Line- to-Line: In-between hard lines, soft lines in flying a kite as drawing
in space.
joannaleahgeldard
Tim Ingold refers to touching and feeling with a pen and begins the exploration of
knowing, agency and flux between the interface of touch, making and form. Touching
the line, a length of twine as Ingold concludes in The textility of making1 (2010)
reveals the ontology of making and was the beginning of the research conducted
with the Aberdeen Knowing group during 2013 -14, as Visiting Research Fellow and
practitioner. However this research took the moving line found within kite flying to
both explore the aesthetic vision of working with kites and improvisatory nature found
in ‘thinking in movement’2.
The indeterminacy that is present in such activity is pertinent as it avoids the heavy
weight symbolism found in objects pertaining to transient notions that end up being
the presentation of an idea rather than an interpretation3. The poet John Ashbury
noted that forms should have a greater transparency alternate to a fixed composition
that renders them concrete and does not lend itself to the variants found in poetics;
‘abolish the dead weight of symbolism and give back the things their true name’4.
Unfortunately ‘true’ can be just as cumbersome, however we can understand his
desire to advocate situations and the poetic lightness and variance found inside such
moments as a means of undoing static symbols. Ashbury uses the kite analogy to
describe the poetics of living moment; experience and dreaming.
1
Tim Ingold, The textility of making (The Author, Oxford University Press, Cambridge Journal
of Economics, 2010)
2 Tim Ingold, Making (London, Routledge; 2013) pp 98.
3 Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy; Rimbaud to Cage, Unreal Cities ( Illinois,
Northwestern University Press,1999) pp.36
4 ibid Majorie Perloff, pp.37
‘ the poet must be willing to release the string, or at least partly, so as to give his
invented kite the opportunity to float freely…it becomes a hymn to possibility’ 5
This aptly supports a poetic exploration of the lines found inside flying a kite as an
artistic act and ironically a symbolic one to indeterminate works that are neither art
nor architecture. It invokes the nature of possibility, found at the metaphor of horizon
line and brings it the ground the space of the subject.
Ingold’s article The textility of making (2010) and his subsequent book Making (2013)
concentrates on the agency and flight line of the kite not simply understood as the
line between agent and kite, but as the line taken by the flight path of the kite. Jackie
Matisse granddaughter of Henri Matisse creates works based on the flight path of the
kite calling them ‘a line drawn in the sky’6. It is perhaps apt to consider poetic nature
of this allegory in terms of lines drawn and understand the inside of its variants and
dialectical nature.
These lines between flight path and space; space and architecture; art and
indeterminacy arguably extend the Line, to Line constellations identified and explored
as result of thinking in and through movement in ‘Knowing from the Inside’
Research.
1.0 Line to Line: Horizon Line to Along the horizontal plane
Thus my research on Along horizontality began examining the line of the horizon as
the edge of a horizontal plane and moved along to the feet of the subject that
activates and produces the plane. Line-to-Line is the space between and it’s
production. To elaborate further the space between are spaces found between the
5
6
ibid Marjorie Perloff pp.37
Jill Johnston, Airborne Abstraction (Art in America, Brant Publications; 1988) pp.131
horizon edges of built architecture; and the subject as producing along this horizontal
plane within these spaces. We encounter edgelands and inside knowing kites as
artistic production.
It explores in greater depth methods of horizontality for artistic responses to site
production in our Edgelands; I argue horizontality as a site-specific approach for
Edgelands. The integration of site and activity rather than a ‘plop art’7 piece as Lucy
Lippard suggests as a problem with site works that do not engage the public. Cher
Kraus Knight comments on Lippard’s criticism that whilst plop art can be inspiring,
does little to employ visual and conceptual vocabularies of the public. In fact she
goes further to suggests that the failure of ‘plop art’ to engage is down to a lack of
understanding in public’s varied interests and secondly that it is
‘wholly appropriate to draw upon popular culture in this endeavour…This
does not signify that pressing social concerns are automatically dismissed; in
fact audiences might be more receptive to serious messages delivered
through familiar means. ‘8
This demonstrates an understanding that there is an essential requirement when
dealing with sites already receiving some engagement from the public such as
Edgelands. It therefore seems to suggest that notions of art works related to
edgelands might be derived from being within the site itself. Horizontality administers
the dirt, the material and what is found on the ground9 and equally pertinent if we
consider everyday and ground level synonymous for locating practices for art
purposes. There is a second component to horizontality that relies on motion and
there are several activities of simply wandering or roaming through edgelands so we
can consider the fluxus as integration of edgelands and horizontality.
7
Lucy Lippard, The of the Local; Public Art: Old and New Clothes (New York, The New
Press, 1997) ‘on anything plunked down in a relatively visible site’ pp.265
8 Cher Kraus Knight, Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing;
2008) pp. I am Special
9 Rosalind Kraus, A Users Guide to Formless; Horizontality (1997)
This culminates in a utilisation of the Rosalind Kraus’s method horizontality towards
such activities and Ingold’s arguments on ‘form-giving’ as a movement that activates.
Perhaps form-giving goes ‘Along’ between what is without form, that is, formless10
and ‘form- giving’. Ingold’s phrasing describes it as ‘textilic to the architectonic’11.
Ingold would describe a woven approach to making, which subscribes to the
integrated approach of site and art activity therefore also edgelands activity; certainly
the textilic is apparent as a result of the research with the knowing group.
2.0 Line to Line: Inner and Outer constellations
To what activities do we turn for artistic and creative acts for edge spaces that we
can we use reminiscently, symbolically and productively to produce these sites on a
greater level of agency in order to recuperate or even garner a processing of
edgelands? Participation in the Knowing project consisted of two separate visits
culminating in presentations and workshops with a view for a final workshop on the
Box Kite; appropriate due to its familiarity and populism but also it’s connection to
everyday activity and perhaps an interface with the environment.12
Initially we explored line and space. Several perceptive experiments involving sight,
distance, experience of space, measurements of space were explored. Paper
diagrams, perceptions through feeling and touch without sight were part of this
research opening up avenues of how perception is part of the learning process of
making and drawing line, placing line and perceiving units of measurement in space.
