Florence (ca. 1503-8) were paintings of the Madonna and Child. This essay examines his practices of full-scale drawings (or cartoons) to execute such paintings, to present designs to his patrons, and to repurpose and delegate the execution of replicas of such designs to artists working in the Marche.

Critic and curator David Sylvester played a pivotal role shaping the intellectual as well as the actual consumption of avant-garde art in the post-Second World War period and yet a key series of exhibitions he curated, focusing on the practice of drawing in the 1950s and early 1960s, has been all but ignored. Drawing for Pictures (Arts Council, 1953), Recent British Drawings (ICA 1954) and Drawing Towards Painting (Arts Council, 1962) all steered public engagement with the eclectic and often private practices of drawing at a volatile moment for art institutional structures in Britain. Sylvester's exhibitions place him among the international vanguard for his use of drawing theory as a tool to explore the role of the artistic individual within her practice, a perspective that points toward the role drawing took in process art and conceptualism in the ensuing decades. Many years before Lawrence Alloway's celebrated essay on Sol LeWitt (Artforum, 1975) inspired an international audience to reappraise drawing in light of conceptualism, Sylvester harnessed drawing to speak to the limitations of modernism and individualism. Sylvester's analysis arose from the particular socio-cultural sensitivities of 1940s and 1950s Britain about the role and obligations of creativity. This paper reexamines these significant exhibitions in order to consider Sylvester's, and by extension Britain's, place at the forefront of the subsequent rise in international exhibitions devoted to drawing practice.

This illustrated paper describes how Thoreau's intimate communion with nature resulted in drawings similar to those created by Chinese Buddhist contemplatives. Qi Journal Vol. 25 No. 2, Summer 2015, is available at some Barnes & Noble stores and other booksellers and may be ordered online at www.qi-journal.com .

Die Linearperspektive ist in der künstlerischen Bildproduktion über Jahrhunderte ein wirkmächtiges Paradigma, bis sie in eine Krise gerät. Denn die ästhetische Moderne attackiert das hegemoniale Modell der perspektivischen Formgebung und macht die Perspek­tive zu einem Objekt der Kritik. Dominique Laleg entwickelt einen Begriff der Perspektive, welcher dem modernen Narrativ von deren Ende widerspricht. Denn gerade in der Kritik der Perspektive zeigt sich ihre Konjunktur als Modell, das sowohl in der modernen Theorie­bildung als auch in der künstlerischen Praxis zum Tragen kommt. Die moderne Kritik der Perspektive muss als Kritik mit den Mitteln der Perspektive selbst begriffen werden, denn Selbstkritik bildet den Knotenpunkt von Perspektive und Moderne.

This is a full draft of my chapter included in the recent publication: Body, Space and Place in Collective and Collaborative Drawing: Drawing Conversations II, edited by Jill Journeaux and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. A copy of the book can be found at Foyles via this link:

https://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/music-dance/body-space-and-place-in-collective,jill-journeaux-9781527541962

With thanks to Jill Baroff Studio, NY, and Bartha Contemporary, London, for kind permission to use images of Jill Baroff's work.

Der Begriff des Kontradispositivs wird in der vorliegenden Studie zur Beschreibung zeichnerischer Verfahren und Diskurse im Zeitraum von 1955 bis 1975 gebraucht. Als Kontradispositive lässt sich eine dekonstruktive Zeichenpraxis beschreiben, die an den Paradigmen ihrer eigenen Geschichte und Technik ansetzt, indem sie die Theorie der Zeichnung zu Ende denkt und sie als eine Kunst der Entgrenzung fortschreibt. Philosophische Exkurse und kunsthistorische Einzelstudien zu Linie und Grund, Geste und Spur, Blindheit, Händigkeit und Aleatorik ›ergrenzen‹ die Möglichkeiten zeichnerischer Medialität und eröffnen gleichzeitig einen kritischen Blick auf Allegorien und Adaptionen ihrer Entgrenzungsgeschichte nach 1975.

