Chiaroscuro: A Theoretical Valence

Abstract

When considering “this thing called theory” from the point of view of Black Contemporary, a rural field station dedicated to the study of spatial phenomena and perception, one is confronted with a paradox that simultaneously encourages and resists our tendency to favour a fixed focal length, that of objective distance. This paper proposes theory as a material practice that opposes the objective distance typically associated with research. Black Contemporary serves as an experiential laboratory of such material practice for investigating, cultivating and expanding our knowledge specific to the study of atmosphere and place. This is achieved through immersive acts of thinking and making supported by a series of material insertions or stagings with a relative capacity to unite, react or interact with latent dimensions of the inherited landscape. Each staging is driven by nascent desire and possibility to intercourse with the existing material surrounds. Each is pursuant of a philosophical position of chiaroscuro that leverages perceptual notions and spatial valence within the material culture of a post-industrial site.

Keywords:

• theory
• embodied cognition
• perception
• chiaroscuro
• material practice
• making

Notes

¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 283.

² David Heymann, “Precise, Anonymous, Enigmatic,” Iowa Architect (winter 1990): 28–35.

³ Marwan Ghandour and Peter Goché, Guidelines for Spatial Regeneration in Iowa (AIA Board of Knowledge Committee, 2007), 186–205.

⁴ Sigmund Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, col. 16, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), 296. Quoted in Georgina Downey, Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes from the Victorians and Modernists (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013), xiii.

⁵ Georgina Downey, Domestic Interiors, xiii.

⁶ John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 63.

⁷ David Leatherbarrow, Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 13.

⁸ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (London and New York: Continuum, 2006 [1988]), 5.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 38–39.

¹¹ Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 5.

¹² Alberto Pérez-Gómez, “The Ethical Image of an Architecture,” in Built upon Love (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 210–11.