The Trees Project / Vikhroli, Mumbai

All photos from 2016. 

keywords: repurposing industrial waste, use of industrial silos, retrofitting, industrial architecture, silos, creative landscaping

 

Evaluating Automatic Thoughts

Notes from here and there

 "The structural transformation of the Public Sphere" by Habermas argues that from 19th to the 20th century, the change in public sphere involves a move "from a public critically reflecting on its culture to one that merely consumes it." In this process, the strictest separation of the public from the private realm gives way to a public sphere dominated by the mass media, in which public life is effectively depoliticized.

From Introduction, Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World by Carol Breckenridge & Arjun Appadurai

The body is an accumulation of the planet by means of the fruit and stuff you consume. You gather your body by consuming the planet. Thus you can never call it "yours"

(dont know the source)

The desire to have knowledge of anything necessarily has the desire to control it too.

Ranciere says that the language of speaking about something comes from its politics. The politics is what pushes artistic practices challenging through  / by deviating into a new language. Hence new aesthetic. Hence, the politics of aesthetics. Hence aesthetic is political. 

All language is signification of thought and, on the other hand, the supreme way of signifying thoughts is through language, the greatest means of understanding ourselves and others." then most remarkably, he (Kant) outlines a circulation of speech in and which thinking comes to pass: "Thinking is speaking with ourselves"

On Translation, John Sallis

The Practice of Organizing Ideas

I guess organizing things and ideas is my favourite pass time. In order to organize first, you have to collect a lot of data. I collect data around the random questions that occur in my head. There are various kinds of things that one is confronted with in such a broad first instance - just like how the fishing net would gather, along with the fish, all the other junk from the sea. Ofcourse, I filter, and in the process of browsing through these items, new ideas open up, and inevitably deflect me. I keep collecting them, and often, in the course of time, also forget them. These items, still stay somewhere. Then, when I have nothing else to do, I come back to this random collection and a new world appears. A sudden urge to make something out of the seemingly undisposed things begins to emerge. Thus, these knowledge objects are not necessarily approached with an intent of a particular argument, rather argument emerges from these objects that are dumped together into lumps. Sometimes, these lumps emerge in tandem with collection, and feel more and more relevant. But often, they are just lying as dump. Then, with these items, things like writings, presentations, images and other knowledge-collages begin to happen. I have so many presentations, books, and such stuff that are just lying like that. I tell to myself that these will keep growing, just like cabinets of curiosities. But I keep forgetting them, and they only reappear when I am shifting computers, harddrives, or searching for something else. My stream and surety-filled intent is often deflected by the unexpected encounters with these knowledge-collages! At times, it feels like I have started a hundred projects, each which hold a potential, but cannot be shared because they are all incomplete. 

Everyone likes to call these things archives. But for me, they are ideas that are yet to find the rest of their body parts. Most of the times, they lie unfinished because I have simply slipped into another zone of thought, or it is time to do something else. Mostly the latter. But also, the duration for which one can pursue a though in this capitally set time space produces a huge anxiety for ideas that almost seem orphan. These are not born to feed the world outside, rather to satiate and pleasure the world of inquiry within. Thus, they are personal. And in the capitalistic world, all things personal, that do not have any demand in the market (even if it is the intellectual market), are auto-low-priority. The way in which captialism works with history, to produce a "relevant" for the "contemporary" is annoying. It makes a universal that is unable to recognize the value of these personal endeavours. Marxists will argue that the inquires of the personal are never a-contemporary, for they are produced through the very forces of the society that one exists in. Yet, in this strand of thought, there is the notion of the centre and the periphery - where certain people have the power to shape the discourse!

But to move away from this anxiety of who benefits from the archive of the personal, I wanted to pen down how I have found my own "system of collecting" or collating rather deceiving. The more one curates into structures, the more difficult it becomes to find material. Once sectioned, it is always difficult to find a knowledge-item for another purpose. I believe that since I am always looking at each object to fit in numerous constellations, they often get lost when they are curated into certain specific knowledge collages. Management of knowledge not only limits the intellectual imagination of an object, but sometimes, also obfuscates it in the process and frame of a renewed search. I have found it perplexing. What I mean to say is that when the archivist begins to codify each item in his archive into some crypt, only so that he / she can retrieve it later, it may not readily be available! A lot of times, filenames, descriptions and locations of things switch places, and then they become invisible... But this is what produces the chance encounters, that once again trigger thoughts to be taken them into new directions! Such is the practice of collection - only provisionally directed, forever wandering.

Post Colonial Theory

 

The Middle Path

Buddha realizes that there ought to be a way of living between extremities of luxuries and mortality. One cannot submit life to the existential crises. To just live and accept yourself is important to be able to perceive others' thoughts and feelings. To be an ordinary human being is to be Buddha. Buddhism doesn't teach you to be special, but ordinary in a way that you are living with everyone else, not above or below. 

