 shot you a look as he entered. You scowled. He would have to show up before you could leave.

“What are you doing?”

This he asked the moment you placed your personal datapad into a bag you planned on taking with you. “Going to a friend’s.”

“No.”

“Wh…” You spun around, shaking your head. “Look… You don’t have a say.”

“Here.” The man was completely ignoring what you were saying. This wasn’t anything new. You scowled, wrinkling your nose as Matt shoved something into your arms. A stuffed bantha, you noted. Your arms squeezed the object. It was, from what you could tell, made of the same material that stress balls were created from. “You seem stressed.” Even as he was saying these words, Matt was going for your gaming pad. “It’s within regulations.”

Am I supposed to thank him?

You were too baffled to do anything at that point. It was not as though you wanted to reject the invitation; you wanted more to come. “It’s not an all-night thing.” You squeezed the bantha, wondering why you were explaining yourself to your unwanted roommate. “I’m going.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be near other people—“
“I am another person.” You turned around to face him. The man was scowling, his bottom lip puffed forward as though threatening to form a pout. Your intestines seemed to swoop inside of you. This was followed by a fluttering sensation. Matt drew his knees upwards, rested your gaming pad on them, and transferred his attention onto the game he had opened.

You scratched your lower back as you stood there, allowing your had to loll back so as to stare up at the ceiling. What were you supposed to do? It felt unfair that you were pressured to experience guilt. This man had forced his way into your life—what the hell was there to feel guilty over? The bantha that was tucked under your left arm released no noise, not offering up any explanation other than its very presence.

“…it’s…girl time, I guess,” you said sullenly. Matt’s fingers paused in their movements, hovering over the controls. “A quick movie…and then I’ll be back.”

There was no response from him. His legs slunk all the more closely to his body, and he buried himself in the fictional world of the game. You sighed, forced away the guilt, and lifted up the bag you had previously prepared. You set the stuffed bantha on your dresser and patted its head before heading out the door. There was no way you were going to be forced to give up something that, quite frankly, did not happen often for you.

As you had informed Matt, you remained with your coworker for the duration of a single movie before leaving. The two of you spoke a little, although you each had a habit of bringing up work. The bowls of popcorn were quickly emptied, and you had agreed to host the next meet-up in your quarters. Through your entire walk back to your room, you had wondered just how that would happen. Especially given the fact that your current roommate likely would not leave.

He was still on your bed when you opened the door. “Since you seem so set on remaining here, I need your contact information.” He snorted, and you knew why this was—it would be too easy to obtain his true name if he gave you this. “Fine. In four days, I’ll be having a friend over for a bit…Girl time again.”

“You want me to be gone?”

“Yeah. I do, Matt.” His lip once more protruded forward, as though the man was insulted. You grabbed the bantha he had given you off the dresser, climbed into bed with him, and laid your head upon the pillow. “Not the entire night.”

Since Kylo Ren was refusing to allow you to report Matt, to kick him out of your quarters, you had decided to make the best of it. This could work…for now. Regardless, you knew that boundaries needed to be set up. It was the only way your nerves weren’t going to be shot—you’d rather not end up in the bathroom nonstop due to stress. Speaking of stress—

“Thanks…for the bantha.” You lifted the stuffed animal enough to display it. Matt’s eyes flicked to the object and then returned to the game. His way of responding was to alter his position in bed; you frowned the moment his ear rested against your stomach. Boundaries, your mind repeated. But you would work on this aspect later.
Insufficient Concerns

Chapter Notes

You've all been uber amazing and supportive. Thank you for the hit, kudos and reviews. Lately my intestines have been acting up, so I've really been feeling this fic. I'm hoping to have all the chapters I have prewritten uploaded before this month ends--hopefully within the next week to two weeks.

Insufficient Concerns

Despite all the discomfort and, in a way, mayhem that Matt had brought into your life with his actions, you could not deny that you were feeling rather comfortable with him. This, of course, had much to do with the fact that he had given you a gift. Plus, your mind added, he had previously brought you food. Had you not known any better, you would have believed he was attempting to woo you. His lack of sexual advances led you to believe otherwise. Perhaps he desired a mother figure? A sisterly figure? You wrinkled your nose. Given the nature of your cuddling, that would be borderline inappropriate. Still, he was quite obviously seeking companionship.

