 Our term for the biosphere, the place that allows living to happen, the part of the universe in which life, such as it is, the mysterious it is, can be. Life can be in biosphere, and we change biosphere to biosphere because it's attaching, separating, attaching, separating. It's the dynamics that underlie our possibility. Architectural body theory says that you are not just the body proper. You are the body proper, plus the architectural surround. Now we know, we have definite proof of the power of this from our work in our piece in Nagi. In that work, we particularly organize the landing sites. We again rely on symmetry to do this. And we have both side to side and above-below symmetry. We heard from the director of that museum, our room, our tube, is one-third of the Nagi museum. And we heard back from him that a great master of Ki went to visit that museum and visited the Arakawa and Gin's room and ran up to him to say, I want you to know that that room has the highest concentration of Ki of all Japan. That's what Madeline remembers. Arakawa said, has the highest concentration of Ki of all the Orient. So Arakawa remembered it bigger. But this is very, very important evidence. And when I heard this, I wasn't so surprised because I said, oh yes, yes, because we organize the landing sites inside that tube. And we know that landing sites are theoretical posits, theoretical identifications of location. To begin with, people when they are in this room, I think also when they are in any work of procedural architecture, they begin to feel more huge. And if you are more huge, you have more power. You have more power. You are in the process of rehabilitating your body. Just to begin with. Step one, everything's changing. People have to know how it's all changing for anyone's health situation. And how this new science that Arakawa and I have introduced, biotopology is very important for rehabilitation and healing situations too. Because biotopology asks that you take into consideration as many scales of action as you can, all at the same time. And it's not easy to do that. You cannot do that yourself. You cannot remember it all. You cannot be aware of all that you need to be aware of. But what if your house is helping you in your houses? Oh, I'm here. I'm your friend. I'm your physician. I'm your ally. I will help you remember this scale of action, that scale of action. This is necessary for you to, don't forget you need to do this. This has to happen also. There's just so many ways that it could be done. Yeah. We have to really tear open ignorance. For our next panel, I mean it says architectural bodies up there, but we've been talking about them all day. But we'll have a kind of different group of perspectives for this set of discussions. Our first presentation will be from Spiros Papapetros from Princeton University, one of my favorite people. And we'll also have Adrienne Hart, a choreographer from the company Neon Dance, who's come from London, and is developing a specific dance piece inspired by Arakawa and Gin's architecture. And then Giusepso and Andres Haka from the Office for Political Innovation will be the respondent. So I'm very happy to have Spiros here to share his findings. Thank you. Thank you, Irene. This is a wonderful job. I should say, Irene was my TA for three years and twice in a class called The Body in Space, actually. I studied architecture and visual arts. And so when she started working on the materials, she thought about it and she asked me to contribute. I was very happy to do it, even though I had no familiarity with her work before that. So what I will do today is actually less of a lecture than a close reading seminar. I have to warn you about that. So I'll talk only about a single book project published in 2002 by the University of Alabama Press, which are proposed to do this close reading. How do I turn here? Great. Since the book has no images, even while describing architecture and that was apparently a conscious decision by the two, I will also use no images, with the exception of only one, to describe their work so that their voice perhaps comes across more clearly without an image. But images will accompany side references to the work of other architects or authors. The third chapter of Madeleine Ginz and Arakawa's book, Architecture, a Body, titled Architecture as a Hypothesis, describes a hypothetical walk between Ginz and Arakawa and what would presumably be a couple of prospective clients, Robert and Angela, touring a house or a full model of a house, the two architects have apparently prepared for them. I quote, Arakawa. Here is the house we were telling you about. Angela, I don't see any house here. Ginz, granted this is not what in our time most people dream of coming home to, Robert, this heap? Ginz, yes, a low pile of material that covers fairly vast area. Angela, are we at a dump, this low pile covering a vast area? Ginz, what you take to be a pile of junk ranges in height from 3 to 11 inches. It measures close to 2,400 square feet or 2,009 square feet if you include the courtyard, Robert. Courtyard? Ginz. The shining part in the middle, that has a lot of green around it. That's the courtyard. After Angela commented that it was hilarious that even the surrounding shrubbery was taller than this 11-inch maximum horizontal layer of a house, Arakawa proposed to the equally alarmed and equally bemused visitors to take a walk around this supine homestead to which Robert gradually retorts, why bother? I can see everything from here. To which Ginz responds that it is wonderful to be able to see everything at once like a plan. But Angela comments, well, that would make this pile of junk a very bumpy blueprint. Here the reader of Ginz and Arakawa's narrative interlude might start asking, where are we? Or where are they? Are we at a remote load looking at an actual structure or at an office where the pair of architects demonstrate a future house to clients through blueprints and drawings? The very principle of reversibility here between 2D and 3D is right here in this procedure. The dilemma is the false one. Since we are apparently outside in the house, it's that flat-ass bumpy blueprint. Ginz and Arakawa's