Creativity, Indeterminacy and Representation

About this event

Luke Jones and Trevor Norris puzzle through the ways in which a process or conceit of representation places us in felt and inhabited space.

Into the black — on the invention of poché
Originally a term of art in architectural rendering, but growing by degrees into a spatial abstraction and specific design method — poché in its modern sense is at least in part the result of a kind of productive mistranslation. In its transposition from the bounds of the atelier to the space of "theory" (and in its adoption within a new anglophone milieu) the term not only acquires a previously absent gravitas, but also a sort of metaphorical depth.

Luke Jones is the course leader on the Architecture and Interior Design (including foundation year) course. He lectures in history and theory on the foundation year and Architecture BA courses, and is an ARB-registered architect. He is also a co-founder of the urban ecology collective Heat Island, and hosts the podcast About Buildings and Cities.

‘Contact! Contact!’
In his work on ecological thinking and being, a response to Graham Harman's object-oriented ontology, Timothy Morton discusses the idea of ‘ambient poetics’, that is, the evocation in textual form of our being in nature. Morton identifies a literary sleight of hand, which he calls ecorhapsody, where writing tries to evoke an immediate experience of nature, making the written medium seem to disappear (you, me, here, nature, this text, it’s all one thing). To help us think through this aspect of nature writing he introduces Derrida’s idea of the ‘re-mark’, the textual gesture that draws our attention to the ways background, foreground and medium collapse, the unstable distinction between ‘here and there, this and that’. Through this collapse Morton leads us towards the new sense of nature that object-oriented ontology suggests. As he notes, ‘Nature loses its nature when we look at it head on.’

Trevor Norris is the course leader of the undergraduate programme in Creative Writing and English Literature at London Met. His research interests lie in the crossover of ecophilosophy, ecopoetics and nature writing.

Image: MK Payre