Progressionally we took this into drawing with line by using yarn to construct shapes,
10
Rosalind Kraus and Yve-Alain Bois, Formless: A Users Guide ( 2007)
Tim Ingold, The textility of making (Oxford University Press, Cambridge Journal of
Economics, 2010; 34) pp 91 - 102
12 Cher Kraus Knight, pp
11
spaces and examine how line can draw into space to create illusionistic expansions
of planes, surfaces and perceptions of space.
We looked at Fred Sandback and his balls of acrylic. Strung up in interiors they made
line constructions which act as constellations of thought. These constellations can
be if we look to Benjamin who deals with them as constellations of outward
topography and inward body of the collective.13 Sandback’s Lines need a real and
actual encounter to decipher their optic and surface presence i.e. they require the
body.
This interaction between line as organised topography in Sandback’s work and the
essential presence of the body can act as the constellations found in Benjamin’s
thought. Benjamin constructs theory around the presence of the body as material
imagery as literal embodiment. These notions translate well to deciphering the use of
kite, line and body to explore ideas; these constellations in actuality. John Rajchman
writes on Fred Sandback in his essay Lines of thought14 that the delicate threads act
as necessary nomadic activity of thinking and working out that expresses idea as
actuality.
This can be said for such edgeland horizontal activity as flying a kite. The journey of
this process of actualizing through constellating the body can be found in wandering
along with a kite.
13
Sigrid Weigal, Body- and Image-Space; Re-reading Walter Benjamin (London and New
York, Routledge; 1996) pp.20
14 John Rajkman, Painting with Architecture in Mind ( Bath, Bath School of Art and Design,
Wunderkammer Press; 2012) pp.85
‘There isn’t an idea which transcends the actuality of the pieces. The actuality is the
idea’. 15
Sigrid Weigal writing on Benjamin’s imagery, allegory and metaphor accounts for a
body- and image-space whereby images are realized through physiological process;
in other words ideas and images are realised as result of the presence of the body
and therefore the body makes image-space.16 This image-space is an actuality of
the image. Raijkman perceives the actualit of Sandback’s line-space-image drawings
as actual ideas of space, lived, experienced optically transfused rather than the
representation of the idea of space and line.
Rajkman notes how in order to understanding the potency of actuality in Sandback’s
work, this ‘knot in the line’17 should be unravelled as it connects to other practices.
Ingold18 describes knots as binding and disabling and destructive to surfaces and
metaphorically alludes to Sandback’s thoughts on unravelling in order to reveal
texture, optical perception and vision. He reflects that there is a peculiarity in the way
of thinking within an artist work, a strange ‘form of search and research’ and
‘drawings that are habitable’19 which in its very action prompts encounters with
others; encounters that are open and are arguably open surfaces.
3.0 Line to Line: Open Lines
Ingold adds that the ordering and placing of the direction of line in woven surface
indicates an ordered system. Umberto Eco on The Open Work (1962) also defines
open works as systems where research and verification can take place but the
15
ibid John Rajkman, cites Friedman Malsch and Christine Meyer-Stoll, Fred Sandback
(Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz; 2006) Painting with Architecture in Mind ( Bath, Wunderkammer
Press, 2012) pp.88
16 Sigrid Weigal, pp.20
17 ibid John Rajkman, pp.88
18 Ingold, Making ( ;2013) pp.62
19 ibid pp. 87
composition is not exhausted20. This indeterminate conclusion resists the polished
edges of architecture and creates acts of indeterminacy. 21’An incomplete knowledge
of the system is an essential feature’22 in order not to disintegrate the dynamic of
openness and to resist the imposed ideas of a finalised work.
This peculiar turn is perhaps the central point of the research within the Knowing
project as it interweaves the experiences and knowledge of others in an act of using
line, the task of drawing with line, to draw upon certain conditions of immediacy, task
and exercise. This connectivity travels down the line as a drop of water might idle
down the kite line into the nebula of the research itself. Intersections of drawing,
phenomenology of space and place, knowing and interaction with line as material
and agent; perception and optic surfaces; and the process are the parallel lines are
built up as a textilic surface. 23
This meshed activity only distilled itself when sewing grids on water soluble fabrics
months later when considering notions of drawing with thread, tracing, drawing into
space and how line became object such as Gego’s24 work whereby the
interconnectivity gives strength to the structure and creates the spaces between that
offer sets of visual planes and illusional surfaces. Grids reveal several spaces; the
space between lines them selves as the textility of making. Much can be said of the
crystallizing or forming of thought through process and interaction. It gives strength to
the body of work, shape and perhaps this criss-crossing, this moving between lines
reveals the peculiarity of working with Kites as a practice of Line and Vision.
20
Umberto Eco, trans Anna Cancogni, The Open Work (Massachusetts, Harvard University
Press;1962) pp.33
21 ibid, pp.33-35
22 ibid. pp.33
23 Tim Igold, Lines (Oxon, Routledge;2007) pp.62
24 Gego; Line as Object (Henry Moore Foundation; July-Oct 2014)
Ingold removes the notion of something static or imposing such as the subject or
object and arrives at ject, or thing, to illustrate how things are intertwined with several
activities, actions, and causations going on at once. In my research I choose to call
this ‘going along’ rather than Ingold’s ‘going-on’25 as it better integrates the extension of a thing to embrace the motion of a thing with a thing. In this case the thing
is a kite and its twine.
Allegorically we can use the vision of the horizon line as a point of perception
established in western Euclidean geometry, to understand the notion of a perception
of possibilities provided by a non-static work. The vision can be altered deliberately
and by chance in focusing the direction of vision and perception in a variety of ways
which can involve a playfulness and dynamism appropriate for edgelands activity and
on it’s more serious note, as a subversive act towards permanent architecture.
Rajkman26 includes Rosalind Kraus’s essay The Expanded Field27 as integral to
intersections when considering the interplay between space and time in relation to
sculpture and art. By shifting from the traditional figure-ground spatial practices
resembling the inter-dimension of art and philosophy a thinking-making process by
which we learn and make indicates the arrival of a form; becoming form or givingform. Ingold refers to Klee and his idea that ‘form is the end, death’, it the woven that
gives life.28 The process of undoing and doing, making and unmaking as an
interrogation of being inside the process is the intimation here. Translated to the kite
project the forms are becoming as a result of being inside the process yet also in
25
Tim Ingold ibid pp96
ibid John Rajkman pp.
