The Role of Tentativeness in Perceiving Architecture and Art: A Far-from-Equilibrium Ecological Perspective

Abstract

This analysis explores the implications for art, architecture, and ecological psychology of Arakawa and Gins's use of the tentativeness created by their architectural procedures as a way of reeducating our senses. In this context, tentativeness is modeled by Prigogine's (Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989) proposal that far-from-equilibrium states can lead to new states of order. From this perspective, the architecture of Arakawa and Gins, the painting of Jackson Pollock, and the new sculptures of Richard Serra shift people from passive, distanced views of the world to an active, participatory way of engaging the environment, be it a work of art or a behavior setting. In each of these realms, transitory forms of disorder are created in order to move people to new forms of order. In ecological terms, new effectivity-affordance couplings are created that change seeing-acting cycles. Most broadly, art and architecture come to function as fields that connect complex systems involving the artist and the observer/participant.

Notes

¹This proposition reflects the origins of tentativeness in an architectural-art source rather than a scientific one, which aims at closure rather than openness (Kadar & Effken, 2006).

²More specifically, it would appear that the architectural body is a collective affordance gathered over space-time, a view consistent with Heft's (2001) view of Barker's (1968) concept of a behavior setting.

³This is not to imply that the ecological and dynamical approaches are equivalents. Rather, at issue is whether as Warren (1984) and Richardson et al. (2007) have suggested, aspects of Gibson's (1979) program can be enriched by giving certain of Gibson's concepts such as affordances a dynamical systems interpretation.

⁴ Iberall (1995) has proposed that new forms of order that emerge from processes of self-organization do not require far-from-equilibrium states but rather can occur with more moderate departures from equilibrium, given certain cyclical processes that occur in flow dynamics.