book emulates the structure of a Renaissance treatise. Polyphilo might come to mind. Or three centuries later, what less picturesque, where we are witnessing a dialogue in which a guy takes an unsuspecting visitor for an architectural walk displaying all sorts of an unbuilt or natural marvels. And yet one can never say or be sure exactly where all of this is taking place. And if one is taking a walk in the outside, one still has a hunch that you have actually never left the author's studio, his salon, his writing desk, and in this case, an office. In this chapter layout and bodily distribution, architectural body is symmetrically divided into nine parts of exactly 100 pages of text total, which makes the missing 10th part, where it to be another vitruvius, which exists in the library, even more tantalizing. Each part or section has a different theme, yet there are plenty of thematic repetitions between chapters which take the edifice of this architectural body book read as a rhythmic structure. At the very preface of the book, we have another dialogue between the two authors attempting to explain the title architectural body, which is actually the only image on the cover, which is an image of a text. Where they wonder whether, after all, the back and forth they have got it right. And then they mention their last other choice, which was constructing life, which they ultimately abandoned since the work was more about reconfiguring life, rather than an out-and-out construction, even if their work had to do with self-organization, autopieces, artificial life, and conscious studies. But still, this was not the title, so the author spent more time explaining a title that they abandoned, unless the one that they chose in the end, that is the architectural body. So what is the architectural body? Perhaps the abandoned title of constructing or reconfiguring life might in fact give us a hint. Famously, in his order of things, Michel Foucault declared that life itself did not exist in the 18th century, and that it only came into being with the establishment of the scientific discipline of biology after 1800. This modern invention of life was informed by a series of architectonic parameters into the growth and spatial behavior of living organisms. Architecture functioned as a typological blueprint, and as an epistemological parameter, describing the methods of organization within the processes of life, now expanding from human to mineral structures. The very practice that would initially appear to fix and stabilize matter was re-employed in order to transform, move, and even animate formerly dead materials by its tectonic powers of organization. And it was precisely the emerging science of tectonics interrogating the formation of all bodies, natural and artificial, that offered an insight into the processes of life, and their impeding architecturalization to borrow a term used in the 20th century by Le Corbusier, architecture. As they strived to adapt within a rapidly transforming environment, architecture then was understood not only as a system that facilitated living processes, such as the movement or repose of human bodies, but also as an entity that itself was animate, living, and had a body. The soul is the architect of its own body. Lam, el architect de son propre corps, argues the 19th century philosopher Albert Remois in his memoir of the vitalist and anime series of 17th century medical philosopher George N. Stahl. Following Stahl via Lemoine, all human bodies possess an architectonic soul, unam architectonic, that can organize all living matter, give form to each body it inhabits, which would otherwise remain a lounge of unorganized particles. Re-invigorated by the invention of the life sciences, now every form of tectonics had to start with life itself. Life would eventually become the arcane, meaning origin, or beginning, of the energy and power behind architecture. Architecture itself is not life as buildings are not living, vivant, but vivifine, vivifique, as they enable the conditions of life to take place. Adhering to issues of epigeneticist and rejecting theories of supporting and a priori pre-formation of life, 19th century medical epistemology of the soul could refabricate the body throughout life and perpetually redefine its living materials. For the end of the 19th century, at the beginning of the 20th, the major evolutionary processes that would connect life, bodies, and architecture would include adaptation, optimization, and the special claims of natural selection. Darwin is in the library of Ginzenarokawa. For Ginzenarokawa, these constructive life processes are called self-organization, auto-PSs, and artificial life. There are several books on that in the library as well. Which means that they took the entire process of the architecturalization or what they call reconfiguration of life to a whole new level. And that's the level of the reversible destiny and of conquering or reconfiguring death by a tentative elimination and or its deconstruction. This may not be entirely against the reconstructive principles of 19th century architectural reinvention of life and its symptoms. In Ginzen Lemoine, the soul is not only the architect, but also the doctor of its body. L'un, médecin, the son quo. The soul holds power over the reciprocal processes of remedy and malady. It can allow the body to get sick and then aid it to recuperate. Also it can drive the body to decay and to death's inorganic inertia. Death is the effective endpoint of this living architecture, the ultimate destination of the soul's plan and its tectonic formation. But in Ginzen Arakawa the same scenario is reversed. I quote from the architectural body, quote, the defeats are everywhere within the life sciences. They try to cure the human body or figure it out such as they find it to be never attempting to reconfigure it altogether, never thinking to reorder the body radically so that it might elude mortality, end quote. An architecturally guided and sustained and organism person should be able to reverse the destiny known to have been lots of billions of other members of our species, end quote. Perhaps one can further think of reversibility here, the reversible