27 Rosalind Kraus, The Originality of the Avant –Garde and Other Modernist Myths; Sculpture
In the Expanded Field (Cambridge, The MIT Press; 1994) pp.276
28 Tim Ingold ibid pp
26
flattening the images form the view of horizontality there is an undoing and unmaking
from the inside at work.
5.0 Line to Line; Between the kite and the edges of Architecture
As an artist outside to architecture and outside to anthropology I was examining the
relationship of the horizon line to the subject in making a horizontal plane in
Edgelands. This looked at how horizon line might be extended and understood as
the edge of a horizontal plane; a plane of subjective land that is created and
produced as a result of activity outside institutional architecture and on the edge of
organized social architecture. Yet as Lefebvre pointes out it as an illusion to rely on
this being outside as if ‘free for invention’ and ‘free reign’29 as even spaces between
vertical architecture reflect the architecture that surrounds it. However, if we
understand that there are activities already associated with certain sites it is perhaps
the observation of what is already produced and the interruption or intervention which
could bring the vision of looking towards the horizon line and the vertical even future
utopic vision, down to earth; down to the plane. Drifting down the line of vision
allowing gravity to pull vision down towards the plane is the weight and vision of
horizontality.
The vision of the kite taken from the point of view of the kite together with the
movement of bodies and wind, a kinaesthetic experience, meant the possibility to
explore this as a means of producing site. This was particularly important, as kites
are synonymous with edgeland activity, rural/urban sites found between the built
environment and part of the edges of cities and towns. This everyday activity is
29
Henri Lefebvre The Produciton of Space (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing; 1974) pp.27
essentially holding a pencil and anticipates drawing. The line is held and an
anticipation of where the line is pulled, manipulated and tugged acts as an inscription
and draws into the site. Ingold uses Jacque Derrida’s30 notion that drawing overtakes
the thinking of the mind and advances. Similarly we can see how the kite line
becomes pencil, and a material to draw with and the motion takes over the thinking.
The thinking in fact becomes responsive and inside the movement that accounts for
kinaesthesia, improvisation and a learning through making the line move.
The research was focussed upon particular areas of land that appeared to have
everyday leisure or playful activity as its modus but lie as ruins or drosscape31 within
tidal flows of planning applications, buffer zones, conserved areas and edges
alongside industrial estates and motorways. In fact the motion of the kite is pertinent
here as Edgelands mirror this in being ‘continuously on the move’32 as the built
environment pushes and pulls leaving scars, connective lines and re-invented
spaces. They are the fissures of the built environment and lack the nostalgia that
comes with derelict ruins; they are the spaces where the grass begins to reclaim
much like Anselm Keifer describes in his landscape installation Over Your Cities
Grass will Grow documented by Sophie Fiennes in 2010, where he cultivates terrain
in a personal metropolis that demonstrates the conflict between the built and the
reclaim of nature.
Our edgelands33 described by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts in
Edgelands (2009), are rural/urban negotiated borders; unnoticed scrubland imbued
Tim Ingold refers to Jacques Derrida’s 1993 Memoirs of the Blind: the Self -Portrait and
Other Ruins in Making (London, Routledge; 2013) pp.69
31 Alan Berger, Drosscape: Wasting Land Urban America, (Princeton Architectural Press,
2007)
32 Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands; Journeys into England’s True
Wilderness (London, Vintage; 2009) pp 5
33 Marion Shoard, Edgelands of Promise (Landscapes, Vol 1 Iss 2, Oct;2000) pp.74-93 [
accessed 13.1.15]
30
with the imagination of childhood flaneurism. These are spaces where both imagined
and everyday activities have coexisted and offer potential for a certain everyday
practice, an edgeland art installation and reinvigorated aesthetic to emerge. This
research was designed to contribute to Marion Shoard’s work on Edgelands34 and
develop artistic activity for the specific purpose of developing making in Edgelands
activities, a living architecture as Elizabeth Grosz describes in Architecture from the
Outside (2001) ‘ a way of opening space and living’35
There are however a constellation of lines in existence here if we consider taking the
line for a walk, the line of flight, the edges of edgelands, the horizon and the
horizontal plane that we turn our attention to in examining everyday practices. It is
between these lines that this discussion falls; firstly in identifying these lines and their
relevance to ‘Inside Knowledge’, and primarily in analyzing the knowledge gained
form working inside lines in the making of kites. For the sake of working from the
inside this paper attends to a series of betweens found inside the lines.
Again Grosz helps identify the betweens in her use of Giles Deleuze’s and Henri
Bergson’s philosophies on Becoming and Duration respectively. She describes
Deleuze’s philosophy as the invention and exploration of concepts produced through
encounter, an encounter with ‘the force of the real’36. This encounter in terms of the
kite and edgeland space is a between since it is an act of becoming, according to
Deleuzian concepts of difference, produced by the duration and immersion of an act.
She asserts that difference and elaboration are produced through this becoming;
through the lived forces of an encounter. Therefore it is essential to understand the
kite activity as a becoming; it elaborates on a difference produced by the encounter
and elaborates on the betweens found between the lines. It produces variations on
understanding the kite, line and the body as a produced space.
Kite Flying is not an activity synonymous with craft or established artistic practices. It
is in fact outside and merely a cultural activity or everyday activity. It’s elevation in
34
ibid Marion Shoard
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside (London, The MIT Press Cambridge; 2001)
pp6
36 Elizabeth Grosz, Bergson, Deleuze and the Becming of the Unbecoming (Parallax, Vol. 11,
no.2 London, Routledge; 2005) pp4
35
status is not ascribed simply because it is being used with art research practice. It’s
nomenclature and placing clearly positions this outside the realm of institutional art,
site-specific practices and architecture yet relates discursively to all. There is a
certain perversity here as Ingold’s research group was clearly concerned with inside
knowing but in order to understand the inside of making kite practice in side
edgelands the very nature of edge places these spaces outside. Elizabeth Grosz
calls this a ‘peculiar place’37 as outside can only be determined by what it is not. Kite
flying is not art and edgelands are not inside architecture;
‘they can never occupy fully or completely, for it is always the other, different, at
a distance from where one is.’38
There is perhaps a threshold or a border that can be described as a line here, a
liminality of between two lines. Perhaps best understood as the line drawn between
what is inside the institution, accepted architecture, valued built architecture and the
norms of social architecture and then that which is outside. There is a parallel line
which acts in complicity with the first; in order for outside to be recognized, known
and defined it must essentially be amalgamated into inside.