You could not deny, either, that you found comfort in his presence due to your own need for human interaction. And he had come to you despite your intestinal issues. While that first night had made you feel rather poorly about yourself, he had since been almost…supportive.

You chewed on your bottom lip as you mulled this over. It was morning, and realistically you should have either been getting ready for work or else catching roughly another half hour of sleep. Matt was doing neither of these; he was engrossed, as per usual, in the game on your device. Why he didn’t simply use his own device, you did not know. Nor did you much mind at the present.

“Are… I mean…” You ran your tongue along your lips, pinching the edge of the topmost blanket. Matt’s brown eyes flicked to you, remaining a few seconds longer than you had anticipated. It felt as though your heart fluttered in your chest, and your intestines responded in kind. You placed a hand atop your belly, rubbing. His eyes again diverted from the game, this time landing on your current actions. Matt’s index finger twitched away from the device, and the man sat up a little straighter. His leg began to bend at the knee only for him to then straighten it once more. “I know that when… When I get stuck in the bathroom, it smells—I get that. But…”

You were feeling rather hot, your embarrassment mounting. Matt did not make a single move nor say a word to dissuade you from continuing. And thus you went on, rambling shakily at first before gaining steam. “I always… It’s hard to make friends who are understanding. They say they do at times, but… The looks they give… It’s with disgust or irritation.

“It’s like they think that I shouldn’t be… That I should be ashamed of my own body! And… I am! I kriffing am!” Tears began to well up in the corners of your eyes, and a tightness began to grip your chest. Suffocation. You wanted to sob, yet you held it down. “That’s why… That’s why I kept fighting for you to be… To not be here. Because this is supposed to be my safe space. I should be able to be comfortable here! Not ashamed of who I am!

“And then… the way Kylo Ren walked away when I was giving him a report. All because my stomach made noises…” You curled your fingers, clenching your hands. “He didn’t even hear me
out when I… He dismisses me as though I’m insignificant!”

Matt slowly blinked, his eyes pinching at the sides and his brow furrowing. “Those are rather insignificant concerns.”

Your jaw trembled, lips quivering as you started to shake. You could not stop blinking. Over and over again, your eyelids descended and lifted in rapid succession. It felt as though he had sucker-punched you; your gut clenching, aching. The gurgling in your intestines only grew. This was followed by a sk-ishhh sound that prompted Matt to reach towards you. You jerked away. Your feet were on the ground, bare to the cold air of the room before you realized what you were doing.

Matt frowned, his expression clearly displaying his stance; he believed you were being unreasonable. You were not going to allow him to make you feel less than you were. Yes, you had made the mistake in trusting him, in believing that he cared about your feelings. You were not about to make it sting worse.

You instantly began grabbing out fresh clothes. Your stomach was clenching, painfully so. You darted into the refresher with your bundle of clothes in your arms. Flicked on the fan, locked the door, and headed for the toilet.

Hemorrhoid cream was your friend. You tilted back your head whilst washing your hands. Blood in the toilet would perhaps have unnerved a number of others, but for you it was…well, normal at times like this.

Kriffing stress.

You finished rubbing the soap along your flesh, rinsed it off, and proceeded to dry your hands on the towel. The smell of inc


 even processes of a design object, service, or system. This results in people receiving more (information and detail) for less (cognitive load), while also being able to return repeatedly to the design and receive something more in terms of information and benefit.

This is a theoretical paper that utilizes presented examples to illustrate the multidimensional nature of the relationship between simplicity and complexity. The article progresses by firstly describing simplicity in tangent with its cognitive apperceptive functions of supporting cognitive fluency and affective preference. That is, here simplicity is described regarding the interaction between the design and its properties that are being perceived, and the way in which it is mentally constructed or represented (apperceived). Thus, the way in which the designs are understood, either from the perspective of simplicity or complexity, is also contingent upon how people interpret (mentally construct) the design. This is then followed by an overview of the psychological nature of simplicity as characterized by Gestalt psychologists. The cognitive–semiotic approach to HTI is explained. Here, we elaborate on a proposed cognitive–semiotic model, the model’s structure, and how it is applied to this study. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications for design and theory with emphasis on the relevance of the cognitive–semiotic approach for crossing the boundaries of design disciplines.

