Archiving the wall

 "Walter Benjamin's Archive: images, texts, signs--carefully laid out manuscripts, photographs of a home with luxurious furniture, arcades, Russian toys, picture postcards from Tuscany and the Balearics, meticulous and unconventional registers, card indexes and catalog; notebooks in which every single centimetre is covered; a collation of  his son's first words and sentences,; riddle and enigmatic sibyls. Everything here is subtly interconnected with everything else...the concept of 'essence' as the mark of truth." (From my notebook, day five, Tumba '10)

And what types and catalogs of lists could be used to make an archive of Reconfiguring the wall?

• A list of oft-used architectural terms (and their definitions)
• A list of processes: textile, architectural, specific to this project...
• Diagnostic terms/tests used (psychology and psychiatry)
• References used
• Types of cloth used

The list is incomplete (are all lists fated to be incomplete?)

Are they by essence (or in essence) fragments?

In what other ways are lists 'lacking' 

• detail?
• aesthetic appeal?
• intention for longevity?
• completeness in themselves? 

Lists of contents have no identity of their own.

A list of images from the pieced side of the quilt:

(sources not available at this time)

- Hospital ward (beds empty)

- Rock markings from under bridge

- Patient and radiographer with x-ray machine

- Patient (?) sitting in courtyard

- Ward with window

-  Map of Leichhsrt (fragment)

- John Brenan

- 4 nurses, in different uniforms

- child's drawing
- Kirkebride building
- perimeter wall....

A list of words/phrases from the pieced side of the quilt

- 'Sites of difference'

- 'And below is always the accumulated past which vanishes but does not vanish'

- 'Joseph was the wicked Uncle Jo who, a gambler whose debts cost the family the Balmain Estate'

- 'Eysenck Personality Inventory Personality Questionnaire'

- 'See thee shocking truth, learn the heart breaking truth about drug abuse'

- 'Recipe for plant dyeing'

- 'Ambiguous boundaries'

- 'And the resistance of space for inside out art-architecture we are able to situate the asylum in a historical context and so to [ ] the spectral quality the site evokes...'

- 'Sites of otherness'

- 'The being of art itself'

- 'Fuck it'

- 'And below is always'

That Inbetween Space

On April 3 Emma left a comment on my March 16 post, 'Sifting & Sorting' (see associated blog, Lost In Space). In her comment she raised a number of interesting issues concerning the sense (or perhaps, 'sensation' is more accurate and takes me closer to Deleuze & Guatarri) of embodiment in space.
D & G consider 'space' as vibratory blocks of space-time constituting an individual organism that interacts with other organisms (suggesting I think that we each carry our own space-time(s) around with us) and thus these blocks of space-time are by nature, 'heterogeneous' (Deleuze Dictionary, p253). Space is a 'discursive practice of place' (p258) and divided into 'striated' (drawn and riddled with lines of divide and demarcation, that name measure, appropriate and distribute space according to inherited political designs, history and conflict) and 'smooth' (boundless...without border or distinction... affiliated with the unconscious...more a space of affects and sensations than properties...it can be perceived through striated space).
OK I'm not a specialist in these theories, and this risks becoming didactic (not my intention)--the above acts to document my process in addressing Emma's questions.
Each of the interactions Emma mentions: videoconferencing, talking on the mobile phone, communicating by email, on Facebook, on Twitter could be seen as two individual sets of space-time coming into contact with one another (unlike her example of reading a book, to which I add 'daydreaming', both solitary activities--unless of course the book is being read aloud to an audience).
What is important here, I think and, Emma's point is that these 'virtual' interfaces are increasing.
Interestingly D & G also address the 'virtual'  and 'actual' as mutually exclusive, yet jointly sufficient, characterisations of the real (p296) but that may be OK for them, how do we as ordinary mortals 'deal' with such obvious different experiences (albeit habituation can probably occur). 
Emma asks : How our bodies then relate to space IN time - how can we inhabit? Her answer is to leave traces (evidence of a 'past' presence).
Traces that also exist in our minds as memories (conscious or not) and that affect how we respond when the actual is transposed to the virtual but yet undergo subtle shifts in how we react to that new situation (the use of videoconfencing in business, law  or even medicine).
I wonder if you can look it in another way...in terms of a third space, that which develops from the interaction itself allied to but separate from the two that are interacting...if on the phone I do not mark my existence 'there' in place with you, we set up an interstitial space, an inbetween place. 'Actual' in terms of the movement of electrons along the phone wires or microwaves between transmitter and receiver, but 'virtual' in our minds.
By raising theories of 'performance'--Goffman and Judith Butler she is offering me an opportunity to explore an integral aspect of my project--how to 'perform' smooth space. Butler, I have come across but not Goffman. Performance has the potential to take us into that third (inbetween) space which, being inherently unstable, has the potential to open up other connections, other possibilities and the dissolution of boundaries.

As I was about to close down my laptop for the day, I opened the catalog to 'Space Odysseys' (an exhibition at AGNSW in 2001) and came across Mariko Mori's video installation Link (1995-2000) which makes interesting connections with  all this! She is quoted as saying:

Space and time capsules attempt to achieve three or four dimensional voyages in space. My approach is to perceive or sense various passages or potential spaces that connect our consciousness to another world. (p15) 

As Mori is transported to various sites within  her 'enlightenment capsule', she transcends space and time, proposing:  '...a new kind of enlightenment...a new  kind of consciousness'.

So, what has this to do with the project? I'm not sure, as it - the project - exists to date, it is all but a 'scrapbag' of ideas (an example of smooth space??) from which something (hopefully) will emerge!
I am hoping Emma will respond to the ideas I have raised here.
And anyone who reads it will too!

Image: Dyeing the cloth for the quilt 'Reconfiguring The Wall' with plant material from the Callan Park site (2006).