These are essentially lines that are hard as they present polarities; to value an
outside practice without it becoming subject to homogeny, glib pastiche and another
postmodern surfaces. Gregory Bateson ’s double bind demonstrates this problem
well in his discussion on schizophrenics between their speech and behavior;
Paradoxical entwinements. Initially understood as receiving language and semantics
that caused a contradiction to cognition and emotional levels of understanding, from
and environment causing a psychic break medically speaking; but in the context of
cultural conditions, a rupture. This understanding has been used in anthropology and
visual anthropology in the study of environments and behaviors’ and also in
discussion on the tautology between form and difference. By this Bateson explains
how environments and forces impact on the creaturely existence; they are the double
bind that act upon the notion of experience and existence. Therefore Edgelands can
be understood as the difference to built architecture whilst remaining in the
representation of cities as architecture. The double bind of operating with and in the
environment of Edgelands with the forces of activity means the bodies that exist and
work within edgelands operate in difference to organized and hierarchal activity. If
37
38
ibid Grosz Introduction, pp xiv
ibid
those activities were to be transformed into an artistic and cultural aesthetic then
there is a slow drip effect of acceptance and institutionalization within the
understanding of architecture whereby edgeland activity ceases to be outside, which
in turn contravenes the difference. This is the double bind of operating with and
inside of edgelands.
Yet this surface of the edge land is a possible interface for modeling debate, a users
environment that goes well beyond the cartographic lines of its borders as it sets up
an architectural model by which to explore the modeling of edge land activity within
an art/architecture framework that could lend itself to a criticality from the inside and
outside.
By this there is a slipping between the parallel lines into a terrain of knowing from the
inside of what it is to be between out on the edge and the debate within the context
of kite lines and their relationship with art and architecture. This slipping between the
lines means it can soften the hard lines and enter into a more fluid state of process
such as Ingold emphasizes in his use of Klee and the death of form39. He explains
Klee’s premise of ‘form-giving life’40, and in this discussion to be tied in with Grosz’s
opening of space to create a living space. In other words there is not the intention to
replicate kite flying as such – to reproduce our images of edgeland activity or
everyday kite activity but to seek and explore what happens with the encounter and
explore the forces that bring that into being; to take other visual positions inside the
lines and remove the static image of what is visualized or imaged as everyday
activity in edgelands.
Tim Ingold has repeatedly referred to the history and craft of architects and focused
his attention on their mastery of material, working on site and allowing themselves to
work from the inside and developing knowledge and understanding from the inside.
In Textility of Making Ingold turns his attention to Turnball and the medieval
architects to emphasis how they worked on site. By working in and with the site as an
emphasis rather than imposing a view of the site, the site is produced. The ground is
the site of production. Working with Edgelands as a site both as plane between line
to line in addition to being in the space of edge lands gives character and subjective
aspects to knowing the site from the inside.
39
40
ibid Tim Ingold, The textility of making pp.92
ibid Ingold pp 91 on Paul Klee (1961)
Yet edgelands can be used and is persuaded upon by architecture to be in constant
flux and exchange with the growth and ebb of the built environment. It is covered and
revealed. As the built environment encroaches, shapes around it, it exposes land of
no clear purpose and establishes boundaries and edges. They create hard lines by
which those spaces fall outside and also fall out of any clear function. The straight
line of rational architecture is designed to be efficient. Edgelands themselves as
befits their ambiguity are outside the hard lines of function and efficiency and can
perhaps be likened to Marc Auge’s non-places41 but as non-spaces. They are for the
most part empty of specific human economic useful functions yet are commonly
recognized as spaces for imagined activity and some leisure activity.
Lucy Lippard defines such spaces as no-place as they have little to offer in
idiocyncratic character and or these remain invisible as they are terrain lying
between and ‘buried beneath asphalt of monoculture’42. She adds similarly to Auge
that these are largely inferred or unseen, part of the homogenous in-between terrain
and possess placelessness43. Yet, if we were to factor in the places of our everyday
lives in the urban spaces proffered by Auge they would be the largely unnoticed
features such as kerbs, doorways and alleyways; Auge’s super modern. We can
mirror this in edgelands as non-spaces. 44 Lippard explains the neutrality and nondescript postmodern notion of space as ‘de-humanized …and devoid of nature’45.
Edgelands perhaps can be described as thus since they inherently are under
occupied as spaces to produce memory and therefore place. This helps give a
symmetrical view of Auge’s non-place of urban terrains to non-space of rural/urban
spaces. In the face of the de-humanization of space Auge explicates ‘ the individual
production of meaning is thus more necessary than ever’46.
Furthermore Ingold explains how architects became concerned with the ‘complete
thing’; the hard lines of imposed thinking and efficient construction. Builders on the
other hand became concerned with sequence and what perhaps can be described as
the soft lines between the hard lines of imposed architectural vision and are in the act
of encounter with material, becoming and producing a site. Similarly we can
41
Marc Auge, Non-Places; Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity ( London,
Verso, 1995) pp.75
42 Lucy Lippard, The Lure of the Local, ( USA, The New Press, 1997) pp. 9
43 ibid Lucy Lippard, pp. 9
44 My terminology for urban/rural unnoticed and unoccupied homogenous terrain as a result of
Auge and Lippard.
45 Ibid Lucy Lippard pp.9
46 ibid Marc Auge pp. 37
understand the research into kite flying as working with soft lines between the hard
lines of architecture in producing a socially and activity produced space through
encounter with its materials in these supermodern spaces produced by imposed
constructions.
They are abandoned and unnoticed spaces, hence the roaming and imagined
practice of edge lands that occur on the edge of settlements and in the open gaps
created between the hard line of architecture. The builder /architect positions used
metaphorically reveal implications to processing edgeland space and processing
through the space in a sequential manner of the builders. Taking the line for a walk
now can be understood as sequential building, processing through edgelands and
processing the encounter to know from the inside. It is necessary to place oneself in
the space in order to process edgelands outside nature, process the variations
produced through kite flying and sequence the soft lines to explore a vision that is not
reliant on imposed views. The processing can be scribed as the line drawn.
