wk5> introduction to Volatile Bodies

Ranging from the metaphoric approach of 'Through the eyes of a child' to the diagrammatic approach of 'Building as diagram' to the scaling approach of 'Music: education with commerce', we were asked to select preferences from an evidently wide variety of themes. The issues revolving around these themes would be responded to critically in the next stage of the folie design.

The theme I was selected into is called 'Volatile Bodies', led by tutor Zuzana Kovar. A PhD candidate at RMIT for a doctoral titled 'Productive Leakages: Architecture in Abject(ion)', Zuzana introduced us to the ideas behind volatile, leaky, or 'transformative' bodies in this week's tutorial. Some interesting points I gained from our initial discussion included:

• body is not static, yet the architecture we design is very much designed for a static body
• >a volatile conception of the body should be the starting point for the design process
• understand the implications that the perception of our body has on the design of spaces

'We Are All Flesh' by Berlinde de Bruyckere, 2009

Zuzana then showed us a huge number of images, such as the one above, that definitely fulfilled the purpose of getting us thinking more deeply and abstractly about the body itself. Some points for further consideration which I drew include:

• consider the body itself: at what point do we push it so far that it is no longer a body, but a robotic entitiy or the like?
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