Ausgezeichnet mit dem Wolfgang-Ratjen-Preis 2018 des Zentralinstituts für Kunstgeschichte in München.

Animatic; hyperanimatic; animation; hyperanmation; the graphematic; art; artist; the animatic life of the object; illusion; metamorphosis; the riss; plasmaticness; the life of line; virtual animation; the hypervirtual; the author (auteur); the artist-animator; the animator-artist; the Cryptic Complex; Michelangelo; The Creation of Adam; Norman McLaren; Jean Baudrillard; Henri Focillon; Sergei Eisenstein; Paul Barolsky; Martin Heidegger; Jacques Derrida; Daniel Mendelowitz; Donald Crafton; Walt Disney; Larry Shiner; Michel Foucault; Roland Barthes; Paul Wells; Gilles Deleuze; Spyros Papapetros; Wilhelm Worringer

Monografia apresentada à Escola de Belas Artes da UFMG para a obtenção do título de Bacharel em Artes Visuais, habilitação em Desenho. Contemplado pelo edital de mobilidade internacional da universidade, nesse texto faço um relato de minha residência na cidade de Jerusalém, Israel, na condição de artista viajante, acompanhado de uma produção em desenho entrelaçada à leituras de romances, poesia e teoria de arte. O título apropria-se de um verso do poema "Distante", do israelense Tuvia Ruebner.

Hold On, We’ve Lost The Thirteenth Century!

Twenty years ago Capitalism basked under the belief, that with the fall of Communism, the West had effectively won the Cold War and henceforth, all the various forms of economic models, ranging from the German, Scandinavian to the Anglo Saxon, as practiced by the United Kingdom and the United States of America, could have free reign.

Under the spell of this moment of exuberance, the various regulatory controls of the ‘Free Market’, accrued since the Great Depression of the 1930’s; the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Glass–Steagall Act etc. were consigned to the dustbin of history by the principle world economies. As the consensus was at the time, that Capitalism had won and so no longer needed to be constrained by the various regulatory frameworks designed to regulate the financial market.

Since the time of the Big Bang therefore, Capitalist economies around the world have increased their Gross National Product to a degree largely unknown before (global wealth doubled between 2000-2006 from $36 trillion to $70 trillion) and the golden boy of all economies, the financial sector, increased in size exponentially, as the new freedoms, under what was described at the time as ‘light touch regulation’, allowed vast profits to be made.

In 2008 however, we all watched in amazement at how quickly this edifice of unassailable wealth and prosperity appeared almost overnight to start to crumble, into what most economists tend now to agree was the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

This is not the place to attempt to explain either why this state of affairs came about or even to suggest possible ways forward. But I think it safe to say that nevertheless, these events have created within the established and new Capitalist democracies (mainly drawn from former East European states), a deep sense of unease as to why the various forms of democratic accountability, that had won the ideological war with Communism, were nevertheless unable to control and regulate the economy, so as to avert such a financial disaster?

Perhaps then the West had not won after all, but had only managed to outlast the various forms of autocratic rule by chance or by simply muddling through? If we accept that this may indeed be the case, we may have to review how we see ourselves, and our future under a new light. Should we carry on as before? If not what are the alternatives? And how are we to judge ourselves without the mirror of Communism?

Such questions are perhaps best put to one side, for in the end we are but Architects who neither have the economic nor ideological expertise to intervene in such discussions.

Nevertheless, as this years research task was to design an archive building to house the various Parliamentary Acts and discussion papers that enshrine our democracy in Vellum, some important questions needed to be asked by each researcher, on the state of Liberal Democracy before pen was simply put to paper.

For it is clear I would suggest, that if we had been asked to design a Parliamentary Archive immediately after the fall of Communism, a certain flag waving would have been in order and so forgiven, as most Architects I believe would have sought to express the exuberance of this moment through the various forms and materials at their disposal. Can we though still act in such a manner today? Is it still clear to us that the democratic tradition is without fault? Is flag waving still appropriate?

