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iordanis stylidis video
metronome against thinking patterns


Topiographia*

2014 / about arts / Multi-scape evidences
exegesis* and stochasmos* about
the Landscape representation
and its in depth comprehension discipline

Topiographia: The technique to create landscape representations out of an experience gained while standing into a landscape.
Exegesis: the critical explanation or interpretation of a phenomenon
(from Greek exēgēsis, from exēgeisthai 'interpret,'
from ex- 'out of' + hēgeisthai 'to guide, lead.')
Stochasmos: the act of thinking within a random propability distribution
(from Greek stokhastikos, from stokhazesthai 'aim at, guess,' from stokhos 'aim.')

 

2014Landscape+  
   
   
 
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TACTICS AND MEDITATION
for an EXPERIENCED CONFRONTATION with the VIEW

by Iordanis Stylidis, U.Th., Hellas
Assistant Professor at the University of Thessaly
Department of Architecture - Volos - Hellas

     

Stochastic: randomly determined;
having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.
from Greek stokhastikos,
from stokhazesthai 'aim at, guess,'
from stokhos 'aim'.

Space of incidents: A choosen geographical area or a reality field of exersice standing under visual and generally aesthetic investigation where all contained elements become (by the choise of the observer) the components constituting a temporary holistic kosmos (kosmos: a system of thought)

Locus of experience: The already known space of incidents transformed (after a discipline of scrutinized investigation is been exersiced to it) to a permanent archive of visual and aesthetic values depended on constant change through time.

Topiographia: The discipline of a detailed and realistic representation of any landscape. from Greek topio 'landscape' and graphē 'writing.'

 

 

Synchronic: simultaneously developed. from Greek syn 'together'
and chronos 'time.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

*
All works are digitally manipulated thus there is no resemblance with the original dimensions and framework.

 

The crucial stochastic* intentions aiming to manifest and define each and every specific intellectual correlation assertively emerged and tightly connected with its fundamental practices, such as the acts of the Landscape Painting, the ''Space of incidents''* detection or the apocalypse and research for an ''active locus of experience''* , are already contained into many library and gallery archives of exceptional and skillful technique (paintings, sculpture and photography). Nevertheless, they are also present into archives of expert essays, notes of criticism, short range review texts and famous chapters leading to the education and exercise of consciousness. All these creative menace is directly oriented towards the temporary comprehention of their compound content spreading as far as the extend of their unique perceptive field (formed by the visual and the intellectual content collection) of all sensory based indications and the attached meditative stimulations tightly linked to its representation practices and the recording and analysis process.

Meditation and stochasmos are the successful outcomes connecting all and every one of these leading masterpieces of thought and practice with the educational tactics, the reinforcement of the and any appropriate constitutional bedrock and the orientation of the exciting curiosity and attention towards an everytime optional condition involving the observer, the ambience and the recording footage and discipline into a unique and unified archive of presuppositions, indications and verified written conceptual outcome regarding the Landscape or Topiographia* .

The constitutional variation of this significant expressional order is including paradigms of detailed workmanship containing all possible spatial positions and intellectual relations between the observer and either the minor and further situated other in front of him or the major and the general surrounding everything (the Kosmos).

Egually, in the ''Landscape with a calm'' (1650-1651) painting by Nikolas Poussin, the ''The fall of Icarus'' (1558) painting by Pieter Bruegel, the ''The evening star'' aguarelle by Joseph Mallord William Turner, the ''Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede'' (1670) painting by Jakob van Ruisdael, the ''Mount Williamson'' photographs (1944) by Ansel Adams and the ''Gas'' painting (1940), by Edward Hopper, a rigor question is standing active having no response and, thus, undermining the stochastic, textual and literal content of all such productions. What and how much of the valuable concept and context depth regarding the flowing and emerging nature depicted in all those works can be recognized and accurately defined in order to be acceptable as the substantial core, the vital reference and the indispensable quality of each such gesture (painting, photographing, writing) and, nevertheless and much more, to be the absolute and secure intellectual content rationalisation. How much of this ''nature'' content is been held inside the depicted artistic phenomenon altering contemplation and research as the primary and only explanatory and guiding idea. It is because of that question that we have to reveal and examine the ideological assemblage between the ''nature'' depicted constituent and the decision and process assumed by the artist to work and construct a representing idol/comment about it (the production of a painting, a text).