A string of sitar too tight will break while if too loose, will be incapable to produce any sound. In order to produce any music, the string has to be tightened just enough - that is the essence of the middle path. That one needs to know just enough to not hurt others, but unite with the rhythm of the universe in order to experience resonance and happiness.

American Beauty

Questions on the Nature of Truth

1.

I am often being told that I am too sensitive, someone who is far too easily affected by what people say.  How does one measure the limits of being sensitive? Isn't sensitivity desirable to be able to become perceptive, responsive, careful, empathetic, and so on? Aren't these values expected out of all human beings. To be human, they say, is to be alive with all your senses, and be able to relate and empathize with feelings and sensations of other human beings so as to become graceful and wholehearted. Do we not need to be sensitive in order to make ourselves large hearted to be able to contain a large amount of experiences, and allow thus, for different forms of lives and their ideas to exist. Is being sensitive not merely being more and more human? 

2.

Implied in their comment is that I dwell on people's comments far too seriously. Often, they mean to suggest that there is no need to pay so much attention to what people say, and that one must not take what is subjected to oneself so quickly. And that makes me wonder if anything that people say could be true? If there is almost nothing that people tell us that can be kept close, what is the purpose of speaking? I could understand that truth is provisional, and that truth is constructed for the moment, and that truth has a function of allowing something to exist in the here and now. 

3.

But then, what does it mean to live a truthful life? It is similar to asking if reflections are true? Do we exist only in our reflections? And if we agree that reflection is not our body, rather an image, then what is the purpose of reflection? Is the nature of truth same as the nature of reflection? Does truth lie outside the body? And if it does, then how is it possible to inhabit it? Does truth then become a mask? If it is a mask, doesn't it become paradoxical to be called truth, for is not the function of mask to merely hide. And by this line of thinking, one begs the question whether truth is a form of concealment? Is truth the mask of lie itself? Could truth simply be a form of lie? Do we only live in shades of lies? 

4.

Is lie a sociological necessity, and the manner in which we come to terms with everyday world? And does truth then become one of the functions of lies? Does it make truth the worst, or best form of lie? Is truth meant to be forgotten? Or does truth lose its truthfulness over time, and keep turning itself into a lie? Can the realization of truth be harmful for one's being? Is that why people transact through pretense? What is the social life of truth? How does it contribute towards becoming human? If there is any connection between truth and sensitivity (and thereby being human), how does one establish this relationship? Is being human far too ambitious a value to be chased? Is sensitivity only some perverted form of value to be mobilised for social transaction? 

Typography

The system of collecting - Baudrillard

The object deprived of its function becomes the locus of the subject. Functionality comes in when an object comes in a social world and objects utility is a function of social relations. This is how in a way and object becomes a matter of collection. What you collect depends upon these social relations. Object gets its objecthood only when it is deprived of its utility. Then is when it slips into an abstract autonomous realm. That's when you wonder why people wonder, if they have preserved some object, that have surpassed their use value. Then it is its destiny to be collected.

The need for validation of your world of collection isn't there before puberty. (Age of 12 to 13 years). Things become elegant after 40 years of age. the intermediate period is about transition and change.

on Monophobia

From Psychology Today dot com

Notes on Design Translation

Notes from Hegel

Ghei Chhand Makarand / Translation

Film: Katyar Kaljyat Ghusli

Composition: Shankar Mahadevan

Singers: Shankar Mahadevan, Rahul Deshpande

घेई छंद मकरंद, प्रिय हा मिलिंद
मधुसेवनानंद स्वच्छंद, हा धुंद
मिटता कमलदल होई बंदी हा भृंग;
परि सोडिना ध्यास, गुंजनात दंग


Translation:

Takes pleasure of the nectar, lovingly, the honeybee

Savouring unworriedly the sweetness, immersed

as it still suckles, the flower petals fold in the bee

Yet unfettered in its trapping, its hum-buzz persists

What is a "concept"?

Sometimes, when certain words are overused, one tends to blind to its meaning altogether. The currency for the word "concept" or "conceptual" in academia can have such an effect. When is something not conceptual, or when does something become conceptual? What can something be called conceptual, and how do we formulate concepts? Can the act of conceptualisation be taught? What are its pedagogical processes? Are we always aware when formulating new concepts? Are we not always suspended in some existing concepts? Is it possible to live a life without conceptual thinking? Or do we just occupy concepts that exist for us? Is a new conceptualization possible only through the interrogation of an earlier concept? Are concepts then merely interrogations? Are concepts mental, or are they material processes? Do new concepts necessarily change our everyday material conditions, or do they simply create new frames of reference? Are concepts instruments of the mind? Could then, existing environments simply be read conceptually afresh? Would one need to change anything material within them for them to gain a new conceptual charge? Or are they already suspended in multiple concepts and call for a reorientation of our encounter with them? Where does the concept lie then - in the reader or the material?