destiny as part of Ginzen Arakawa's main organizing principle or architectural hypothesis of choice evolving around the idea of tentativeness. An idea that structures the biosclives, the version of the body or the living sphere as we heard, as a demonstrably tentative constructing towards holding in place. Which implies that the architectural works constructed inside cannot be anything but tentative. As I say, tentativeness is not simply about the fleeting nature of things including architectural works but about an intrinsic tentativeness within the biosphere that all living things which architecture sure helps to remain living applies. For them this is a totally constructed tentativeness, a surfeited rightful hesitation on the hesitating mark. It's an antidote to the person's self-certainty. And such hesitation needs to be put in precise order in order to work to be in relation to works of architecture. Demonstrating the ins and outs of viability, these structures one feels as if walking inside a tentatively constructed hypothesis, an architecture of as if. Similar to the philosophy of as if by Hans Weinger at the beginning of the last century that signals a condition between idealism and objectivity. But let us now return to the two couples that we left earlier about the architectural narrative of the house visit that started this paper. With the architectural guidance of the two life designers, eventually Angela and Robert start adapting to their new house as they are asked to use their own body to activate and reform the space. Well, Robert I begin now to see what is expected from us in here. First off, we need to stretch our limbs as much as possible. When I stretch my arms up as if I am about to hit a volleyball, the material rides up and I can see a fairly large area. Is that the kitchen facility? Is it a kitchen in the center? Yes, that's the kitchen. Your arms are raised up high, atlas supporting the globe. And do you see where that gets you? It gets you to a house that begins Angela. Rooms form depending on how we move. If I bend down, I nearly lose the room. Would you open up the room a little more where you are? Robert, I will play a carriaret and you go off to the farthest end. I'm beginning to feel more at ease with all of this. Like an atlas and then a carriaret, when one should be able to hold or carry the world or at least one's own house on one's head. The house does not passively carry the inhabitants. It is they who hold it together and actively support it. Similarly, how one flexes her muscles. A person should be able to flex her surroundings, as both Kinsen and Kwarakaya note, are with her now and off her always. And as the architect continue, you're not given a finished house, but instead something you can form throughout your movements and through those whoever else is there with you. The structural surroundings are elaborately structured pretexts for action. They pre-exist the person and they are already there waiting to be entered and encounter even when in disarray. They essentially function upon the person and become perceived as atmospheric conditioners. That's their expression. In his unpublished manuscript titled Magic Architecture, the Story of Human Housing, Frederick Kisler that there is a monograph in the library would narrate the first entry into the habitation of pre- or proto-humans in caves as an active quest for reformation of their own bodies. Kisler would imagine the ancestors of the human species quote, crawling on four legs into his habitat with more ease than his later erect stance would permit. Then, after he became upright that is the human, he had to bed down to get through the door and once inside, he remained marched. Finally, he raised the roof of his new home to the full height of his stature end quote and that was Kisler. We see here that for Kisler the cave is not already made like a living organism the cave develops in conformity with the body of the proto-human and vice versa. The story resembles the Lacanian mirror stage in which the cave plays the role of the Trot-Pébet a prosthetic scaffold that supports the contingent body of the developed human being. But Kisler's story just like Ginz and Karakawa's underlined the co-dependency between the body and the tectonic prosthesis. The house, like Kisler's cave elastically transforms to accommodate Man's transition from horizontality to verticality yet it always carries the memory of that crouching body that originally crawled in its interior. The house is not a finished frame inside which the body is installed but instead it's an extension of the human figure that akin to a spider web gradually emanates from the body and develops in conformity with it. Ginz and Karakawa mentioned in the architectural body that it would be ridiculous for someone to use a flashlight to find the path out of a labyrinthine cave what has to bump against uneven walls and low overhangs or trip upon rocks and stalagmites and then slide into and splash through shallow puddles so as to start wondering if indeed this might be a hollow-out figment of your imagination. That is, extracting the cave the Ua architectural surrounding from its solid framework and recasting it into the plane of tentative possibility. Another similarity here is with Kisler's other original model of habitation that is the animal nest such as the Ua orangio tanks makeshift night shelter made of leaves from surrounding tree branches. The cave adapts the logic of the nest and vice versa. Angela and Robert are asked actually to return to that stage where every day and every night they would have to reassemble and raise the house from the horizontal pile of junk as the first call it to be constantly and actively reaccommodated. Another animal metaphor that describes Ginz and Karakawa's architectural body is the snail. Human snails go on carrying the architectural surroundings which are glued bodily on them like second skins through which in the best case scenario creates a form of interpenetration with their environment breathing in and out creating what they call complementary tones as well as passive and active elements. This living shell is quote thick with one's own breathing and quote