It is coherent and accurately related to state that the compositional choice, the frame positioning and the explanatory conjuction of this ''nature'' component plugged in into an artistic structure (a painting, a photograph) or a text is always collate to multiple lateral appositions and it is not the primary visual consept element. The ''nature'' component is either a neutral background of a painted picture or, in case there is an absence of a primary indicator-fingure becomes the leading evidence proving the meditative and ideological inadequacy of the craftman or writer. It is a prove that this component feature (the nature as is in front and around the observer) is not a powerful enouph attraction to allure the will of the some time after, or accurately, creator of a painting, a photograph or a representative text. The observation and the synchronic* meditation about what the attracting landscape is carrying with should be the only, the definite continuum, of a completely powered experience releasing all its content to educate and fulfill/satisfy the spectator. Any afterward attempt to discribe it and constitute a close and verified interpretation produces a conceptual mine field of rapidly collapsing meaning. The only and profound mental connection between a human being looking at a landscape and the landscape entity as is is uniquely accomplished on site.

There is a flow of irrelevant announcements and short range comments intenting to stabilize, to enable and maintain the core meaning of these actions (to paint, to photograph, to narrate the one and any landscape) aiming to achieve the concept fortification of the material outcome (the paint, the photograph, the text). We can read about ''…the early national pride mirrored into the landscape paintings of that time… is carrying the identity of the newly liberated country…'' as the primary and essential reason locating meaning for the paintings of the Dutch Landscape Painters of the 17th century. We can also read that the painting can convey ''...the loneliness of an American country road…'' or and even more ''...the honest presentation of the American scene…'' for the painting of Edward Hopper ''Gas'' (1940), and, furthermore, that ''…he focused on what he termed the spiritual-emotional aspects of parks and wilderness and relentlessly resisted to ''resortism''…'' for the photographs of Ansel Adams commenting ''…the wild nature of America…''

All these linked and firmly bridged correspondences to the illustrated landscape concepts and meaning bedrocks (…the national pride, the loneliness of a country road, the emotional-spiritual experience…) are constituting a field of irrational deviation from the values of the real –the site spesific- experiences thus, consequently, are functioning as interventional mental barriers accelerating the collapse of the attached accurate aesthetic meaning. Indeed, the actual and original meaning that springs out and dominate the correlation between the viewer and the landscape he stands into is the ad hoc action of looking at (the landscape) and the envisagement emerging because of that action. Any other act beyond and after that antecedent action (the narration, the writing, the painting, the printing of a photograph) is merely a constituant element forming a devalued conceptual field of inadequate experience resembling the experience of self in front of a mirror.

This constancy of purpose regarding the discipline of the construction of an imperfect narration aiming to fortify and conserve through time a meaning is similar to the so called ''spiritually'' driven patterns of behavior. The thinker and carrier of the experience of stasis into a landscape (he and the everything ambient at any given geography) is not fulfilled and overwhelmed by it but, to the contrary, have to transform the impression to a technical process and, thus, convey and dictate ideology driven identities.

The structure (the painting, the photograph, the text) include visual properties of minor significance. Conventional elements carrying some of the value of the actual surrounding ambient. It is also carrying all that can't be represented but, nevertheless, comprise its essential content. The lack of the sound code, the lack of the surplus of the surrounding left unidentified because of the frame limit, the visual anomaly accelerated by the ideological additions and prepossessions of the constructor, the always left unknown territory of the textual setting that had to elucidate and disclose all identity features left unidentified.

To each and all of these structures I have presented as examples in order to clarify their visual reading peguliarities and to crtically stand against their constitutional incompleteness, nonetheless their ideological irregularity, which are already standing into the so called history of art as ''masterpieces'', I have identify major sympolic attachements undermining their syntagmatic intellectual positioning as constituents of a synthesis of practices aiming to exemplify and reveal the significance of the overall ambient of events and living contitions. The fortified city (Poussin), the windmill (van Ruisdael), the gas station (Hopper), the mythology and the ideology (Bruegel), the eye altitude (Adams), the method for the visual representation (Turner), are all tesseras of a communicational distortion and a concept shifting compromising their possible placement into the field of works aiming to guide consciousness to the comprehension and the radical appropriation and enjoyment of the landscape.