To answer these questions, each of the Parliamentary Archive proposals described within, all radically explore in their own innovative and kooky ways, how Architecture can be used to both parody, deconstruct and perhaps ultimately extend the death throes of the Democratic Project.

Gordon Shrigley, 2014

This study analyzed three different remote sketching paradigms to find recommendations for future remote multidisciplinary co-design systems. These included virtual reality freeform drawing, tablet drawing, and uploading images of paper drawing. Drawing in VR could potentially be useful for convergent ideation and visualizing designs that require large-scale spatial thinking or human-scale interaction. The tablet was shown to be easy to use and applicable for a wide variety of design scenarios and paper showed strength in divergent or sequential ideation. The results indicate that perception of media might affect the use of digital tools-this difference in perception was shown between disciplines. Notably, users of VR for collaboration might need more time to explore and develop skills since the medium is so new. The results of this study contribute to further understanding of how digital media can affect the design process when communication between stakeholders needs to be remote.

Este artigo busca contribuir para um entendimento de desenho que abarque ideia, grafismo e coisa. Perspectivada pelo interesse no processo artístico, a reflexão aborda as ideias de continuum e principalmente  de  potência para propor a noção de convulsão como a dinâmica entre estes três estados.
This article aims to contribute to an understanding  of  drawing  that  encompasses idea, graphic and thing. Perspectivated by the interest in the artistic process and  considering  the  ideas  of  continuum  and  potency, the  reflection  propose  the  notion  of  convulsion  as  the  dynamics  that occurs between these three states.

With this brief and unstructured essay, I would like to clarify the connection between geoemtry of representation and cartography, in the hope of soliciting further reflection on all the areas of research related to the representation of space, and which do not refer only to the technical informatics data of drawing (a trend becoming more and more risky today with image digitization, computer graphics and virtual 3D) but to the complexity of the entire process from conception to realization.

Rue Des Martyrs [revisited].

To enter the world of drawing is to give up an element of grounding, in what we understand to be day to day reality.

The authorial activity that is able to translate simple marks upon the picture plane into coded relational lines within the picture plane, is a process whereby the author moves slowly into the simultaneous reality of the space of the drawing, a space which paradoxically knows no hard and fast borders or a sense of its own mortality. This is not a representation, this is simply the true condition of architectural drawing.

To draw then is to both dream through line and to use line as a simple mimetic code. One involves a partial surrender, so as to let line follow its own path and the other holds onto the physical world, attempting to translate complex phenomenon into a universal language that is readable across time and space.

Yet these two ways of working with line appear as a contradiction. How is it possible to let line dictate both how the composition develops and also to consciously use as if a tool? The answer lies I think in a certain intimacy with the codes, which allow one to employ line without having to constantly ask, how should I use this line to show this or that detail? This may suggest that by working with an abstract language over time, similarly to written language, one develops an ease with its cold structures and internal expectations, to the extent they become deeply ingrained within ones consciousness. The same process therefore which allows me to write these words without having to constantly check my grammar, spelling or if the words are working for me and expressing what I want to say, is the same process whereby I can draw lines which have a direct relation to the material world of objects, without having to constantly check whether the lines are running away with themselves and are describing characteristics to objects which they are not capable of.

The greater the intimacy with the codes of architectural representation therefore, the more one is able to let go of first order intentionality, so as to feel the strength of line seducing you to explore it discrete world, distinct from its character as an instrumental tool. Simply the more one draws, the more ones work is inevitably situated within the realm of desire, of jouissance. For the sooner one leaves simple ideology behind and gives up the attempt to use line to express an external idea, the sooner one realises that to draw is to enter into a tense negotiation between the infantile ordinances of line and the authors particular neurosis. The author may choose to use line as a simple tool, but I think that author will never discover the surprising play of line and will be forever limited in their conceptions. It is our contention therefore that by giving up a certain amount of intentionality, that one is able to start to investigate how line pushes and pulls the architectural imagination. This not a contradiction, but a tension which allows one to fall into the world of line, yet always with one foot placed firmly within the simple mimetic tradition of architectural representation. To choose to explore one path to the exclusion of the other is to step into the field of other related disciplines and so is to give up the hard won title of an architect.