its thickness is achieved by the amount of possibilities for what they call landing side configurations which swallow them but also heuristically expel exude and disperse while going through. The way that this snail like architectural skin is formed is by a quote kinesthetic casting a cast layer created by the perceptions arising from the body's movement. For them persons are always quote kinesthetically grounded, figured and reconfigured. Everything happens by kinesthetic instigation or corporeal proteins since all events kinesthetic repercussions create a mobile and sculpted medium of locatings and landings. Through such kinesthetic casting they argue the house prompts your actions. Once tactile surroundings are closing on her they sculpt kinesthetic possibility or kinesthetic with itness. The sculpted kinesthetic with itness, the tentative the tentativeness of any moment can be thought of as the matrix of the person. While strongly related to the processes of imaging such portable casting net can never be achieved with merely optical means. They mention for example and that's another iteration of that casting. They mention for example the famous AIMS room designed and constructed by the ophthalmologist Andalbert AIMS in the 1940s based apparently on the writings of the 90th century physicist, physiologist and master of psychotechnics, Henry Helmholtz creating optical illusions of giant and small figures and that all of this illusion could instantly vanish though once the viewer armed with a stick probes the room's interior say Ginzenarokawa. And if she or he learns tactilely and kinesthetically that the floor slopes and that the structure of this room is anything but ordinary so that's a refutation actually of some of the principles of cognitive psychology implied here. This proprioceptive kinesthetic sculpting of the house does not mean that it precludes practical living functions. As Ginz explains to Angela and Robert everything that can be done in an ordinary house can be done in this one but some maneuvering might be necessary. Its piece of material on the pile you see has ribs or spokes that open like those of an umbrella ready to be activated expanding mechanisms lie at four foot intervals. Ginz further explains that everyday house activities like cooking can also take place in the house depending on the setting one chooses to operate the house and which causes the material to close back in and down. More ever when the house operates through quote remote controlled switches that can then operate sensors that bloom and fabricate the house and this is also what allows it to become liveable by those who are ill or handicapped. All three of these models of an architectural body we've seen so far, the snail or the house has a protractable second skin the house has an atmospheric conditioner and finally the house that has a number of different settings in which it can be adjusted, go back to the ideas of the biological and ecological reconceptualization of architectural space as the main brain in Siegfried Ebeling's 1926 small pamphlet published at Dessau by this former student of the Bauhaus. Ebeling conceives a space not only as a permeable membrane but also as a vegetal husk, a tree bark or a mineral shell that allows the living cube to communicate and absorb the ionized particles of the atmosphere. His few designed projects show a house organism that is entirely controlled by the human hand by a set of valves that adjust the mood of the space by altering light and air conditions. His texts and his projects as himself prophesied would not be known unless if perhaps in 20 years later some biologically and ecologically inclined community would pick up those ideas. It took perhaps twice as long for some of these architectural ideas of inflatable domes and other things to be revived in the 1960s and another 20 or even 40 years for him, Ebeling that is to be rediscovered. But that's Ebeling's reversible destiny. The architectural bodies of Ginza Naracawa are with us in this moment and did not have to wait that long. By the end of their walk around the house Angela and Robert are totally convinced. Angela this entire house is landing on me, on us. There are so many landings I hardly know where to begin. Robert, when I breathe in there are lots of landings as a result of that. I'm feeling my breathing more than I ever had before and at this point Angela decides to lay down, crouch, curl her body and take an up into this cosy place. Aracawa was thrilled that the pair had linked breathing with landing. They didn't know that before. As if that marked the moment that the architectural body had been resuscitated by that very breath and grounded with that landing. Thank you. Great and now we'll hear from Adrian Hart of Neon Dance. Are you alright? There's lots of people talking at you. My name is Adrian Hart. I'm the artistic director of Neon Dance. We're based in the UK and it's been a pleasure and thank you for inviting me to come here to talk to you all. I will be talking but I also have some artefacts to share with you that are part of a brand new work that I'm developing. I've never been asked to talk about a work that exists yet so this is a first. I'm developing a new work called Puzzle Creature that's been inspired by the work of Aracawa Madeleine Gins and it's been a really fascinating process to go through. I was exposed to their work through Leopold that's here today and spoke to you all earlier. At the time I was making a piece called Empathy and I was really utilizing the Phenambolas which is it's now a physical magazine but at the time it was only online as a resource and there was some wonderful work there including a podcast from Mimeo also here that exposed me to reversible destiny lofts in memory of Helen Keller and I had the opportunity to go out to Japan where the lofts are based and also to explore both the lofts and the park the site of reversible destiny and then I came back to the UK and pulled together a team of artists that I thought might be interesting to bring together to respond to this body of work and I think already from the number of speakers and diverse disciplines standing up here and talking about Arakara