lundi 25 juin 2012

max hooper schneider // monist kingdoms

The Monist Kingdom series adopts the materialist philosophy of Benedict Spinoza (1632-77): everything that exists is composed of a single substance, matter, and all matter is ‘alive.’ Bodies across all kingdoms of classification, as a plurality of diversely formed matters—plants, animals, minerals, machines, buildings, landscapes, and so forth—act and are acted upon, their mutual modulations constituting what is. From this perspective questions of landscape and aesthetics are transformed into physical questions: i.e., knowing what a particular body is capable of and how particular bodies combine in beneficial or destructive mixtures through their positive and negative encounters. In landscape architecture what matters, the only thing that matters, is how bodies interact with and transform one another. As in the original meaning of aesthetics, concerned not with beauty or taste but with how the world strikes the body, a body of organisms or molecules is understood not as good or bad, but in terms of its agential powers: with how it increases or diminishes the powers of the other bodies (human and nonhuman, natural and artifactual) with which it interacts. The submitted collages, which mass together a multitude of bodies and exist as bodies, perform within these parameters. Their logic is a full-body logic of sense in which color temperature, collision of form, pattern of juxtaposition, the site in which they are experienced, the perceivers, participate in constituting a dynamic, morphogenic assemblage of bodies—that is, a Monist Kingdom.








images and text via: maxhooperschneider.com


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