A marionette could be seen as a bridging system, a connection between two different systems.

Traditional between a person and a puppet where the puppet player causes, by moving the controls following his intention, an animating effect on the puppet. Because of the connection between a living and a non living organism the cause and the effect remain a one way system with a forced effect.

It would be interesting to use the principle of a marionette, bridging two living systems and creating an adaptive system with an unpredictable result.

A Mask gives you a sense of liberation, you can be much more playful behind them. (G.Wearing)

You can be yourself, you do not have to do what the environment expects you to do, you can decide whether you would like to adapt to the environment or not.

A mask can be used to pretend the adaption to an environment. At the same time it acts as a protection enabling the autonomous adaption to environmental forces within the required timescale, following an individual decision making process.

Therefore a mask could act as a bridge between different structures (living / environmental structures) like a part of a marionette.

Wet, cold plaster bandages being placed on my face. Closing the surface of the skin sheet by sheet, layer by layer. I can feel the thing slowly drying out. Every muscle and sense seem to be fixed under the damp cover. My chin was touched but I thought it was my nose. My face feels like being replaced by a hard dull shell.

I try to gently move my face. It hurts. My skin and some of my hair seem to be encased but I can feel the thing releasing. I use my hands to help and now I sense the warmness of my hidden face coming though. Slowly the thing comes off and I hold it in my hands my face.

Lily Cole by Gillian Wearing (2008)

A model formed by the environment - a puppet.

A puppet with emotions, sensation, mind, human structure etc. hidden behind a beautiful surface.

A living marionette controlled by the environment?

What we see is the surface, a mask fashioned by the environment.

The body and mind in conflict with the environment? The surface not allowed to act like a real adaptive interface would do? Are the environmental forces acting on the interface dominating where as the personal forces are restrained?

Allows the artificial mask Lili to use her face as real interface behind the mask?

Lily has two faces - two interfaces:

The real face - the surface of mind and body, treated by the mind and body on the one side and by the environment on the other side.

The mask face, a reproduction of the shape formed by the environment.

What happens between the two interfaces?

A chain of relationships released by the happening of one event - a sweeper attracted by a with flour filled crisp bag on his way...

A Walkers bag on the pavement immediate interacts with the users passing by. They either ignore it or respond to it with a change of their behaviour. With a human being or any living organism the result is generally unpredictable as it follows a nonlinear pattern of organization.

Living systems respond autonomously to disturbances from the environment with structural changes, i.e. by rearranging their pattern of connectivity. A living organism records previous structural changes, and each structural change influences the organisms future behaviour. A living system can never be directed only disturbed, but will maintain the freedom to decide what to notice and what will disturb it. (Maturana / Varela - The Santiago Theory of Cognition)

One of the results of routine live is that our brain optimizes recurring activities by filtering redundant, secondary information out in order to focus onto general trained operations. During this simplification of our perception lots of information is being lost and cannot be used for further development.

Freuds Censorship:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Instinct_and_the_Unconscious/Freud's_conception_of_the_Censorship

How can the routine be broken up and the hidden information become visible again?

In “Understanding the Media” Marshall McLuhan is dividing between hot and cold media. "A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high definition”.... High definition is the state of being well filled with data.... Hot media are, therefore, low in participation or completion by the audience." A cold medium instead keeps lots of information secret and inspires the observer to compose and accomplish their individual image driven by personal experiences.

To stimulate the personal perception methods like disturbance, codification and the unusual association with a situation could be used to make the unseen, unpredictable visible. So the observer / participant could become a part of an input-output-system where he is forced to question his perception and behavior within the routine live by simultaneously providing, feeding the system with his own experience.

A Walkers crisp bag being catapulted by the wind caused by a passing bus is reacting like a nonliving system to a linear chain of cause and effect.

Walkers on the street_cutout

Spacial camera: While the loose hanging camera was forced to swing by the wind of the passing vehicles it created a dynamic space around itself.

UNDER GLASS 02... an offshoot

http://innenoderaussen02.blogspot.com/

This blog will be a collection of links, images, etc. that may or may not be related to my current body of work but are interesting none the less.

"While there is something happening here, something else is happening there"

Works 1988-1999; J. Baldessari

During our daily live we are constantly surrounded by events happening autonomous simultaneously next to each other. Sometimes under certain environmental conditions or changes the autarkic events get in contact and create something new, something unpredictable.

When I went to Air Street and Lavender Hill, the fleeting relationships and the unforeseeable created the connection between me and the two sites.

Two different sites under different conditions with different events:

LAVENDER HILL: Saturday 24th of October, 7.30am, wet and quiet

bird - pavement - poo, bus - puddle - reflection, light - wet pavement - reflection,

paint spot - pedestrians - traces, tree close to street - bus - shape of tree,

passing bus - tree - falling leaves

AIR STREET: Tuesday 27th of October, 12.00pm, sunny and busy

sun - right street side - shadow, sun - windows - reflection,

paper - wind / pedestrians - transport

Aristotle described the relationship between events as causality where one event causes an effect to another event...

"According to J. F. Sowa (2000), up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality:

Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect.

Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect.

Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (M. Born, 1949; J. F. Sowa, 2000)"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

OUT OF THE HAZE...

“Under Glass lifts characters out of the hurly burly of everyday life and frames their moments of solitude; examining human beings attempting with varying success to live within their limits.”

http://www.clodensemble.com/performance/underglass.htm

What are our limits?

Maybe we are also just like an insect under a glass being watched by someone / something else, like we would watch an oil drop in the water being distracted by chemicals?

Are the causes of the ecological challenges we are facing not our distractors and do we as architects not have the possibility to mediate between the participant and the changing environment by discovering the unseen and translating it into spacial aesthetic forms, helping the participant to adapt?

Which side of the glass are we? Inside or are we watching?