and Gins you can see how much they've influenced many different mathematicians architects choreographers such a wide range of people and that's incredible to me as a choreographer when I work with Neon Dance it's about bringing together artists from different disciplines to create work that we couldn't have created alone and for me Arakara and Gins they personify that and I'm every day exploring more and more about their work and today I'm talking about puzzle creature but already I'm starting to think about beyond that and perhaps making several other pieces after this one we will see so let me introduce you to puzzle creature as I do you'll see an image of my dancer Karastaton performing with what we refer to as an artefact I've been working with an artist who initially trained as an architect called Anna Reykjavik when we were talking about an environment for puzzle creature and for my performers to work within we started to think about the idea of the body and how repeated actions meaning that we become fixed perhaps in our way of thinking, in our way of being and as a dancer, as a choreographer meaning that we get stuck in creating the same type of movement vocabulary so she came up with this idea of using this mesh type material that has the ability to I have this mask that I'll share around in a second but it comes as a rigid material and you can dunk it in hot water and then it becomes fluid, soft and malleable and you can cast it on a limb on a light, on a chair and within an instant it becomes fixed and stuck and so we found this a really interesting device for generating movement material but also it means that if we wanted to we could then put it back into boiling water and it would reverse its destiny it would become floppy again and then you could recast it into something new so just as I carry on talking I've got my little I've got hundreds of these but there's only so many I could fit in my luggage so this is one of them that I'll pass around and you can try and guess what this is this is your challenge for the day and just to say and I will talk a little bit more specifically about the work itself as well but just to say I through Erica and Gens I really started to think about how I've been making work up until now and it's been for an audience that are generally sitting in chairs as passive spectators and I really specifically when looking at the lofts and how they've been designed with the body of Helen Keller in mind it kind of woke me up a bit actually and starting to think about different bodies and how they might engage in the space collectively and so I've been kind of on a journey with this work and speaking to lots of different groups and inviting them to give me feedback and that's informing the piece that we're making so I've been working with a group called the Brailists in Bristol who are visually impaired and I bought these objects in with me and it was really fun seeing them try to guess what some of them are but also for an individual that was visually impaired and trying to work out the face object and they were starting to place it on a shoulder or a knee and I thought how wonderful that these shapes that are formed from one body part can fit and find a way or another and it got me inspired in terms of how movement can shift and change so as that's doing the rounds I've never worked with one of these before so so I'd like to describe our thinking I'm really opened for anyone that's interested in what I have to say today come give me feedback on this because it's in the making next month we go to Berlin to try a scale down version of this and then we premiere in Japan and then we come to the UK after that but we're still very much in the creation process so a few things became very clear when I started to research the world of Arakara and Ginz as I said audience they can't be sitting in chairs this felt very clearly not not right the audience need to be in and part of the work so for the first time ever that's what we're doing we're finding venues where either we can take away the seating or perhaps using going away from the theatre and working in a museum or gallery space the I mean you can see maybe where the bumpy floor influencers come from we made a conscious decision that of course if Arakara and Ginz were still alive today I would be pleading with them to collaborate with me but they're not so I've worked with an incredible design collective called Neiman to come up with a response to their work we're trying not to replicate but hopefully offer a sense of some of their philosophy around architectural bodying and it was really nice to hear the kind of theory before that because these designs that are up here right now are very much from that theory and how perhaps both performer and audience member can collectively occupy the same space another aspect of the work is my score we've chosen to create a surround sound score where the sound will have a physical aspect in the work and again thinking about not being so reliant on the visual world and perhaps if instead you consider how sound might be in a space then it might travel across you, underneath you it might surround you and so we've started that journey and it's been a real privilege to work with some of the archival materials from Madeleine and Arakawa having them physically in the space with us seems to be to make the work more real and also introduce a whole new group of people to their philosophy to their way of thinking I can tell you the very opening of Puzzle Creature will open with the words of Madeleine speaking at my audience and saying hello a final couple of things to add about Puzzle Creature with it's really got the Helen Keller in mind as a body but also I'm interested in what happens when we take away certain senses but then introduce others I'm going to be working with a British sign language and a Japanese sign language communicator and one of the interesting processes in this is that some of the words for example, reversible destiny doesn't exist in British sign language so we're having to invent them and going through the and I feel this could be a really nice thing to contribute back to BSL and we're just starting that journey