notes

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
===== Thoughts and spaces =====

Something about the mismatch between thoughts and feelings I'm least aware of and the material situation I find myself in. The spaces we encounter in our everyday lives are designed to keep us in place and encourage us to play certain roles. Like canteen style display counters and tills in supermarket cafes, hospital waiting rooms, or collections on peoples dedks in open plan offices, booths in late night bars.

The stage setting of this interior design is all about codifying hierarchies and boundaries between people though materials in space. Thoughts and feelings pay such little attention to expectations about who or what goes where! The psychic energy moving through the materials that make up the space are't subject to the psychological or social pressures we are..
We design and fabricate social spaces, so that they in turn shape our experiences and behaviours. But at some level the materials they are made of capture the errant thoughts and feelings escape the social constraints of the space.

Like taking 5 mins out and putting my feet up in bed, staring into space through my drawers and being visited by a memory of being attracted to another boy at football practice. Or same memory visiting while playing a 5 a side.

How those thoughts might chase others around the bathroom taps and sink, or wander around the back of the sofa, or circle around the handrail on the bus.
How the material spaces we share, designed on a human scale, provide habitat on a much smaller scale for diverse ecologies of thoughts and feelings.

Experiencing rooms, the furniture, the bodies and things in them as vast and complex landscapes teeming with ideas, memories and emotions. To be a human in a room aware of the lives of thoughts and feelings is to be a giant watching a colony of seabirds around a cliff. Thoughts flying, around and to and from, the walls, the furniture and your body, some settling on your shoulder or head, some following you as you move. Like ant colonies foraging the spaces between you and the marble of the fireplace, the cotton of the sofa cushions, the lcd screen on the tv and the clothes and skin of the other people.

Feeling an emotional resonance through my body with the material and spatial form of sofas and floors and coffee cups and phones, the way they are with each other and and the way they appear to me.

Micro psycho geography of the material spaces we share, from the point of view of thoughts and emotions. 

Walking through the huge atrium space of alder hey children's hospital - parents concerns, hopes and anxieties are invisible but safe to move around in this light airy space, it's a cathedral. All the spaces we share are sacred spaces - the changes we don't understand, the thoughts and feelings we aren't consciously aware of sacred, profane, beyond our aesthetic or morality all move through these spaces.