The crucial detail of the technology for the fortification of habitats is distorting the represantation of the landscape (Poussin), the flourish of the idea of a newly born nation together with the dynamic of the applied technology distort the landscape in the work of van Ruisdael, the flourish and the establishment of a new typologie of behavior patterns regarding the observation of nature from within a car and the cultural phenomenon of constant shifting into geography is the major component in the work of Hopper leaving nature in the context periphery as a factor of fear and weakness. Similarly, the identity represantation of nature is standing within a much more crucial and importand declaration regarding the visual narration and depiction of a mythical dogma (the fall of Icarus into the quietness of the overall naturalistic frame) as the leading educational purpose of a dissolving philosophical concept. Icarus is falling, in the work of Bruegel, as the subject of a punishment demonstration derived from his attempt to find another, ''higher'', stand to look at kosmos. In the work of Adams the positioning of the camera thus the positioning of the eye is not laying within the ordinary physical width as a metronome of an unsophisticated choice but it is situated at a certain hight beyond the capability of a human (Adams positioned his camera on the deck of his car) thus producing a direct ideological gesture and result. Finaly, searching Turner's intention to represent nature as a dynamic field of successive and slight light and ambient changes leading him to actually create a vast archive describing time as the crucial element of landscape observation. Much more than this he is presenting for the first time the idea and the practice that nature is not and can not contained in a depiction but merely is a territory of direct experience. Turner tried to do what we all so easy and impulsively do using the digital video cameras in order to frame a section of the reality we are all drifting into. But, he is too, disable his achievement, inserting the conceptual noise into his work using secondary elements (the boy with the shrimp net and the dog) thus loosing the ability to present an elaborate and accurate result.

Rethinking the so far thoroughly presented analysis about the intention and the intellectual capability of the observer-producer while recording and representing the chosen actual and overall surrounding environment makes it easy to argue that all these compositional details and particular insertions, the so-called visual concept noise, are, seeing into the contemporary frame of thinking, vital and essential elements of the natural. The windmill, the gas station, the movement and the occupation of a frame presenting a landscape sequence, the movement of a ship, the positioning of the camera, the ideology driven narration of a myth are already fully accepted as functional elements forming a motivation bedrock, a contextual mixture, a perceptive plentiful connectability whenever they are occur and accumulate to constitute a meaning (a painting, a photograph). This kind of concept formations were not active and accepted into the time frame of these productions (17th century on till mid 20th century). Nature, already under the stochastic scrutiny of the emerging innovator man was a completely dinstict field of meaning, totally separated from the observer's existence.

 

 

Protasis: The clause expressing the condition in a conditional sentence.
From Greek protasis 'proposition', from pro 'before' + teinein 'to stretch'.

Apodosis: The main clause of a conditional sentence.
From Greek apodidonai 'give back'.

 

 

 

 

Apothem: The quantity of collected goods stored for the winter or any
seasonal reasons. From Greek
apotithenai 'put aside, deposit', from apo 'away' + tithenai 'to place'.

 

The hypothesis and the subsequent protasis I am presenting here is based on a series of technical decisions concerning the collection of visual footage information aiming to reveal and fortify the landscape pictorial question and, additionally, a textual line of comments proposed as highly active concept functions attached to the critical remarks already mentioned, commented and arranged regarding the artworks of the expert technicians. The protasis* is depending on the collection and the following presentation of a set of one minute video recordings of land, sea and skyscapes as found and experienced at site specific contacts. This discipline is a constitutional and syntagmatic category containing specific and considerable relational elements regarding the established manipulations and the aesthetical results and conditions (until the mid 20th century) although support and consist the apodosis* , the new and vivid concept deviations and suspensions providing the opportunity to allege that they are constituting a unique and fresh, highly elaborated and essential relationship regarding the moment when the observer is active within the field he choose to observe and meditate about.

The act of selection and recording are not and will not become the epicenter of a connected narrative mythology. I (We) am (are) always standing at or passing through and there is always the any place to stare at the everything existing. There are no ideal and perfect recording positions or carefully planed strategies but mere visual recordings and attached written material containing or not all that is forming my (our) dreams (in the form of a visual container and a set of notes giving an account of its value). The footage can shape and support my (our) self-awareness. It is the extreme material I will use to experiment with, confront with, distribute and dispose it as an educational archive and apothem* . A short period after the introduced collected items (the visual footage) are already detached from the reality they were belong to and their coherent time pocket. They are not anymore (never were) the reference or the firm conviction of a place but the ideal setting to rephrace my (our) standing before nature.

