[...] lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.

meeting the cat half-way



[Ingraham]
the house, passed over in history, brings with it a great many dangers
architecture (never touches the object) is enchanted with object discourse
...all of us have been asked to “instrumentalize” architectural [or art] theory according to a particular building
material given a structure

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Q & A ?, interactivity, swarovski party, servants and robots interacting with foreign bodies --> feeling at home? excited... --> disco without bouncers and borders without border check, spaces you can seamlessly in and out, labyrinthine

i am generating some vocabularies
parsite and parasitical, not all of them are predatory like the wolf



(Karen Barad)
With all mirroring practices, biomimcry has built-in optics on the geometry of distance from what which is other.


(Irigaray)
surprise (to be new): not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known
our attention to that which is not yet (en)coded

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(something to consider, regarding the pigs and wolf story, also an interest for performances that happen in closed space;) there is a standard account that says ‘interiors’ and ‘interiority’ are linked, that the articulation of interior physical space enabled the development of certain kind of (initially bourgeois European) sense of subjective life--as something sheltered and enclosed.
=/= interiority (subjectivity) is linked to the exterior [Sennett]

O-- still in the 15th century (when sex and sleeping was not veiled under curtains) there was no correlation between the notion of privacy and the interior
O-- in the mid 18th century (among European bourgeoisie) a new ideal of domesticity appeared which dictates a new interior space --> separate room separate functions, segregation of domestic activities
O-- Rousseau: in the shelter of private domestic space subjectivity is set free (--> a different kind of subjectivity (one which guards the self, something to be protected from the outside) is enabled by the development of the division of labor in interior space) [this is not merely architectural, it is also something about the clothing people wore: wearing different clothes in family or in the realm of strangers. houses became warmer]

(Simmel's) “urban subjectivity”: street physical over-stimulation ==> wearing a mask, you show nothing to people, you are not there. and behind this mask there is the feelings you are having, and these sensations behind the mask are your subjectivity.
it is a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity
the subject is divided: neutral on the outside / stimulated in the inside

(i don't want to become a camera)
observe (without interacting)
observational cruising
[the standard account:] interiority ~= reflexive detachment, reflexive withdraw

social media and exteriority

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Sennett, “3rd world” SPeCo62Mz2Q : condition in which centralized space or distributed communication networks are missing
-a public space that is officially organized
*parks: open space that are reserved for the public: “where informal economy wants to be but is banned”

*public space: (@Selma on st.open project)
(21st century) modern thought <-- *two traditions of thinking about public realm:
1- as a dialogical condition (of exchange, of political engagement) --> Arendt & Habermas; --->{a communicative immaterial space} : “more talk ==> more agreement, common understanding” ---[dialogic & immaterial]
2- as a space of spectacle --> (goes back to 19th century) Baudelaire's ‘individual passers-by’ watching something on the fold (--> [old Greek idea of spectacle:] “unfolding of narrative.” a bad idea of ‘how people should be physically in space’ for example, a landscape architect that creates a scenography in a park ==> a witness in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}

3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]

***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle

public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)


(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•




the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular

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*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment

Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> m[...]