There can be further stream of questions that one can keep asking about this term "concept / conceptual". But what precisely is a concept? In order to have some clarity for my own self, I began looking at its definitions and etymological origins. Quite simply, "concept" is a conceived imagination. but then, such a root does not help our purpose. Hence I started looking at more elaborations, because often, the inter-related words "concept", "thought", "imagination", "idea", "theory" get mixed up in academic conversations which produces a conundrum in meaning formation. Dictionaries rely on each of these words for explaining the other. And therefore, the notion of "concept" gets further confusing. What is however important to use a word which is closest to the meaning that we want to convey, even if the meaning could be swerved for context. Rather than using the confusion (or the creation of it thereof) as escape to evade contingent parts of a conversation, it is worthwhile to build redirections of meaning consciously.

Having read and meditated on some amount of definitions and discussions, I have come to deduce that it is best to consider a "concept" as a "form of experience" - that it is an experiential space. In / for architecture, we could think of it as taking someone in a space of a particular / new experiential register. To "reconceptualize" thus would merely mean to rethink the experiential coordinates of an existing phenomenon or space (in architecture). For example, to rethink the hospital as a garden would give it an altogether new conceptual charge. However, here, "garden" is a notion that can itself be opened up in many ways, through many interpretations. But it shifts the idea of a hospital from an institutionalised medical facility that is situated in the seriousness of treating the ailing body, into its imagination as a landscape of strolling bodies which may be located in a more open environment. Such a restructuring of environmental imagination could have a material translation, or even remain as a textual reading.

Professors of higher education from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA, Anfara and Mertz (2006) mention that "Concepts are words assigned to experience. Concepts combine to form a "construct". Constructs form propositions. Relationships among propositions form a "theory"." What I understand from such a description is that particular forms of experience set the coordinates for the perception of an environment. The manner in which we come to inhabit this environment is the only way to thus live a concept. The particular feelings it produces, the values and modes of thinking it triggers are all embedded in such an environment. When a series of such experiences settle in our lives, they produce a trusted model for living-thinking. This model is an understanding retained in the mind where reason gets associated with it, and aids its solidification. (This reason is not necessarily same as the scientific notion of reason, rather it is a cultural mode in which the mind reconciles with several unknowns towards living a practical life. For example, the notion of 'respecting elders' is a conceptual idea that is not rationalised empirically, but culturally - for it may be believed that those who may have lived a longer life must have greater life experience, and therefore greater wisdom to act upon the eventualities one is faced with in life). This is perhaps why, concepts can be so hard to challenge, because it would mean the interrogation of very associations of acts through which one reason one's life for practical purposes. 

Thus, such a model of reason produces a construct. Since they are "trusted" now, they can be depended upon (they get solidified), and even proposed to someone else to achieve the respective mental / physical state. Thus, they can now be proposed as accepted modes of living. According to Anfara and Mertz, relationships between these modes of living, or propositions, form a "theory". This is something I will need to consider with more attention. I say this because I am trying to figure in my head the difference between "conceptual thinking" and "theoretical thinking". At this point, both of them almost feel the same. However, theory is understood as a framework to study a structure / phenomena. (framework is another word one must open up). It could be a model to even predict certain things. If theory too, is a model, how is it different from conceptual apparatus? Theory is also defined as "a set of principles on which the practice of an activity is based." Another definition says  that theory is "a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained." Further, idea is "an explanation to describe something about the world that is not necessarily proven". This likens idea to a "hypothesis" - an informed guess, which may be disproven later by some formal investigation. 

Someone has straightforwardly said that a theory in its strictest sense is an underlying explanation of how something works. In this line of thought, theory is not integrally linked to experience, but a process. Either understanding processes helps us to troubleshoot a particular outcome, or it can be a way in which ideas or things may be "mobilised". To be sure, theory is based on empirical research, and got popular in the late 16th century as a mental scheme of something to be done. Theory may also thus be associated with the certain development of scientific thinking. While theory is a mode of contemplation or speculation, concept is closer to thought and imagination. Thus, theoretical thinking is processual, whereas conceptual thinking is imaginative and creative. The ontologies of both these modes may be quite different. For instance, while theoretical thinking may simply chart out a process of approaching the future without necessarily a "clear" picture of the future, conceptual thinking may conceive of an imagination of the future and attempt to reach it. While in the theoretical approach, method drives the act; in conceptual approach, act drives the method. Thus, in the first case, one arrives at the image of future, whereas, in the other, one departs from the image of the future.

more thoughts later.

Architectural Diagrams - 2

 

Architectural Diagrams - 1