The performative experiment : a polylogue to practice the malleability of an aesthetic and spatial sense of self

This thesis contends that basic architectural design training requires malleable aesthetic and spatial sensibilities which in turn can cultivate a pliable and multiple sense of self. "A sense of self" here draws on William James's and Ulric Neisser's plural ways of conceiving and knowing oneself through self-knowledge, self-consciousness and self-agency, all of which combine to motivate our actions in the world. "Aesthetic", borrows from Mark Johnson's definition of constituting the patterns, images, feelings, qualities, and emotions by which meaning is possible for us in every aspect of our lives. "Spatial" captures the ways in which we situate and orient self in the world. How we are trained to perceive, apprehend, cogitate, examine, reflect, record, and practice these sensibilities guides how we piece together our experiences in the world as a series of aesthetic and spatial fragments. I argue that 1. The cultivation of multiple and pliable attributes of self is prescient and relevant to fields beyond design. 2. The site of cultivation lies beyond the mind. I build a case that these two contentions are picking up on recent waves in situated and embodied cognition and posthuman discourse, that have each reclaimed the body, physical, digital and virtual environments, and the nonhuman respectively as extended sites of perception and cognition. Posthumanism here, in the terms of physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, extends agency to the nonhuman by prefiguring neither human nor nonhuman in interactions. Both situated cognition and posthumanism are engendering new aesthetic and spatial abilities that exemplify the multiplicity and malleability of self. In order to productively instrumentalize their common findings, we need new methodologies and materials that escape individual disciplinary silos which proliferate canons and inhibit the creation of common ground. Design pedagogy has the ability to subsume the motivations of various fields in order to develop such methodologies. I embody cognitive science and posthuman discourse, in order to make visible their pursuits, knit together their underlying values, and frame their common calls as design problems. Through this, I develop a new methodology called Performative Experiment, that primes the malleability of aesthetic and spatial sensibilities by estranging one from canons and rote moves. Like parkour for imagination, displacing the center of thought from the mind into the surroundings that are appropriated as an extension of self, performative experiments arrest the spatial and aesthetic aptitudes growing out of a malleable sense of self. I present the shadow and shaded silhouette as materials with which to engage these priming methodologies. In order to implement the case I've built, I present Hogarth's Silhouettes as a proof of concept of a foundational experiment in design education. My claim is that it puts into play a malleability of aesthetic and spatial sense of self, which constitutes a new form of design thinking/doing, across disciplines.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Sivakumar, Akshita

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mark Goulthorpe.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111498

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/111498