Architecting Bodies by Immersive Gestures

Architecting Bodies by Immersive Gestures, proposes play-legged embodied design thinking to move from the body of architecture to architecting bodies. The immersive approach, coined waying, proposes to bodymindly engage with mess, draw on the fragilities of bodyminds and environments and urge movement in the broadest sense. Waying is simultaneously a movement, a walk, a performative practice of way making and architecting bodies that does not represent time-space-matter but creates it (on a 1:1 scale). Waying came into being as a result of bodily exploring the conceptual apparatus of becoming and designing actionables that are operative on two levels. The first level of operation is of direct embodied immersion of the author/learner’s bodymind while looking for mess in urban environments and adopting a micro-perspective. This is to carefully instruct and rigorously perform close encounters with the environment – as situated and situational time-space-matter – by means of walking and responding and wherefrom embodied creations come into being. Walking, a mobile form of bodymindly engaging with environments, is never completely predictable. By walking, environments are encountered in flux, ever different. Instructs for walking and responding provide a structure to enable embodied interactions outside the pattern of habit and outside the engaged-legged style of thinking. Performing eccentric instructs (i.e. instructs that deliberately constrain engaged-leg styles of logics, analysing, cleaning) addresses the fragile bodymind by opening up micro-situations of risk. In micro-situations of risk, sensitivities for creating-with, relating-with and therefore becoming-with the environment are practiced while keeping the response embodied. Moving and becoming (eccentrically) moved are vital shifts sensitised by the bodymind, and wherefrom embodied responses in multimedia (artefact, drawing, photo, film, sound, act) spring. This contingent and iterative performativity is called responsive walking. The second level of operation is called gathering and departs from the assumption that embodied immersions in mess by responsive walking are de-settling and urge sense-making. By creating video-assemblages, performance-lectures and conversation pieces processes of embodied sense-making are explored. Thereby, the challenge is to avoid the pitfalls of quick dichotomic, hierarchic and disembodied understandings of bodymindly engaging with the environment. To resist slipping into these categories – that are so readily present when sense-making is discursively elaborated – the notion of pregnantness and the notion of a propelling hypothesis are proposed. The former is a bodymind state that allows to imaginatively presence not-yet and becoming significances of embodied engagements with environments. The latter is an operative design instrument that allows the responsive shifts in hypothesis to become the very mechanism of a form-giving practice that reflects whimsicalities and contingencies. By de-settling and re-settling loops between the first and second level, latent tangible and intangible aspects of bodymindly relating to mess are gradually brought forward and incorporated as to activate a knowledgeable bodymind (and not only a trained mind). Waying cultivates, by play-legged embodied design thinking, a sensitivity, responsivity and ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2015) for that which is not-yet formed, seen, heard, thought – the unforeseen and unpredictable. As a result, Architecting Bodies by Immersive Gestures is less concerned with consolidating and establishing what already is, than practicing the art of anticipatorily relating to what is unexpected and unforeseen, in order to create alternative body-environment relationalities. It offers an embodied environmental awareness – broader than human alone – by enticing environment-sensitive acting, environment-sensitive bodyminding and environment-sensitive becoming.