6.0 Line to Line: Procession of the Line
To roam and walk in such space is to scour the surface and as Ingold refers to in
Lines ‘the line etched by a stream’47 Such lines are characterized by gesture,
‘flourish’ and embody a form of knowing. If edge lands are the site of observation and
processing the space a certain gesturing and weaving of narrative needs to take
place much like the drawn line. The vision through processing is subject to bodily
orientation rather than an imposed vision or the visionary distance measured in
Euclidean line and geometry. It is a line of sequencing discovery and therefore
proceeds and processes in and around the space or more pertinently ‘along’48 as a
journey. We can understand the kite activity as kite drawing; drawing along in an
‘evolution of gesture that moves along rather than across a surface’49 as he
describes the way of the wayfarer who encounters:
‘in the very course of our moving through them, in the passage from place to
place and the changing horizons along the way’50
47
Tim Ingold, Lines (London, Routledge, 2007) pp.87
ibid Tim Ingold, Lines pp84 - 85
49 ibid Tim Ingold, Lines pp.85
50 Tim Ingold 2000 pp227 cites Tim Ingold 2010 pp88
48
Ingold refers to a going along very similar to processing through. Whilst he refers to
other senses it is important in the context of horizontality to place emphasis on the
knowing of the vision. The bodily orientation typically relates things perpendicular to
itself. This is how the vertical and the perspective have such ramifications in their
orientation with our uprightness. However in going along, with processing the ground
the vision is pulled gravitationally down. The vision in orientation to the body is
altered. It takes in the plane of horizontality.
By this the optical vision of gazing to the horizon line and defining distance we adjust
the perpendicular gaze to the body and take it down in a gravity pull. The weight of
this draws space from the line of our body. Understood as from the foot as a hard
straight Euclidean line and a soft line corporeal and relenting and shaping around the
body. From this line of the body the vision moves along to the horizon line and then
charts back into the body. The gaze follows from your feet and along; Along that
horizontal plane towards the horizon.
It will not meet it as it concentrates on the life of process not the death of form.
Additionally we can understand that this gravitational pull down adjusts a view to a
phenomenological grounding that does not depict the vertical stature of significant
form. It’s laws for an experiential understanding of space, allows for a subjective
experience and optical view and furthermore it allows for forms to be experienced not
as they appear at a distance. By this account we can sensibly factor in Rosalind
Kraus’s work on horizontality and her collaboration with Yve Alain-Bois on the
informe or formless; the act of changing the nature by which we view accounts for a
phenomenological experience of vision. We can begin to cross reference Kraus’s
horizontality with Ingold and Deleuze respectively; firstly as a knowing from the inside
of subjective positioning in time and space rather than working between matter and
form, and secondly working between materials and forces. The body becomes a
component; part of the material, part of the forces with the material structure of
space51. It is important to note here that this does not condense Deleuze’s
philosophy on the body as material and virtual, being and becoming52, yet this is a
significant feature in the relationship of the body to form which does require further
elaboration in a more in-depth analysis. For the moment we will stay with the vision
of the body as it moves along.
51
Giles Deleuze, The body, the meat an the spirit: Becoming animal (optusnet.com / fbacon,
accessed 23.1.15)
52 Slajov Zizek, Organs without Bodies: Deleuze (Lacan.com, quasi-cause, accessed 23.1.15)
In taking the line for a walk rather than going simply upwards we are also going along
rather nicely with the ground. There is an oscillation of vision that deals with the
vertical kite and the feet and the ground. There is an awareness of the corporeal
body and it’s orientation that is significantly between that which is measured in the
geometric perspective and that which is experienced sequentially and processionally.
Rather than an either or Kraus’ horizontality becomes a phenomenological activity
that is not consistent but is integrated with the ‘knowledge of going along’ (88)
horizontality. In fact the research group found themselves going along and back and
forth and around. There is an element of surveying the ground to make room and a
path for the feet to go along whilst navigating the kite and the agency of the wind53
‘The way of knowing of inhabitants go along and not up as inhabited
knowledge…alongly integrated’54 suggests Ingold. However, there is another aspect
to this that reveals itself with going along with a kite; we can inhabit and survey a
space while surveying horizontally and looking up in an oscillated vision between
significant upright forms and the formless of the horizontal pull. Ingold’s ‘alongly
integrated’ is perhaps significant to pause and ascertain whether in fact the ‘alongly
integrated’ can be understood as an inconstancy of the vertical. More significantly it
appears this oscillation cannot be still, there is a processing of going along that is not
static, not reliant on one vision or the other; thus we can conclude that this fluid
continuous movement underlines the relevance of the vision and the motion of the
body not simply the corporeal and orientation of the body.
Kraus in her analysis of Pollock’s method considers the kinetic motion found in the
drip paintings from going along the horizontal plane, with a gesturing and movement
similar to surveying and tracing the space as knowing and going along as a plane.
Undoubtedly movement is integral to understand horizontality yet the vision and
orientation to the body is the most emphasized. Furthermore Ingold asserts that
knowing is ‘itself a path of movement through the world’
55
a gaining of knowledge in
the going along a line of travel. The obvious one is the walking along and taking the
line for a walk this affirms the horizontality of considering the ground in orientation to
the vision of the body and knowledge of the space but there is also the line that is
being taken for a walk connected to the kite. This is also in orientation to the body at
53
ibid Tim Ingold, Making, pp. 98-99
Tim Ingold, Lines, pp. 89
55 ibid Tim Ingold, Lines, pp89
54
first we can say vertical but if we consider that much of the looking up is above we
reach another transfer to a horizontal plane. This going along is not merely of the
ground it goes along to an upward plane of above. The orientation of the horizontal is
not merely grounded. In fact Ingold identifies this somewhat when he says there is
‘building up from the array of points and materials collected into an integrated
assembly.’56 The builder collects the knowledge from the site and builds in a rhythm
and motion of along both along the ground and upward towards along above. Thus it
is possible to conceive that line to line can be representational of the drawn line
going along at the gravitational vision and the line above where there is a line drawn
in a vision of following the along of the kite up above. Integrated with this surveying
and oscillating between the vertical and as a motion of looking from down below to
up above, it is conducive to say that it is the motion itself that brings about
horizontality and the vision of the horizontal; it is fluid, knowing and built in relation
and orientation to the body. This becoming process appears to work very aptly
alongside horizontality as it is not fixed upon the form but in fact in becoming
embraces the formless and the working along the ground as defined by Kraus.
