Description of the project by Bryan Cantley
Ghost notes and parenthetical notations. Bryan Cantley/Form:uLA.
GHOST NOTES
The space between notes.
The anti-accent.
If Claude Debussy's quote that "music is the space between the notes..." is taken as a condition of spatial occupancy, then the documentation, or at least the exploration of that space is a state of the ghost note.
In the discipline of drumming, this phantom indicator suggest placement, semi-transparency, and effect. It is also referred to as a dead or false note, though this is a somewhat inaccurate nomenclature, since it does actually designate a type of percussive resonance, albeit one that plays in the shadows.
In other instrumentations, it may be described as a musical note with a rhythmic value, but having no discernible pitch or identity. In typical musical notion, it is designated by an "X" or a note head in parentheses. In drumming, it is played at an almost imperceptible volume between the "main notes" or emphasis of the rhythmic phrasing. Though they may not be heard as part of the fidelity of any given recording, they give breadth and expanded value to the "regular notes", or the components that we are expecting to hear.
As someone who plays drums and someone who explores Architecture, the overlap is silently visceral. My work has often explored the edges of acceptable architectural space and notation. The boundaries of presentation as well as it's role in the 'visible' realm of architectural education and discourse are often blurry, borrowing at least in nature from the semi-adjacent realm of (musical) notional theory.
The occupancy of music occurs at 3 different yet intertwined areas:
1. graphic notation [writer/composer]
2. performance [artist/musician]
3. aural receipt [listener]
I might suggest that architecture exists at multiple levels as well, none more important than the other, yet each providing access to a synthesized whole:
1. graphic notation [designer/architect]
2. performance/construction [builder/fabricator]
3. occupancy [viewer/inhabitant]
One might extend that logic to suggest that the [architectural] drawing exists in a similar trinity of layers:
1. impregnation [drafter]
2. consumption [voyeur]
3. occupant [cerebral inhabitancy…]
In my exploratory drawings, I attempt to synthesize the three layers into a single page event, one that speaks of referencing not only building technologies and conditions of occupancy, but the hidden layer of graphic notation… simultaneously. One cannot produce an experimental document that deconstructs each of these by only allowing views of that which is know, that which is immediately definable, that which is reduced to documentation of legal descriptions.
It’s the last section that begins to explore the opportunities and overlaps of reading and the implications of occupancy in architectural drawing. And whereas many architects deal with the drawing as a vehicle to describe spatial residence, my work also attempts to harvest the type of information and experience notation that is not usually investigated, or at least that tends to stay in the realm of the invisible- that zone of the ghost note.
PARENTHETICAL SPACE/ noTATIONS
The space between ideas/references.
In basic mathematics, the notation “ƒ(x)”- denotes a function ‘ƒ’ applied t the variable ‘x’. Parentheses are used to set apart arguments and/or establish order in arithmetic statements. Much like design development representations construction documents, architectural drawings employ a similar type of drawing notation- those symbols that designate not material or shape, but suggest chronology, technique, and artificial [but universally accepted] structure.
My work, especially the drawings, has always been about investigating these hidden command components that manifest themselves into their own structured congregations on the architect’s desire to fully describe an object with a reduction of information. Our task as professionals is to provide a set of legal and spatial coordinates that allow a physical translation from image to object. The information [notation] of the architectural drawing is a set of instructions and descriptions- not meant for public consumption. They are the invisible structure of the drawing, and therefore the realization of a ‘building’. They are additionally not built, or do not show up as a physical entity. They are akin to the staff in sheet music. Not to be seen, not to be heard, but a very critical system of communicating the intent and the application of a composition. For me, this is a powerful and underexplored conceptual space. Similar to radiography, my drawings attempt to expose a system of structure, experience, and spatial residue that one cannot locate on the surface of architecture.
Parenthetical space, then, is the zone of [graphic] occupancy that exists under the skin of the drawing. Just as in musical and architectural notation, the parenthesis is not meant to be seen as a function of the result of performing a mathematical task… but it is critical to the proper application of intention. And traditionally the architect’s drawing is if anything an attempt to provide the proper application of their intention.
One might suggest that P-Space is a function of the space of intention as much as it is documentation.
The ghost note. Parenthetical space. Musical notation structuralism.