with JSL but the what I found so far is that those that I've worked with that I've started to talk about Erica and Ginn's work too they felt really empowered by the work and just to end there's a group that I've been working with recently that are called the Company of Elders and they're all over the age of 60 and a dance company based in London at Sadler's Wells Theatre and one of the the group they normally have to walk with a cane so making reference to that story earlier but she says when I dance I don't need my cane and so I really loved the story to know that when you're in the loft you don't need a cane either so for me Erica and Ginn's work fits so well within the realm of dance and the body being the central tenet of any given space I feel really at home when I got to stay in the loft and I adored being at the park I managed to survive without breaking any limbs I think I'm going to leave it there I know we're going to open it up to conversations but I think this is hopefully these are just some very early sketches if you get to come see the show you'll get to be part of the final thing but yeah the idea is you could physically be moved by an air bubble around the space and one thing actually recently I came straight from London and I had a wild card at Sadler's Wells where the audience were mostly having to sit on the floor and they were saying how uncomfortable it was and it was a flat floor and it was a really interesting process to go through and to consider how I take care of my audience so that they can be active in the space and that there are many ways of not just standing or sitting in one fixed way for a huge amount of time perhaps they can sit, lie, hang, lean and that their body's engagement with the space is very much part of the work yeah I'm going to leave it there, thank you very much thank you so much Adrian and now Andreas Hacker will lead the conversation with Adrian and Speros super good well, let's start right away there's so much to discuss and please if someone wants to do a question, raise your hands and I'll take notes and we'll try to take as many as possible well, I'm very, very interested in the connections of your two presentations in a way for instance, it was very interesting that you were using the word entity to talk about both human and also architecture at one point and you were talking of artifacts when you were discussing this much, these terms of course are not naive at all and very much kind of in a way, correct me if I'm wrong but they're both reclaiming a little bit of a way of describing these processes in which there's certain symmetry in the counter of different bodies or entities the humans and the non-humans let's say and I want to stop here in this moment in which both get to adapt each other to somehow they saw their co-dependence and it seems to be also taking Speros words from Arakawa and Gin the construction of life in a way, so maybe you can in the UK say to you and for instance this need of an interaction between the whole installation in which the audience meet the performers also seems to be mediated by a process of adaptation to something that somehow is both shaping those human bodies but is also equally shaping the space and the forum in which they're meeting so I think this process of mutual adaptation, mutual affection in a way it's crucial in both your presentation so maybe we can start with this Speros maybe you want to it's a lot, first of all about entity I wanted to use a term that is as neutral as possible actually their time is person and you have to do the work to become a person and interact with one surroundings right that happens gradually so that's important in on the second question about how do you actually achieve that status through biological processes while the classic biological process of the 90th century will be precisely adaptation, optimization they're using the language of a new form of biology that is auto pieces self-organization is in their library for example, they're very interested in pygenesis and atongenesis anything that would avoid heredity information, fixation so all of that is there but I like the term person because it's used a lot by also contemporary anthropologists that are new animates that you person the world and even objects and animals can become persons that they have qualities and agencies within it interesting I guess it's also another point that I got into if anyone's heard of Vernon Lee who did a lot of work on aesthetics and how I think it was a book on beauty and ugliness in the 18 something, late 1800s and she she talked about the effect art and architecture had on the body and hinted at this our entangled nature with our environment and I think that is it Madeleine that said don't be so damn sure of yourself and I like this idea of creating an environment for an audience to become conscious of what's is this table solid or over time can it also decay and meet its end or renew and be recycled into something new the body is a fascinating thing where you can physically see changes if you don't see a family member for a year and then you come and see them again you can notice a change in them so it's it's this thing of the noticing and being consciously aware of our body and our surroundings and the fact that they're one and the same I'm very interested in that moment where tentativeness or hesitation is preserved in a bodily level that if you never master things or control them in the end even though you might have done the same movement a hundred times I was very intrigued to hear that even people who have worked in the office so many times they would still bump and trip in all of these environments but that actually might be part of the agenda in a way that you never master something right? Tentativeness has to be reserved, you're never self-assured that's the kind of care and respect that you have for your environment that's tentativeness to me how does relate in your opinion to the process of awareness because it's true that Momoyo for instance was mentioning that when you went to Europark you had injured yourself you have bounce so in a way there is a process that is very physical of really even suffering in