8.0 Line to Line: The Procession of the Body
If we enter stage right here with William Kentridge and his physical rendering of body
and image-space57 the physicality of the body underlines the issue of body, matter
and material over form. The horizontal alignment of vision found through movement
also supports the overturning of the hylomorphic model58 explained by Ingold; that is
a turning to the priority of process rather than form.
In turn Kraus’s notion of motion acts as a Subverison of imposing form but a working
with material. The motion expressed within Kraus’s theorizing of horizontality brings
the material body forth as a significant mode of making and centralizes the body and
its vision in the process of making. It also demonstrates a certain knowing from the
inside of vision that is based on experience and certainly supports Ingold’s
reasoning. Furthermore we can on the subject of kites identify the body as pivotal to
being in touch with the horizontal place, surface, ground and gravity and materially
56
ibid Tim Ingold, textility of making , pp. 92
ibid Sigrid Weigal, Body and image-space, (London, Routledge, 1996) pp.21
58 Hylomorphic model is understood as bringing form and matter together but imbalanced as
the imposition of form takes priority. Ingold reflects that Deleuze and Guttari overturn this
towards an ontology of process and flow. Ibid Ingold, pp. 92
57
working with the kite and its surface of line, agency of wind and surface of its
constructed form. Once these are broken down into their constituent parts it is much
easier to see the work of materials and forces59.
Knowing the inside of kite flying leaves whipped cuts, sore and numb hands; aches
in the shoulders and legs that have move backwards and forwards in a rocking
motion. ‘The interfaces are different from feeling the sentience of holding’ and with
the kite, holding on. Ingold describes the holding of the pen and drawing the line as
writing a true, gesture. It is intermittent and not as consistent and punctuates with
gaps. Similarly while the motion of the body is continual the steps and the drawing of
the line by the feet of the body mark a series of punctuated placements; back and
forth, along and across. This lilt and gait referenced by Ingold is compared to the
dancer60. The flow is interrupted, composed and defined by a series of pauses.
Similarly the motion of the body of the kite has punctuated pauses, precarious
sustained moments before going along not just as a surveying and taking the line for
a walk but the activity of the wind as a driving agency that affects the gesture and
punctuated marks of the body’s feet.
This essentially begins to work a series of surfaces and coordination of those
surfaces. It also develops repetitive gestures, movements that are dislocated from
the picture of the kite. The responsiveness of the body to the elements of wind and
the affect of such the forces upon the kite pulling along the body can be described as
an encounter such as Alanna Thain reflects, as the point where the body embodies
‘an intersection’.61
Thain reflects on a notion of liveness found in dance and movement documented
with technology. It was the development of this research to have cameras within the
kites to capture both the ‘liveness of the kites and the liveness’ of the bodies below
thus capturing the inbetween the lines of the flight path of the kite and the line of the
horizon that intersects the vertical vision but also the horizontal plane of the ground.
A mixture of filming and recording as documentor; from the position of the body and
the position of the kites were taken. The process of equipping bodies, kites and
59
Tim Ingold on Deleuze and Guttari, 2004 in Introduction of Bringing Things to Life; Creative
Entanglements in a World of materials, Working Paper, University of Aberdeen, 2010) pp 2
[accessed 23.1.15]
60 Tim Ingold, Lines (London, Routledge, 2007) pp.95
61 Thain. A Wandering Stars: William Kentridge’s Err (ant) choreographies (Parallax: a journal
of metadiscursive theory and cultural practices, Taylor and Francis, Vol14, Iss,1;2008) pp 69
pressing record along with taking the line for a walk proved too ambitious for a first
step into the abyss of between the lines. It became clear that the co-ordination was
like learning to work another body, animating technology and animating the kit
cooperatively alongside others and with the technology.
Thain strips down a number of issues regarding this relationship between or perhaps
the relationship found ‘inside’ this constellation of actions. By using William
Kentridge’s work of Drawings for Projection62,Thain refers to animation and the
technology of documenting movement and identifies that any animation or recording
by technology ‘flays the body’ of the totality of it’s liveness. She also asserts that the
movement becomes a half-life. This is argument enough to claim the essential
position of the body and the art of its movement as encounter and live act. The
recordings of the kite project failed in terms of an entire series and only caught
fragments of the motion or art of the movement demonstrated and instigated by the
encounter with the technology of the kite.
Despite this failure several observations appear. Firstly the opportunity to see the
failure of the film demonstrated Kentridge’s conclusion that there is a distinct gap
between ‘what we know and what we see’ 63. There was an awareness of all
participant that we were both subject and making the subject- this critical observation
meant we were part of the scene yet the technology and strategies of filming had
failed to grasp the inside knowledge of that experience. Thain refers to Kentridge’s
observation of the cinematic vision to explain how the camera produces a ‘double
vision’64 - Whilst the human eye processes near and far movements simultaneously
the camera fails to do so and produces these as broken down pieces. This can
explain something of the disconnect between trying to film and record inside the
flying of kites that is produced by enthusiasts rigging cameras for aerial views or in
the case of this experiment, the failure to capture the fluidity of space around the
working in the relationship between body, kite, line and space. Ingold’s experiment
observed the failure of a technological account, as it did not capture what was
inwardly felt, thought or known.
62
ibid Thain pp.
Alana Thain, Wandering Stars: William Kentridge’s Err (ant) choreographies pp.70
64 ibid Alana Thain pp.70
63
‘We were aware of the kite’s flying in the same way that we were aware of our
running, through the bodily sense we had of our own movement, or in a word,
through kinaesthesia’65
Kentridge’s dance films show the ‘work of the body forming relations’ and succeed in
animating dance through stop motion drawing. He embraces this disconnect by hand
drawing effects, slowly zooming in; he creates fluidity by erasing one drawing and
drawing over this with the next so that trace marks are built up as a sustainable
movement66. The trace mark is not visible with the camera eye unless using a series
of flashes to freeze and capture over exposed fragments, a worthy experiment but
not exactly feasible when including a kite. This is perhaps suitable in thinking towards
capturing the movements of a dance at play beneath the kites as films did reveal
sequences of steps, gestures and repetitive tugs that implied the following of dance
steps and initiated the composition and dynamics of a dance work.
