Affective Craft
A while ago I wrote about a talk I had heard by Glen Adamson (see here for the original post) and his thoughts on the word affect and on affective craft. Then yesterday I came across this article by Scott Geiger via twitter which had the following definition in it:
Affect
Sensory performance ascribed to a building or space. Some contemporary architecture appeals to the senses through pattern, materiality, light—what times past would have called “ornament” before it was starved from architecture by modernism. Affect resists interpretation. It bears no message. Instead, affect conveys a resonance between space and program, building and site, surface and sunlight. The screen facade of the New Museum in New York City, for example, affects mutability: the building looks either rugged or diaphanous depending on the time of day, quality of light, and your perspective from the street.
Read on: The Function of Ornament by Farshid Moussavi; “Ornament and Crime” by Adolf Loos.
The qualities described above apply just as aptly as in Adamson's explanation and they both refer to Adolf Loos.
'Sensory performance ascribed to a building or space' is an intriguing way of thinking about the affect of ones work - if you were to translate that to your own pieces (in my case jewellery) what sensory effect would it give?