The sea I am collecting footage from, adopt and record its properties is not the actual sea I am crossing but the cognitive and stochastic type sea including all the tranquil and placid seas, the vast seas of the planet and all the connected multiple elements such as the pure and pellucid water, the populations and the varieties of their inhabitancy, their chemical continous and their stream flow paths, the mirroring of the skies, the mythology and the endless narrations referring to the surface and the extreme deep phenomena, the multiple editions of the historical crossings and navigation acts, the geography of their constantly transforming bed. The vast cultures are not the actual cultures I am crossing through but the ideal metaphore of the concept culture altered as a performing sympolism used to announce and fortify the peacefull and bouncing life. The storms and the heavy dark accumulating clouds are not the evidences and the signs of a pre-desided visual hunting meeting but the ideal type of all storms bursting on the planet signaling the moment when civilization have progress well thus we, secure inhabitants of normality and the necessary distance, can detect and create an index adding multiple comments on it as significant carriers of a meaning tightly linked with all planetary phenomena flowing over the vast common space we are going to end our residency. Using this similar path of thinking, we can think about the flying of an aircraft and its route over a city in the night as a powerful signal and indication of the outstanding materiality of technology we have attain and share. This forceful capability having alter and change the locations from where we are looking at and comprehent the planet. The forceful rumbling of the falling water is the concept indicator and the specific welfare scale proving the fertile break through to the unbroken and consistent continuity of life, the indicator of its rapid and stable flourish, of the possibility of a cataclysmic collapse due to its flowing power change. The recording of a sunset is the ideal remnant of all similar weather conditions circularly occurring around the planet proving the stochastic connection of the historical self with the environmental facts.

This stochastic unity of recordings and documentations tightly connected with their attached short notes have to be consider as the vital cause and the crucial aim for contemplation we have to achieve and continuously apply. In order to firmly determine and accelerate the solitary and every solitary (in the form of a choise for a stasis into the landscape to observe and meditate) research and scouting. Much more than this it is the tool we have while we are endlessly navigate conciousness towards the daily thoughtfull actions enhancing and improving the quality of the heroic and blilliand crossing of reality. This kind of footage have no and will have no any technical processing aiming to improve its quality. The raw sound of the heavy wind or the passing cars, the irregular and random voices melt together with the multiple sound disruptions are compose, constitute and verify the accuracy and sincereness of the act of collection. Furthermore there is no indication of an intentionally choosen compositional discipline or the preparation and construction of a predecided ''ideal'' bedrock of features aiming to create an impure and mislead illustration of a reality model, an ideology driven method constantly and tactically used in the history of ''art''.

This act - the ''as found'' and ''as is'' collection of footage - is one of the many about to be engaged and become critically operated in order to contribute in the gradual modification and deletion of the so far permanent and confusing gap of significance between the ''as is'' representative to the experience example and the manipulated and technically elaborated to be ''as it is expected to be'' authoritative and ideology oriented result. A political strategy attempting to the absolute control on the otherwise multi-oriented reading possibility regarding the plurality of influences in understanding reality. A leading act of composing and, instantly, educating through a line of manipulations enhancing self-awareness and environmental reconnaissance at the peak of the global debate regarding the possible collapse of the life support equilibrium. It is a harmonized and direct development process aligning this prime meditative gesture (the exhibition) with the digital communication universe and thus, consequently, transform its unique tactical revelation dynamics (of collecting audio visual footage, texts, comments and references thus, altering multiple comprehention behaviours) already hard deviating from the common outward massive communication bearing (the material object based exhibitions) to a constitution of a fast forward progressive spread and distribution of content all over the planet.

This exhibition of visual findings and their direct contact writings is evolving on a demanding conceptual background, a powerful but supple cognitive discipline allowing meaning manipulations, constitutonal context re-establishments and radical updates. Giving access to its internal activated dialogues and questions and to its open content arrangements and reformations, additions and revisions. This fresh and radical ''going digital'' choise, this dynamic approach and concept possibility is continuously giving away its core elements and constantly revising its bedrock values. Uniformly distributing and rapidly collecting each and every minor and major compositional component, every following valuable thought and intellectual gesture having and, instantly, having not a supportive and specific positioning. This autonomous and self oriented attempt standing far away from the bulky typologies of materiality (material exhibitions, editions, contribution, purchase, objects, spaces, rituals, supporting ethics) is going to be the new digital ability for a perceptive making of a way through the historical convention to form one and multiple cognitive pockets of fast forward and compact, collective and outstanding actions.