This accidental observation alone has opened up the kite project to a series of
experiments in understanding and breaking down the knowledge of the body action
and space found inside such an activity as ‘movement performance’67 and also
frames the kite project outside of everyday practice and into a zone for improvisation
and composition as an artwork. Ingold himself includes Sheets-Johnstone who
began as a dancer and choreographer, later philosopher on interdisciplinary studies
who covers aspects of the corporeal body and the primacy of movement, to comment
on the improvisatory nature found in moving and responding to the kite. He offers his
interpretation as rather than thinking through movement, this demonstrates a thinking
as movement or as we could now refer to it as thinking movement (my phrasing) as a
way of expressing the intrinsic nature of thinking as movement.68
Thain also explains how Kentridge’s overlapped drawings into film produce a ‘line of
flight’; the flight path of the object similarly to Ingold’s description of the flight path of
the kite69 not just the connection between body and kite. This poses a little difficulty
in understanding of the trace of the flight path of an object can possibly illuminate the
concepts of the body in space. However it does reveal a ‘composition of relation’
between elements therefore is it possible to now consider overlapping fragments of
65
Tim Ingold, Making (London, Routledge; 2013) pp.98
ibid Alana Thain, pp.71
67 ibid Alana Thain pp.72
68 This reasoning taken from Tim Ingold’s Making ( London, Routledge;2013) pp.98
69 ibid Tim Ingold, pp.97
66
film documentation from the kite experiment to evolve this idea? Ingold also poses
that the very elements between body and objects such as air are part of the material
therefore it is worth considering the cognitive cogitations within an interactive
dynamic that accounts for all the elements but also as a series of ‘correspondences
of material flows with sensory awareness.’70 Ingold supports this with his argument
on combined effects between air, kite and mover and to fast forward a little to a
refrain on the imposition of form on matter. He again asserts that rather than
elements such as air required for interaction, the objects are required to correspond
with and between; ‘Equally it is the flyer dancing with air’71. This dancing with and
inside removes the requirement of the imposition of form and returns us to the
process of correspondence. In doing so we address the removal of form, the kite
form, the still representation of flyer and kite and nestle inside a dynamic
choreography of indeterminacy full of resistance, pulling, gesture, tugs; a counterplay
with the wind, air and kite. This counterplay does not allow for a single representation
once inside, rather a multifarious or a series of visions that go along in a kind of
animation similar to Kentridge’s recording, and recording over; a stop motion to
capture the between fluid spaces and counterplay around the body.72
9.0 Line to Line: on/along
To account for such multiples of vision, we can begin by considering the strategy of
filming; to get inside the experience is to allow the technology to take on the
horizontal vision. Initially this had been accommodated through attaching the
cameras inside the kite to reveal the buoyancy, the ground and the body and
removing the eye of the cameras away from the perpendicular cone of vision73 of the
body. However if we consider Kraus’s description of horizontality the working of this
means the use of weight and gravity combined with looking across the ground as a
plane. It therefore seems important to consider for any future experiments that the
cameras are attached to the body to break this component down. Furthermore the
remembered experience of flying noted how often each participant looked up. There
is a constant oscillation between upwards, downwards and along. If cameras were
attached to the body the notion of horizontality along the ground actually could
70
ibid Tim Ingold pp.98
ibid Tim Ingold, Making, pp.100
72 ibid Alana Thain pp.71
73 Horizontality as the body looking over and down towards the ground as a gravitational pull
imbuing the flatness of the vertical. Rosalind Kraus, Horizontality, from A Users Guide to the
informe (2007) pp. 93
71
feasibly be inverted to account for across the sky therefore capturing Deleuze’s ‘skychance’.74
The element of chance within these components act as interplay and a
correspondence in the improvisation of kite flying. Combined with the interplay of
elements so far described these are set within the contingents of the horizon, the
subject and the horizontality of the present ground. The very activity of kite flying sets
the present against the future dynamic of the horizon and equally expresses a
kinaesthesia found in chance.
The chance component of this experience and the action of counterplay can be
metaphorically linked to the dice. One film revealed utter failure at our ability to
interact with wind, force and lift; the kite overturned along the ground. Since the
camera was inset into the kite crossbar it faced through the edge of the kite, which
was rectangle in shape. The image produced was of the crossbar inside a frame. As
the kite rolled forwards and backwards momentarily lifting and banging to the ground,
the cameras continue to record its tumbles. If the experience alone had been
accounted for and technology ignored as only a supportive role the following
observation would have been missed. As it was the interplay between mover/flyer,
kite, wind and air was so prescient in the research due to Ingold’s initial research the
camera eye was essential as interactive with the elements. The film was not
dismissed. By looking through and past the crossbar towards the horizon line
pictured in the frame the horizon appeared to be moving. The frame turned over but
was so fixed and straight edged, it was able to capture the effect of the sky and
horizon line and lands tumbling over like a dice. This immediately recalled the
research of where the horizon moves (2013) as part of a Yorkshire Sculpture Park
professional workshop with Gustavo Ciriao. Here the interaction was with the horizon
line and utilising representations of landscape to re-frame the representation of the
horizon line.
Frank Stevenson, On The Horizon; Nietzsche’s Lady Dawn and Deleuze’s Sky-chance
(Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 35.2, Sept;2009) pp.355-378
74
This small failed film re-framed the horizon line as a dice pertaining to the inherent
properties imbued within it of openness and possibility. In going along the ground
and across the sky we arrive at counterplay75 expressed as the dice thrown towards
the d horizon reframing the horizon and opening up the work of horizontality. This
final constellation perhaps underlines the main purpose of entering into such
research as an artist, outside anthropologist and architect, in that whilst
interdisciplinary and crossing the borders into these areas still offers insight relevant
to the artistic practice of imaging and phenomenology.
