Spatial poetries: heuristics for experimental poiesis

The theme of this research is the study of how things take form in experience, consciousness and language. In large part, it explores the identification and the naming of ephemeral event phenomena that are as of yet unnamed, a process of becoming I describe as symmetry-breaking. This exploration is pursued within the framework of a Lived Spatial Inquiry called Experimental Poiesis, a particularly experimental form of making where inquiry is the formal philosophical and poietic tool where the original matrix of the site in question is embedded in what is made. The methods of this inquiry facilitate both the study and the subversion of normal habits of language-focused perception and are called Heuristics—experimental aesthetic practices that are site-adjustable and engaged iteratively, where the results of one experiment become the starting point of the next. Spatial Poetries is the name I have given to the results of these experiments, hybrid in form and prompting shifts in lived experience in the reader. This thesis pays homage to Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (1666), by the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish, as well as The Manual of Scientific Enquiry; Prepared for the Use of Officers in Her Majesty’s Navy; And Travellers in General (1859), edited by Sir John F. W. Herschel. In addition, I engage with the work of Gregory Bateson, John Dewey, Ian Hacking, Dalibor Vesely and Roberto Casati, and have found resonance with practices such as medieval monastic rhetoric as presented in the writings of Mary Carruthers, the work of the architecture school Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso in the Ciudad Abierta (Open City), and the site-based poetic and philosophical works of Ian Hamilton Finlay. As a hybrid object, the thesis contains a manual for the discovery, analysis and naming of ephemeral phenomena. The Manual is composed of images, text, audio, video, and diagrams. As an assemblage, it both documents a process of inquiry and attempts to provide a taxonomy and rationale for that process and is presented in the form of the Atlas of Experimental Poiesis, a central contribution of this research. This Atlas allows for a process of philosophic reflection that feeds back into and has the capacity to enrich lived spatial-aesthetic experience of readers in general. In specific, it offers a vocabulary and visual structure to undertake the processes of observation, detection and creation of new forms, and the challenge of bringing those experiences to language