Come and join the undergraduate Terrain seminar in the SandBox and the PlayPen

IngerSays: The urge to make continuous shapes out of the disjunctive pieces of our sensory world runs deep; but ongoing research into the psychology of perception only reveals new and more mysterious voids in our understanding of the “real world”. There are even more disturbing questions about bodies; about what is inside and outside or whether there is in fact a separation between the two.

Is the new “blobbiness” in certain examples of contemporary architecture pure formalism generated by modern technological advances, or a new kind of sensibility? When confronted with an unfamiliar object there is a compulsive human instinct to see bodies. If what we are looking at is positively not body like in any comprehensible way we are disturbed, yet we still remain in thrall of the idea of the body and acceptable bodies have to have the potential for liveness.

The body itself has been the site of almost continual mapping since the early nineteenth century, most of these to do with forays into ideas about sensation and the investigation of the visual as an inscribable field. Alongside this is the insistent de coupling of senses, particularly the senses of touch and sight, and the longing for them to be reconciled in a synthesis with machines. How does technology function as a site for knowledge and power that operates directly on the body of the individual?

JulianSays: but what has all this to do with terrain? isnt that the ground, something that speaks quite separately from whatever we do wiith it, or how we see it? topography is more than allegorical, more than a generic structure to hang ideas off in such a way that, hey, they dont seem flat! the ground is not just a surface, but a depth. form is not isolated but resulting from context. context is messy and fucked up. buy in!

PiaSays: this is where wiki-ness is testing itself - this is out first act of graffiti - Julian R is a lanscape architect and has responded to this word terrain via landscaper terminological research. i find a bit disturbing that in the wiki you can't change font, or indent or something to give a sense that someone is commenting on something. It's really confusing that all of this is running in together. so i'm putting pia says and julian says as a way of dealing with this for now.

who says! i dont see how its graffiti if it has to be authored? is this wiki thing just supposed to be polite?

PiaSays: yeh - but identity and structure is not such a bad thing after all.

IngerSays: and the funniest thing is this seminar only ended up being called terrain because I forgot to put a title on the seminar flyer. This was actually a minor subheading that was picked up as a convenient handle by the students. Now the actual name of the seminar seems to be in a state of flux between Terrain/vital signs/sandbox/playpen....which is interesting for now but I can feel that it is going to become tedious pretty soon.