Reflections and implications of a naïve attitude to architecture

Hello and welcome to the Active Inference Institute. This is ActInf Guest Stream number 60.1 on October 18th, 2023. Today should be a great and very exciting presentation and discussion. Kristen Whittle is here and will be presenting on reflections and implications of a naive attitude to architecture. There will be a presentation followed by a discussion. So if you're watching live, please feel free to write any comments in the chat. Otherwise, thank you so much for joining and really looking forward to this work being shared. Thank you, Daniel. It's a great pleasure being able to present to you and your audience. And just as we were maybe talking, the journey towards arriving here to talk to you has been a very, very interesting one and one that's really been undertaken since I was a young person. So it's thrilling and exciting to be able to talk about the work that we've been doing as a studio and kind of seeing where the touch points and points of influence and interest to you and your audience come into this conversation about our sort of artistic work, I guess. So what I wanted to do is to maybe explain what we're just about to see before showing it. What it is, is a kind of an assemblage of work that's been undertaken since I was probably 22. And it goes into a lot of practical work that has now been completed, real large scale buildings, etc. So it's kind of part theoretical part, kind of trying to understand as a curious person where I'm at and trying to evolve a maybe a strong systematic view on architecture, because I guess the way I see it is that architecture is a bit lost. And in a sense, there's an idea implicit in the work, which is to kind of remind ourselves the purpose of architecture in a kind of pre-industrial form, and then looking towards the future, towards a very sophisticated future that we have in front of us and trying to synchronize that with a very humanist substrate, humanist philosophy. So the reason why I called the talk a kind of evocation about naive architecture actually comes back to some readings that we've been doing, and that Carl Jung evolved out of readings that he'd had from Schiller, the German writer and philosopher about ways in which artistic production occur. So one would have, for instance, one production of art stemming from a natural source almost, which he referred to as naive art, or a naive approach to art. And the other, which is what he referred to as a sentimental view, or a sentimental approach, which is more that you're standing away from nature and looking upon it and choosing which direction to evolve in and objectifying the direction. So the first thing to say is that our work really stems from an extrapolation of nature through our work in a kind of intuitive, instinctive manner. And then maybe post-rationalization or more theoretical explorations after that, but the very basics of it come from a more intuitive approach. And I think it's very exciting. exciting area is this relationship between a human being, emotion, feeling, and space and the environment. And so our work is, I guess, coming from a kind of slightly utopian perspective, seeking to reconcile the maybe lack of connection in the modern world to the physical environment. that's this kind of reward matrix that sits outside of our bodies to generate an architecture which is full of meaning and nooks and hooks and alcoves, if you like emotional alcoves, which hook us into this kind of positive feedback loop. So we see our extrapolation of cognitive creative processes being something to do with how nature and feedback and cognition works at a fundamental level. So I'm very interested in exploring this with you and your audience later on is how creativity is a sort of manifestation of cognition. So with architecture, the interesting thing about architecture is that it's really associated with other people and it requires you to be an empath. So the big thing here is when you meet a client who's got a…