your body transformations but in the case of Momoyo for instance it's even bounce and it's a process of let's say learning a creation of certain self-mutual awareness so there's two processes that one seems to be bodily, the other seems to be more intellectual but in your readings both things come together somehow? Well it's an issue of kinesthetic knowing almost right or knowing from the body symptomatically yesterday we had a discussion precisely on her book Kinesthetic Knowing so it was interesting for me to prepare for two very different events that actually were very much related and a kinesthesia was very much at the very heart of them so you can learn precisely by the body and acquire that kind of awareness Robert and Angela that we heard about that's exactly what we got here it's their journey of awareness of that space that they would see as a junk of pile and in the end they would get to be aware of their own possibilities within that house that they're actually living synesthetically For me in response to that and the idea of falling or slipping and how it can be there is a way to it's interesting as you're falling if you do this you're more likely to break a bone if you let go and release and go into the floor a tip next time you're at Euro Park then you are less likely to hurt yourself so there are by giving in to gravity to accepting the floor you're less likely to hurt yourself well bring it back the reference of Leopold of the normative bodies and how that translated also to for instance horizontality in floors the way you describe these processes are something that somehow would be very difficult in a normative space that is already kind of avoiding this process of basically needing to adapt as the space also adapt to two bodies actually both the collection of the cases that you brought Spiros could never be probably included in the normative spaces or a German that Leopold was talking about in the case for instance of Kiesler very clearly the space that you're creating probably will have very many difficulties to get licenses to be surprised with the regulations so in a way there's certain and I take your expression setting that somehow it's avoiding these regulatory Germanis here in the cases so this architecture seems to put itself in a realm of experimentation with the tentativeness it's expressed very vividly it's bodily experience in a very clear way alternative to probably ordinary experiences what is this experimentation character or kind of experimental character of these works what's the importance of this I would say they're not aware of this normativeness actually it's right there I mean there's vitruvius there the karyatis watch more of a normative with these women depressed actually by the thing that they have to carry on their heads they turn them on their heads somehow or they turn on their heads these kind of normative procedures the one example that I show that was the Amazon Domino by Corbizier what can be even more normative right but they re-adapted it with their own casting the synesthetic casting inside it to say that's how actually the architecture of fame should have been created so the normas are there implicitly in the work as almost graphic representations how can you almost corrupt them or prevert them some of the processes they describe in this house that you have to crawl in and raise it up seem established traditional architectural ways of verticality raising up but then again they challenge that as well they can collapse at any time with these multiple settings I think it's essential I think all buildings should look like those by I want that hotel to exist and it's fundamental because people are producing work in these spaces they are dance studios for example they're all flat floors they tend to have bars even though only a proportion of people produce ballet anymore so bars in a mirror will colour in the scribal way of being on the body perhaps make it more architectural to change the movement vocabulary that's produced so I think what Madeline's doing with the poetry is this scrambling effect with language it's very interesting for me as well reminds me of William Burroughs and the cut-up technique as a vehicle for producing other ways to make work and to derail your way of thinking so it's essential what is the way that you in your work accumulate let's say the experience of the tentative approaches so what is the way the space the bodies, the choreographies are registering for the result of the evolution of tentative approaches to the work I think that's probably why we've gone down the route of working with these artifacts because my dancers they've trained for so many years they are experts in moving eloquently, beautifully and so how on earth do I disrupt that and make them tentative and I certainly think this environment will do that so that I was proposing earlier I think having the unknown quantity of audience members roaming within that space will do it as well and having for example did anyone guess what the other piece was for was it a hand? do you have any clues? it's very close it's a trick question because it's made with two different bodies together two hands which again this idea of tentativeness if you're used to having one body and then become attached to another body I think this is a vehicle for that to occur probably there's already questions comments, complaints like well I have one more I have many more but I have one now you ended with a very kind of mysterious sentence this grounding without landing maybe you can develop a little bit on that what do you think is behind these words? actually it was grounding or how to grounded without landing but it had to relate actually landing to grounding I find it very interesting that in the conclusion of all of this Angela just lays down and rests asleep which is the ultimate way to show that this is cozy you can sleep you know what can be even more intimate in this case so that way it was precisely usually these landings are most successful when they end up to the body itself that was the moment that somehow the body reacquired its horizontality the very thing that we said with Kitzler and others it was it regrounded