_thinkMake Week_12, (Spatial Practices: Thinking and Making) - The Mangle in practice, Science, Society, and Becoming

 This week, we had the last reading before the Christmas break, it's called The Mangle in Practice by Andrew Pickering. First, Naahzat did the presentation about the topic and we discussed this as a group reflection.

The book is a collection of applying and extending Pickering’s concept of the “mangle” to various fields of study and practice including history, philosophy, sociology, geography, literature, software engineering etc. The mangle is a metaphor for the dynamic and emergent interaction of human and non-human agency in the production of knowledge and action.

Pickering introduces the mangle as a new way of understanding the world and our relation to it. He contrasts the mangle with the traditional ontology of representation, which assumes that the world is fixed and stable and that our task is to accurately describe and explain it by comparing the art of two artists Mondrian and Willem de Kooning.

Mondrian's geometrical abstracts - a vertical and horizontal grid of solid black lines filled by patches of primary colour 

De Kooning's painting - a dense, embodied, swirls, vortices of colour, chance juxtaposition.

He also gives an example of  U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan for controlling the Missis­sippi to prevent flooding into New Orleans. No matter how much science and man-made model used to prevent the flow of water within the river, the plans were failed and he suggested that The Corps ofEngineers should stop fighting the river and let New Orleans go since. Mississippi is going to flow into the Atchaf­alaya sooner or later.

 He also discusses some of the implications and challenges of adopting the mangle as a new ontology, such as the need for new ethics, politics, and aesthetics of practice.

• So I resonated with the reading that the mangle offers a more realistic and exciting ontology of becoming, which acknowledges that the world is constantly changing and evolving and that our task is to engage with it in a creative and performative way by going with the flow of becoming which is a better way to live in nature than to do so through the use of grim and desperate projects of domination and control.

After the reading, we have to draw a visual illustration to capture the surroundings with chosen verbs which mine are to weaken, to bind, to immobilize and imitate on mind while eyes are being closed. 

For the first drawing, I tried drawing the visual memory that was striking my mind such as the table arrangments, the sun, the curtains, and the slide windows but Oren told me that I should focus on drawing nom character elements by feeling it weighting through the lines not just drawing what I have seen exactly.

So the second, drawing was more of a progressive for me, I tried to visualize in my mind and hands drew together according to my verbs while expressing their functionality and direction with different forms and weights that I felt through the art of becoming together through my hands and the verbs as I resonated with today's reading.

In the evening we have to produce something in the space by reflecting on the chosen verbs and have to perform together as a group.

I create this not as a whole, but as a function of movement by using the objects from my surroundings, firstly I was surrounded and immobilized by a circle of restriction using the chairs and closed up by binding my coat. Then I tried to get out by weakening with multiple efforts and then getting out through the path of blackboards, I was still surrounded by objects but I felt that I was free since I believed that chain of enclosing around me was the one making me feel restricted at that moment.