Ocular occupations : painting and other spatio-visual strategies for making and inhabiting architecture

Abstract

Many writers have suggested that our capacity to occupy space meaningfully has been undermined by our contemporary ocular-centric culture, which distances us from reality and corrupts our physical and embodied experience of the world. This study challenges these claims within an architectural context, by examining the fundamentally visual nature of architecture and inhabitation as well as the spatio-visual practices, acts and strategies that we use to occupy space. Drawing on theory and practice-based methods from outside the professional limits of architectural practice, the study implements visual acts of occupation to establish a new and expanded conception of architecture as a performative spatio-visual practice – a conception that engages and connects its practice with the purportedly ocular-centric spatial conditions in which it is made and occupied.