This quality to architectural practice is perhaps unique in that it collapses two seeming opposites, the transcendent and the relational and I think therefore, we should build on this opportunity and try not to deny it by convincing ourselves that it is possible to practice either pure aestheticism or blind instrumentality. For just perhaps, this is one key to a future that can work outside of the easy oppositions, which we are constantly plagued by.

Gordon Shrigley, June, 2011

Architecture is a form of cultural practice that classically bridges between the disciplines of Fine Art and what we have come to understand as the Social and Physical Sciences, and hence in previous epochs, the tension between these two very different ways of looking at the world has been creatively maintained within the theory and practice of architecture.

Sadly however, after the heroic period of modern architecture, when the more experimental architects practiced as mixed media artists, the discipline of architecture has been subject to the murderous influence of the social scientist alone, who managed to convince a whole generation that our role was to re-engineer the human soul, not through poetry, painting or the conflagrant rhetoric of the manifesto, but only via the dead hand of the clipboard. This has resulted in a profession that is more technocratic in nature than artistic, that values the grey horizons of the middle manager over the wild anarchic free play of the avant-garde and that sees everyday life as something to be mapped, observed, analysed and ultimately controlled.

Why is this important? Why bring such a sense of melodrama to our well-tended gardens?

Simply because the Faustian bargain we chose as architects to make also entailed that we agreed to forever think of the language of architecture, simply the language of line, as no more important than a line that traces in a graph the Gross National Product of the latest Five Year Plan. Yes, line was recoded as if a tool, as an ideationally transparent medium, that is well suited to the job in hand, but is certainly not worthy of attention in and of itself.

Such willed blindness towards the very medium that makes architecture possible has also entailed that architects still hold to an essentially 19th century bourgeois idea of the subject in relation to language i.e. I have an idea in my head and I use line to express it. This way of understanding the world of the linear, employs line as mere utility as opposed to thinking how lineature structures the space of the imagination, yes, how it creates the sense of the possible.

The language of architecture has on the whole therefore throughout the 20th century consciously set itself apart from the radical theories of language as developed within the disciplines of Linguistics, Semiotics, Anthropology and Post Structuralism, so leaving us, at the beginning of the 21st century, a rotting infantile corpse of a discipline that is only now, recognizing its intellectual paucity.

What is the alternative? How are we to reestablish what is particular to our profession? How are we to radically rethink line? Through the eyes of another discipline? Or can we, as the masters of line, think what it is to have wedded ourselves to lineature, in a mode of address, a new lexicon, that is a result of the analysis of drawing practice and not from a desire to gain the respectability rightly due to others, by crudely appropriating their language. Yes we need to found new readings of lineature, a new plurality, with its own terms of reference, ways of speaking and sense of permanent revolution.

It is with these thoughts in mind that each student researcher starts the year by experimenting with a style of drawing developed by another artist, for example the work of Albrecht Dürer, Hanne Darboven, Francisca Goya, Peter Roehr, Jorinde Voigt, Robert Oppenheim and Georges Seurat, so as defamiliarise their relationship to the very act of expression itself.

Initial graphic studies are then applied to a series of architectural propositions that seek to test the limits of each student’s experimental language, framed within this year’s research theme:

Popular memory and the deep structures of lineature.

Gordon Shrigley, 2013

Sketching is fundamentally a practice of being present: Usus in Praesens.  It teaches us to mindfully dwell in the perfection of the moment. A moment that is not just objective but also irremediably subjective. And, when done wholeheartedly, such practice offers us the potential of profound, sublime, and transcendental insights. Sketching is an act of meditation.