EDITOR STATEMENT: PROCEEDING IS EVERY BODY’S BUSINESS
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AUDIO: MADELINE AND ARAKAWA ON ARCHITECTURE FOR TENTATIVENESS
FOTOSET: BOB BOWEN – BIOSCLEAVE HOUSE
PERFORMANCE: QUASHA/STEIN – AXIAL MUSIC FOR MADELINE GINS
TEXT/AUDIO: ALAN PROHM – IMAGING MET LANDING
ESSAY: CHARLES BERNSTEIN – A +/– G
INTERVIEW:
In this interview, Madeline and Arakawa explain how they set out to conceive an architecture to reinstate tentativeness in the society of organisms that person.
From a series of interviews Alan Prohm conducted at the Reversible Destiny Office over three days in 2006. The topic on the day of this excerpt was procedural architecture.
LISTEN
HYPERBOLIC BIOTOPOLOGICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
In this study using hyperbolic and computational photography, Bob Bowen subjects the Bioscleave House, East Hampton, to a machinic perception mimicking the perspective-driven distortions of human perception.
Like the mesmerizing analytic cubo-futurism of Pavel Filonov, Bowen’s machinic capture yields world sliced into shards of perspective, blobs of perspective, streaks of perspective and smudges of the act of looking. A medium for recording vision with the sort of approximative-rigor we bring to it. Hyperbolic in fidelity to the biotopology of encountering the Bioscleave House.
Axial music is a practice Quasha and Stein have kept for many years, showing, in regular generous live performances, how improvisation on the axial principal can serve up procedurality in great doses.
Here are George and Charles performing Axial Music for Madeline at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, on the occasion of the memorial there for Madeline Gins 29.3.2014
Behind axial music is the axial principle, and behind Quasha’s “principle-based” practice a poetics beyond conceptual, targeting an agency “initiating other levels of action”. “Principle” in Q+S’s practice nears “procedure” in A+G’s procedural architecture, for them a practice beyond poetics. For more see below . . .
imaging met landing – a biotopological romance
Alan Prohm
This text was generated in a single pauseless improvisation (the time of production being close to the time of reading aloud). It explores the notions of landing and imaging in the landing site theory of Arakawa and Gins.
To get a better feel for these terms, and the theory they animate, I engaged them in vocal/written performance as characteristic actions/characters acting in consort and/or in conflict at the basis of our world-making.
Imaging Met Landing – a biotopological romance – Alan Prohm reading – min: 09:30
Shusaku Arakawa (1936-2010) – Madeline Gins (1941-2014)
by Charles Bernstein
In this essay Charles Bernstein sets A+G within the context of their American art/poetry contemporaries, refusing the brilliant duo’s isolation in a romantic exceptionalism pegged to speculative philosophy. Referencing Deleuze, Nietzsche, (or Blake), OK, but more relevantly Hannah Weiner, Richard Foreman and Ron Silliman, Leslie Scalapino, Robert Grenier, Joseph Kosuth, Eva Hesse, and Jackson Mac Low, Robert Smithson, Philip Guston, and Wallace Berman.
This essay was written before the deaths of Arakawa and Madeline and is published here as eulogy. The first half is based on Charles Bernstein’s talk at the Arakawa and Gins conference at Barnard College in May 2009, which Madeline attended, and which Arakawa was then too sick to attend (dying of ALS later that year).
OVER(RE)VIEW of RECENT WRITING
The procedure of proceeding is predicated on a known or unknown momentum for going forward.
The Proceeding Procedure, a 4-day event in June of 2014, gathering and activating in the spirit of Arakawa and Gins, was predicated on the nowness of a current movement, a range of artists/scholars/scientists actively asking A+G questions along new trajectories.
This review is a simple run-down of some evidence of the thinking going on, over the last year or two, from the pages of The Funambulist, Artforum, Harriet and Inflexions.
Continue reading
PROCEDURES JOURNAL
Anniversary Pilot Issue – Today, we honor a great star in the struggle against the downhill course of things, and her star partner, with the modest publication of this Anniversary issue commemorating Madeline Gins’ passing one year ago, on January 8th, 2014. Thank you to every one who contributed to the Proceeding Procedure, to this comm(or)emoration, and toward upcoming publications in this series.
In this issue: (online only) Madeline Gins, Jondi Keane, Alan Prohm, Jake Kennedy, Marie-Dominique Garnier, Solveig Styve Holte, Marte Reithaug Sterud and Ann-Christin Berg Kongsness.
Reversible Destiny Lost Book Re-Release – INTEND, 1973
The long unfindable work INTEND (1973) by Madeline Gins, a work of pre-procedural lyricism, hand-republished here in foto-copy.
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Before there were architectural procedures in the Reversible Destiny project, there were, on Madeline Gins’ side of the nascent effort, poetic procedures, constructions of language gearing the reader/viewer to continually reenter hir processes of text- or world-constituting.
Jondi Keane, Deakin University
“To begin a study of Arakawa and Gins is, in many ways, to begin a practice. To continue a study on Arakawa and Gins and the practice of embodied cognition, is to begin to reconfigure the practice of person in relation to the Social.”
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ABOUT THIS ESSAY: In this essay long-time friend and colleague of Arakawa and Gins, Jondi Keane discusses the practice it is to study Arakawa and Gins – and the practice it takes to reconfigure the person in relation to the Social.
PROCEDURES Journal 