itself but after it has acquired this kind of awareness of verticality and whatever she could do of the house now she kind of relents and just laid down to sleep so that's the grounding where about the breathing breathing is very important I mean the thing is you know one of the traditions that brings the body to space from the 19th century on even in Nietzsche's the birth of tragedy precisely what relates to the space is the breathing the regularity of breathing in and out and that creates rhythm and that creates precisely space which 90th century theories of space would talk that's how the body relates to space actually through breathing the process that is already in the body what do you think is the role of basically aracawa and Nietzsche here because for instance you were asking before about the notation system that you were using so it's maybe a discussion that we can bring here because in a way the role of Nietzsche for instance here and aracawa writing the story for Angela and Robert is very peculiar the kind of in control of all the story in your case for instance you're preparing this situation but in a way it's probably very unexpected and very uncertain the evolution of it so there's a question also where's the design operating here in both cases it's difficult one to answer because it's still in the making I certainly I was saying I end up with a script by the end of a making process with with this work yeah there is an unknown element to it which is my audience or organisms that person and how yeah I guess it's almost that each event will have its own particular outcome and we can set up possibilities we can imagine things we can ensure we take care of the audience but yeah there's no one way to predict it necessarily or to yeah and in terms of documentation or notating it's I mean I'm still a very someone mentioned VR earlier is that a way to document or to notate it truly so that you could only relive one audience or one performer's experience by going through it yourself no the reason that I brought this story in and I made it this fine or the presentation is yeah I was really struck at that moment that they take what could have been both ethical clients, friends what is this couple for a site visit that we would normally do and then suddenly the husband say well but this is just like looking at a plan we can see everything so horizontal so they are immediately transported back as it been and looking at a drawing while you are on the site so this kind of reversibility to me was extremely interesting of reversibility that would apply to the spaces from 2D the space of the drawing to the space of the actual site and that's why it's very interesting where this is a very bumpy look but then there's a third level which is the level of the text everything is written it's notated, it's scripted and of course it's their script and I don't know we heard the presentations earlier that Madeline was doing and so I was wondering actually who might have written the dialogue and each of them who speaks every time that it's under Madeline or Arakawa speaking is it really them or someone else wrote their lines and why do they split these lines between them and this kind of thing so that they are already there and you're also doing a question you started actually with a question that it was where are we or they and this goes to Lucy's presentation on the books I don't know where Lucy is and actually the fact that we're re-enacting somehow many of these works and the exhibition is re-enacting them in a particular way through the design as well so in a way we're also part of this visit that Angela and Roberts are having and also in your case it's different because we're not the audience of the actual choreography puzzle that you're presenting but we're kind of experiencing it through the mediation of performance that you two are doing here so what is the way that this previous experiences in your case the tentative the previous tentative experiments of this choreography in your case the re-enacting of this text is mediating also or is producing another tentative layer in which these works are enacted basically Yeah, sorry, I'm thinking it's really I guess it's a proposition to my audience that I've never had before so trying to go beyond spectacle and what's there, what am I asking the audience to do they can't view as passive spectators anymore they're invited in and part of the work literally stepping into the work onto the page and their actions influence both performers and other audience members' experience and I love that idea I'm a big fan of improvisation both in dance and music and perhaps that's coloured and shaped alongside Iroca and Gin's tentativeness Yeah You know the very idea of the architecture of promenade as I said it originates in this text but then of course you have Corbisier who transcends you a building and now it goes back to text that's the reversible character of it I mean that's the way to implicate your reader empathetically even almost kinesthetically they have this wonderful scene here where actually they're asking you to do an experiment with a book far close to your face in order to realise your kinesthetic possibilities there are multiple ways of reading not just sitting How do you think this work relates to for instance a discussion that happened last night their work basically the question is about how do you contextualise this within the whole tradition of kinesthetic of architecture Yeah, no the discussion we heard yesterday it was precisely about the sort of practical application of these physio physio-psychical experiments of the 19th century in order to induce this idea of actually control of the body what seems very natural very bodily actually is a means of control and I think that's precisely when I said they play with normative modes that they are trying to reverse so it's one of these attempts actually to escape this psychocontrol that all of these psychic techniques involved in design processes through the Bauhaus Black Mountain College wherever Albert and others taught in fact to turn them on their head but they are based on very similar principles Excellent so let's go on with the next panel