4.0 Line to Line: Landscape and Arcade
The agency of the kite focuses on two aspects the ‘interface of feeling with the body,
it is a physical active Line. The kite line could be described as active drawing, a line
of agency, a productive line but this needs examining further in order to understand
its relevance to Along horizontality. The Lines of agency and flight are explored
through Tim Ingold’s research on Lines and Making and actually hark back to his
initial paper on the Textility of Making in 2010 where he asserts the process of flow
and material rather than fixed forms imposed upon the visible. In other words he
draws attention to an imbalance between what is a final work or object and the
making knowing process that evolves to bring this work into being76. Horizontality
imbues the ground, the material, the dross and the everyday unnoticed futile
components that gather gravitas in their dynamic presence of the everyday and in
the gravity that pulls our vision down and into the space we are present in. It is not
just literally the ground but the present and immediate space. To be inside the space
is essential in horizontality, to be present as the subject being active wrapped in the
75
counterplay defined as an opposing or positive action from a position of defense Eva
Guelen, The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel (California, Stanford University
Press, 2006)
76 ibid Tim Ingold, The textility of making, pp. 100
motion no-static interplay is the interface with edgelands and found within kite
activity.
This interplay can be also referred to as ‘unprogrammed movement’ and the
supremacy of chance’. The indeterminate nature and the allegorical movement of the
work positioned entirely at the forefront of drawing lines in the sky. This could be a
poetic open work that gives space for chance a la Eco, however a deeper
understanding is offered with Frank Stevenson an academic in Literary Studies who
writes On the Horizon (2009) referring to notions of chance and the sky dance found
in Nietzsche and Deleuze’s work on the Greek goddess Eos (Dawn)77. Here
Stevenson identifies Deleuze’s expansion on Nietzsche and the Dawn goddess
making two notable considerations where the kite illuminates chance and an
extended horizontal plane. Nietzsche identifies earth-sky as figures and notes the
gap between found singularly at Dawn. He also asserts that Eos/Dawn can be
correlated with accident and describes the goddess as a dance floor for divine
accidents. This gap he offers is better understood with Deleuze’s reading where the
earth and the sky are tables. The tables are hinged at Nietzsche’s double horizon
seemingly exposing a gap at the horizon. Stevenson explains how this double
horizon or horizontal gap acts as an opening onto a flat surface of time. Chance as
the dice are thrown into the gap along a horizontal table. This description identifies
with Deleuze’s fold78 and brings the earth and sky hinged with the ability to be
flattened out by this act of the die, of chance. This inversion of the positioning of
earth and sky corresponds closely with the subversion of the vertical and arguably
Kraus’s horizontality. It would be possible to conceive of a further argument therefore
Frank Stevenson, Neitzsche’s Lady Dawn and Deleuze’s Sky-Chance (Concentric: Literary
and Cultural Studies 35.2, Sept 2009) [accessed 20.12.14]
78 Giles Deleuze, The Fold, (London, Continuum, Ist published 1993, ed. 2006) as in the
understanding of doubling, interior and exterior as and the multiple subjectivities and the
production of self subjectivity. It is a subjectivity produced in relation to another; ‘a one upon
the other’ pp.3 [accessed 1.2.15]
77
that Kraus’s horizontality is Deleuze’s difference; and the kinetic momentum of
chance, the die substituted with a kite/s now acts simultaneously as sky-chance and
horizontality. Horizontality now embraces both the ground and the flattened sky and
brings down the hierarchy and undoes verticality.
Weigal asserts that Benjamin’s body-image-space79 as a collective i.e. body of
people can be ‘transposed into the arcades and passageways of the city’80, and even
go as far as to suggest that the physiology experienced of the organic and inorganic
world posits Benjamin’s ‘landscape of the arcade’ or now can be understood as
landscape arcades. Perhaps if we now consider the constellations within edgelands,
these acts of chance and dance we can perceive these as a different understanding
of landscape arcades.
Conclusion
The kite research project has developed into a boundless work since working in
Aberdeen. It reveals lines within the action of making a kite (which has not been
elaborated on for the sake of focussing on being inside flying the kite) and those
actions found inside kite flying. These lines have been explored as active and moving
line rather than straight point to point lines.
By dissecting the lines of thought found inside flying the kite a set of constellations of
between elements has been established; much like a sky map the lines are drawn
between the elements but as thinking inside the experience of flying a kite.
To end in a straightforward summary of the points discussed, listed in a vertical
manner, I would rather go along towards two distinct aspects that this paper has
revealed.
79
Sigrid Weigal, Body- image-space; Re-Reading Walter Benjamin (London, Routledge,
1996) pp.21
80 ibid Sigrid Weigal pp.21
Its link to horizontality as producing activity through Ingold’s understanding of alongly
integrated and the kinetic movement and interaction with gravity as Kraus exerts.
However this paper has also established that this can be understood as an oscillating
view, which takes into account going along the horizontal in a counterplay to gravity
by using the gaze along the above and along the ground.
Its links to the body includes the use not of movement and understanding in direct
connection to the perpendicular view but in terms of a kinetic momentum that
oscillates and inhabits activity in a going along, journeying way that reveals alternate
visual methods and alternate modes of inhabiting. Both of these act processionally
through going along activities such as kite flying but reveal an open approach in fact
a way of developing open works. It evolves gesture through such activity and
perhaps can be utilised more effectively for drawing and artistic activity with tools for
motion drawing, recording, improvisation and chance were components of a quasi
planned/improvised approach. It is these elements that the research now turns to try
a series of activities that develop these visual and kinetically planned/improvised
methods for a drawing practice in non-spaces i.e. Edgelands.
We can therefore infer that non-spatial work has aspects of characteristics of an arts
practice that has its roots in horizontality. We can also understand horizontality as
based on ground kinetic momentum as an alternative to imposed and vertical
drawing in art and architecture. This difference lends itself to the outside practices of
art and architecture; outside and in-between institutional practice landscape arcades.
‘History is the object of a construction whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but
time filled with the presence of the now.’81
…and it is to this image making that the kite project belongs in the making of
landscape arcades on the outside of architecture, inside art and habitation.
81
Sigrid Weigal cites Gegenstand and Jetztzeit ( Body- and image-space; Re-Reading Walter
Benjamin (London, Routledge, 1996) pp.77