blind contour writing
the second batch from a past
Freshmen at art school are forced to draw blindly for hours. It’s the fastest way to break them out of old bad habits, to make them unlearn lifeless conventions. The goal of blind drawing is to really see the thing you’re looking at, to almost spiritually merge with it, rather than retreat into your mental image of it. Our brains are designed to simplify — to reduce the tumult of the world into order. Blind drawing trains us to stare at the chaos, to honor it. It is an act of meditation, as much as it is an artistic practice — a gateway to pure being. It forces us to study the world as it actually is. Letter of Recommendation: Blind Contour Drawing
16, Jul, 21:55 If you assume writing as an art, moving ideas of learning to draw, to writing, is a metal model to unpack. Blind contour writing is thus an incidental find. The creation of texts as plain thought dumps is in principle similar to drawing without looking down on the sheet. The exercise may seem fine; it will help the mind develop processes for coherent thought. Eventually, unlike drawing, writing needs to be more accessible and be able to deliver faster than any other art form. A form of human hallucination of text about ideas, which may or may not apply to the reader.
29 Nov 2022, 00:14. ENGINEERING. How you design dreams is the next frontier of (architecture) research. I position it as building-without-gravity. How we ground ourselves determines our imagination. We wouldn’t be us if our feet didn’t touch earth or some kind of man-made surface. A different paradigm must guide the planning of resource assembly. The weight of objects wouldn’t matter. All life will exist in some kind of capsule with an ecosystem to sustain it. Oddly, like how this post too is a container, whose relevance is relative to how connected it is to the next. Architecture as a ritual is moving from one capsule to the other.
29 Nov, 11:47. ENGINEERING. as a marker, will contain logs on how I hope to lay out what I write online. There are past spaces I should close, but it is something to get there in time. Images collected are almost inspirational and work with the post. At least in theory. For now, the second profile edit is defining the landscape in which my writing finds itself. There is no space on GitHub, which is disappointing. To plan a life on the internet is also a project to plan and therefore build incrementally.
29 Nov, 11:48. Starting with a tag is a newer thinking about disciplinary writing. The tag is a heading and also an approximate direction for where the idea can locate itself. For daily sentences, it is inspired by the mapping service, (where.three.words), the framework guides a grand theory of space.imagination.practice whose attempt is to describe everything (architecture). I elaborate the working formula for the first part of Architecture = (Art + Science) of building as Art = (art) + (planning) + (design) + (engineering).
29 Nov 2022, 14:34. eisenmanarchitects.com/Projects ranged in the early 2000s. The extended discourse of deconstruction defined the profession for a generation. There is also no social-media. 23years, and then until now, there is now, new land available to build on. Engineers created buildings before the profession manifested. What will ARCHITECTURE 2.0 look like? Architecture imagined without the restrictions of gravity in virtual reality, that is. What are the opportunities for spatial practice in the newer virtual landscapes?
29 Nov 2022, 17:54 ART. Editing is the best part of this site. Reminds me a lot of the several Tumblrs I had in 2012. I go through this list, ooh.directory, Blogs about Architecture … It is odd that there are only 32 blogs that come under architecture. Culture and fashion are the other tags associated with what an architect writes about. I let that slot into the broad frame of design and planning. Defining the domain as a + p + d + e is the thesis dictated. It is also a posting strategy.
30 Nov 2022, 22:26 ENGINEERING. What is an open research notebook? This I ask as someone with a research practice. Previously, researchers ensured rigor through structured published materials. Today its form has changed to a working set of notes connected to a personal domain. Again, this has no specific template. I am staring at my list, Twitter, Instagram, Substack, and medium. In all of this, where does the notebook manifest? Case studies; Three books in a trench coat and fightwithtools.dev
10 Dec 2022, 11:24. DESIGN. I must write more. A year of stochastic daily journaling has taught me is that writing on random daily ideas does not work when you are trying to write books. Previously, only writing in a word processor was enough; today, besides them, there is internet search, note-taking tools, and now artificially intelligent chat. Four broad technologies in total and four different frames of thinking to generate work. No, these aren’t distractions.
01 Jan 2023, 19:17. PLANNING. This is another beginning. Another attempt to build a habit. Thinking through writing. You cannot link ideas here other than replying to yourself; that is a status update. The first significant idea to address is a microbook. What is the best way to convert every idea into a book project? Pick the smallest size publishable on Amazon and go for it. Making bad books is a business model. Enough badly baked goods can lead to good ones later.
01 Jan 2023, 19:44 ARCHITECTURE. We are getting somewhere with the idea of what could be a writing practice and the form it can take in the post-information digital age? I added age since that was the word recommended, and I pressed tab. there is an obsession with the past that architecture is a complete built “opinion”? Based on where ideas are headed it is a story told over time and by generations on how they want to live, and think about organising their lives. On the internet, it is information.
01 Jan 2023, 20:43 DESIGN. It is a recent phenomenon that everyone is dumping everything online. There is also now this battle of verified accounts, blue ticks, two blue ticks, and then gold. The red one is new — my very first sighting of a new species. Because tech is very unorganized and messy, we are as a result becoming such. The idea therefore is, what is a continuous architectural writing practice? That is verified and discusses virtual spatial conversations?
19 Jul, 00:23. A coherent direction to the introduced ‘blind-contour-writing’, my apologies, is absent here. I did plan to edit these for a book project, but keeping them as posts, I can get back to, seems the best option. Like character sketches for an animation. Generative A.I. today are too badly drawn sketches. All content today on the internet is also very relative to the audience it draws. Thought dumping daily is the first practice to develop. An audience, which develops in time, may contribute to how ‘good’ the work eventually develops into.