If the space between the notes is an indiscernible layer found within the totality of music, then the obscure information of the architectural drawing is as much a component of the discipline of architecture as the object itself. In my work one can see the evidence of explorations of the noumenon… all one has to do is believe in ghosts.
Description of the project by Cesare Battelli.
Imaginary Body and Sections of Imagination in Form:uLA by Bryan Cantley (Form:uLA).
Formula is also magic formula and alchemy.
IMAGO (magician) is analogous to the ability of seeing beyond reality itself and metaphysically, the world´s transfiguration in a sort of allegoric transparency layered by different meanings because created by
the eyes of
FIRE.
Following up an ancient visionary tradition any transparent matter (not in a physical sense) is so, because is pre-known by human soul. Incarnation of the thought in the image.
Imagination is a mediating element between
THOUGHT and BEING.
When we mention MEDIATION we refer to
infra-mundi (hybridity)
(worlds in between)
which is an exciting and necessary approach to the Visionary Architecture in general and the Architecture of
Form:ula
in particular.
GHOSTS are transparent as well as the radiographies but with opposite meanings and movements.
The firsts (ghosts), from an hypothetic
elsewhere (inside),
burst into an outside which is for us conceptually and ironically a visible
OUT-side,
but incomplete in clarity.
They are almost transparent because is uncertain the place they come from or they go/went to,
and almost impossible to understand by which material it/they are made. Almost Transparent because it (the ghost) stands briefly in a “confusing" threshold and quickly disappears. It surely has relations with prints, signs, jet streams and occasionally with prints of our
“milky“ memories.
There is no a secure dimension for them and neither inclosing concepts.
They are always there in somewhere, ready to be evocated and evocate rather than be commemorated.
Veiling is its (ghost) contradictory status.
On the other hand, radiographies allow our (eyes?) (fire)
dig into hidden worlds and converting darkness in something extremely suggesting and beautiful in essence.
They make palpable the until-now-un-known gloom
by the conceptual “conversion” of the opaque
membrane
that encloses things and transforms them into a nuanced and bright halo.
Radiography remind me
the scan at the airport and the place inside with multitude of directions and accesses.
Both, Ghosts and radiographies, are the manifestation of something far from the present and paradoxically very present in time.
Irruption-against-violation.
Hidden geometries are possibly made by ghosts and radiographies in a collapsed fields of lines/traces:
they are, now, visibly manifested as well as the same objects of their creation; they can also being seen as
creatures.
The objects are traces and traces, objects, and not objective/objects,
because lines and edges don't inscribe anything but our intuitions in a horizon made by sequences and presences of extraordinary plasticity...
There is not difference in between but just –between-, the only and inexorable Between;
a sort of time´s machineries,
FOXILES of motions,
TERRITORIES.
And Architecture coincide with a dance of complex crystalized forces, unpredictable fields and foaming fragments.
Hidden geometries don´t belong just to a nautical compass of an ancient geographer
but they glide, incise on the paper by way of tentacles,
re-connecting lost spaces with imaginary dimensions, converting representations (traditional ones) into “maps/machineries”, and sometime putting both, observed and observer, into an infinity representation
within a finite size as support.
Boxes, squares and any possible recognizable geometry appear forced to move within the paper letting the imagination run wild and
trans-FORMING concepts into a
CLOUD of possibilities.
Impossible spaces into something more intimate,
beyond any gravitational attraction
or
landscape specification.
The newborn architecture stretch its “joints” in a unfamiliar territory like a newborn
new species.
offering understandable intersections of its womb and interior wiring.
Spots and ghosts
appear without any warning and rational comprehension:
It/they RE-scale existing places
giving new viewpoints or unexpected wonders…They just burst into a fascinating but sometime scaring unknown organism mixed with a familiar background.
They FLY and sometime are cities.
Cities are
VISIONS
and visions can belong to dreams as showed in modern paintings
(Giotto and Beato Angelico).
To see/comprehend
LESS
is to see more complexity, out of any idea of formalism: exceed in forms is reneging them.
Converting/suggesting all this apparently rough material into a mythical universe where
sounds and signs flow together announcing other possible bio-logic hetero-logic and ,above all, analogic multiverse made, perhaps, by the same thoughts and matter (?) that
CLOUDS are made.
Cesare Battelli.
