The Human Scale

Photo Copyright: Leo Chow, SOM

human perception is an automatic dynamic biological and neurological function requiring no consciousness of its 600 million year evolving apparatus to define, edit, summarize, even presume the billions of stimuli your body receives each moment.  

human perception and human scale were two parallel lines that crossed in recent years. human scale has always been of great interest to my work beginning with rothko's canvas, le corbusier's modular man, da vinci's vitruvian man as well as other applications of proportion as golden mean, etc. human scale has been a manner for man to enter into a work completely or proportionately, like some connective tissue or shared breath of mathematical sublimity. as true in Architecture as in Art., human scale was a scale which pulled upon more sensory apparati than just the ocular, prompting fuller sensory awareness, a wholeness of submersion.

however this definition has only gone so far----larger works would automatically engage human scale and yet rothko eventually felt shut out of his own frames. body as measure brings "object"ness higher in the heirarchy for definition instead of perception itself. this unit whether body or object continues a separatist vernacular---furthering a gap felt between perceiver and the percept. the wholeness of submersion is not a scale of size but a scale of awareness---an awareness of the perceptual system that engages not in the totality of what a something is but a human experience of it-----it is the most rudimentary and simple of points and yet immeasurably true, ones degree of awareness of this is one's human scale.

the function of sensory perception is to bring an unknown into definition. attention brought to the moment before definition suspends the unknown––explores it––however minutely, and gives an experience of the human mechanoreceptive, proprioceptive, somatosensory scale. it is impossible and unnecessary to track the immensity of information our system summarizes but the experience of this scale can be brought to the edge of ones finger [as all senses]. human scale is a chosen moment in the awareness of this perceptive function----this is the works of the Protoist Series, as well as with other works of Art and Architecture. 

Singular Experience And Permission of the Physical Moment

Friday, May 7 1824. Kärntnertortheater,Vienna

It had been ten years since Beethoven stepped onto a stage, paper advertisements around the city announced the performance of his Ninth Symphony. Ludwig prepared an unparalleled physical scale and sound to his performance. He doubled the size of the orchestra, tripled the size of his chorus with perhaps as many as ten voices per written part. The evening was absolutely mighty. A sensation so eruptive the audience stood to their feet five times, a number of ovations considered so obscene the authorities were called to calm the crowd. And the memory of this historic performance was not saved in a recording but in the bodies of those who experienced it.

The Abstract exists just outside associative time. An Abstract Form can bring an unknown, an "unfelt", powerfully into intimate relevance by direct physical experience. They require our presence. These Forms are to be touched, entered, walked upon. They are conceived and constructed to be permanently encountered. Their Work is your permission to physically engage, to allow the rare opportunity for the body to lead the mind beyond its known pattern of reality into the monumental collectively and individually.

These Forms are not a “minimalism” but a singularity. The singular moment when thought is silenced by abstract presence and something unknown/formless collapses into what was previously known, felt, experienced. This moment is free from association and has nothing neurally to connect back to but the sensation within the body. And when that experience is profound, it is profundity then that grows our physical connection with the outside world. Thus allowing, even for one moment, a truly physical experience to return us transformed. As humanity evolves an immediacy without actual physical presence, these Forms give opportunity to awaken sedentary senses and exult their skill, liken to the awareness of those in the audience at Beethoven’s premiere–what would be their only time with his Ninth––the experience to feel human.

UNE begins this series of Form: The PROTOIST Series, the Form before the Known.