title: Arakawa and Gins: The Practice of Embodied Cognition
Creators: name: Keane, Jondi
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2006
Subjects: subject: Arakawa
subject: Gins
subject: M
subject: architects
subject: artists-turned-architects
subject: embodiment
subject: multidisciplinary interarticulations

description: This thesis will examine the works of artists-turned-architects, Arakawa and Gins in light of current research in the arts and sciences on affect and self-organisation. The aim of their project is to arrive at a 'daily research' in which a person may: 1. observe and learn about the operations of his or her own perception and action; 2. interact (dismantle and re-assemble) the identity boundaries reinforced by the habitual implementation of concept and category. This thesis takes account of multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to embodiment and engages Arakawa and Gins from a practising artist's point of view. Given this practical orientation of the study, the aim is to makes a series of critical reflections on the work of Arakawa and Gins and demonstrate how such an approach brings theory and practice together. Exploration of the central aspects of their processes will prepare a person (researcher or practitioner) to begin a practice that is designed to combine studies of embodiment with the co-evolving relationship of organisms and their surroundings, to form the basis of a practice of embodied cognition. The thesis sets out this investigation into three chapters. In Chapter 1, I propose that the context for Arakawa and Gins' work be understood as the result of multidisciplinary interarticulations and multi-modal approaches to embodied activity. The position they occupy in relation to disciplinary endeavours such as art, architecture, psychology, bio-topology and theoretical physics is a process of constant problematisation, convergence and repositioning. A survey of key writings on Arakawa and Gins demonstrates the complexity of their work and the difficulties authors encounter situating them within a context that adequately addresses the scope of their project. In Chapter 2, I map a series of activities that accrue to form embodied configurations made perceptible by Arakawa and Gins' procedural architecture. These tactics apply to the observational-heuristic stance they take towards the perceptions and actions that constitute a person's identity boundaries as well as the transformational approach they take towards perceptions and actions that construct the material surrounds. I propose that the movements initiated by their architectural procedures become the practice of embodied cognition. That is, the ability to increase awareness and construct the shape of awareness is, at the same time, the ability to observe and learn about the anatomical, physiological basis of cognition. Through Ã†ffective readings and embodied engagements I explore how Arakawa and Gins propose that the distribution of awareness may reconfigure the relationships among the organism-person-surround. The practice that repositions a person in relation to him- or herself, to others, to constructions of knowledge and modes of acquiring knowledge, questions the autonomy of any construct, especially constructs that are historically entrenched such as the organism, art, science or agency in general. In Chapter 3, I argue that by investigating the connection between and across the organism, person and surround, a person must reconsider activities, such as judgment and Reason, as ongoing embodied processes. The implication of such a shift impacts upon everyday practices as well as vocational and professional practices aligned with research and development. Throughout this thesis I argue that tactics of Arakawa and Gins' procedural architecture and the ethics of their reversible destiny project are the most productive way to approach the practical and theoretical inquiry into the contributions that humans can make towards co-constructing the world. The complex and intricate processes that emerge from their work will enhance the quality of life by allowing persons to apply the benefits of research in art and science to everyday actions. By devising procedures for re-entering perception and action, the transition from self-awareness to a practice of embodied cognition acquires a renewed urgency for daily life. Further, I have suggested that Arakawa and Gins' works demonstrates how deliberate recursive action may become a practice of embodied cognition. This occurs in three ways. Firstly, any form of deliberate assessment and coordination of top-down conceptual-analytical processing and bottom-up perceptual processing will open the activities of reasoning, selecting, deciding, and judging to new embodied modes of knowledge acquisition and therefore to unprecedented configurations of value. Secondly, the reconfiguration of what counts as knowledge, from an ontological perspective, impacts upon research processes and the way in which research cultures are situated in relation to communities. Lastly, the practice of embodied cognition sets a new agenda for convergent 'daily research' especially the interaction between art and the 'outside of art' and between third-person science and the science of our own fiction. These practical actions will counteract our commitment to closure on many fronts, both personal and historical, from the education of the senses to the construction of social justice.