The Cognitive Apperceptive Meaning of Simplicity, Fluency, and Preference

The discipline of cognitive science has a long history of measuring and defining the parameters of simplicity in terms of cognitive processing, such as (a) the problem of induction—a deep philosophical debate relating to the obtainment of truth or a real understanding of phenomena and its reasoning;\(^1\) (b) infinite or endless numbers of patterns (or symbols and sequences) being compatible with finite data sets (Chater & Vitányi, 2003), which can be demonstrated by limitless amounts of curves passing through the same set of finite points, programming logic (differing algorithms to achieve the same programming outcome) and even radically different painting techniques and mark-making (i.e., dots, line drawings, geometrical approaches) that in the end resemble familiar objects and forms; (c) repetition of stimuli (Bornstein, 1989; Zajonc, 2001), seen in phenomena such as the mere exposure effect, whereby through exposure people learn and recognize patterns toward which an attraction is developed; and (d) prototypicality (the ability to connect phenomena to categories\(^2\)), semantics (the study of meaning), and ontological categorization—the process of deriving cognitive categories of phenomena (Hekkert & Wieringen, 1990). Cognitive science is a highly interdisciplinary field, combining theories and approaches from psychology, social science, aesthetics, and design, to name a few. In addition to cognition, cognitive science allows the study of the relationships between and among many factors, such as embodied experience or embodiment (physical and multisensory experience), emotions, and, quite crucially, the way in which cultures influence these processes (Norman, 1980). From a pragmatic point of view, cognitive–emotional processes operate in relation to action and what is occurring within the external environment (Dewey, 1938; Dewey & Tufts, 1909; Peirce, 2009). Thus, the senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste) and the subsequent perception through these vehicles serve as the interface between the mind and the world outside the human body.
The perceptive processes involve acts of finding patterns in received sensory data and high-level cognition (i.e., indirect or more abstract thinking that involves processes of classification, association, reflection, evaluation against other information held by the individual, as opposed to low-level cognition in which reactions to the external world happen almost instantaneously) require the recognition of patterns of information in order to create and develop categories of meaning (Chater & Vitányi, 2003). The problem of induction accounts for the complexity involved in establishing patterns: Infinite numbers of patterns exist even for finite data sets (Chater & Vitányi, 2003; Saariluoma & Rousi, 2015). That is, through limited tools and choices, the possibilities for differing patterns are unfathomable. For instance, numerous studies have researched the dynamics between decision-making, creativity, convergent thinking, and the ability to generate new solutions from scarcity in terms of limited options or resources (Amabile, 1983; Mehta & Zhu, 2015; Sternberg & Lubart, 1999). To give one example of how numerous patterns or solutions may derive from scarcity, participants of a study (Mehta & Zhu, 2015) involving three resource availability conditions (scarcity, abundance, and control) were assigned a task of solving a problem involving an image of a candle, box of matches, and container of tacks. Participants were required to solve the problem of attaching the candle to the wall through the use of the provided materials, ensuring that the candle would burn properly (in the correct direction) without dripping wax on the floor or table. The results proved that scarcity, or a limited number of resources, is not purely a question of material reality but also mental state. As the study showed, those who were confronted with a scarcity condition clearly displayed higher levels of creativity for correctly solving the problem (e.g., emptying the tack box, tacking it to the wall, placing the candle upright in the box, and lighting it), than the other two conditions of abundance (where people were given a narrative alluding to the participant existing in conditions in which resources were vast) and control (where people were not given any narrative to prime them for any specific conditions). In the control and abundance conditions there was no significant difference in the rate of successfully solving the problem, yet between the scarcity and the other two there was a significant increase in the rate of success solutions. Other examples that physically and informationally demonstrate infinity in finite units include Gabriel’s horn—a geometric figure featuring a finite volume with an infinite surface area (Havil, 2007), and the traditional binary code modern societies live by, the 1s and 0s in computer programming. The reality of infinity in finite units also brings implications for addressing reductionism in design; even decreasing levels of information may stimulate creativity and imagination in the user (Inoue, Rodgers, Tennant, & Spencer, 2015). In other words, while people are surrounded by infinite pieces of data about anything and everything they encounter, it is the smaller sets of information—such as a piece of paper, string and a pair of scissors—that prove most useful and fruitful for undertaking creative activities, such as transforming these materials (the paper and string, with the help of the scissors) into an item of clothing. Thus, to establish limits (in materials and/or information) increases one’s ability to imagine more options for that controlled quantity of resources. This is due to the fact that people are only capable of making sense of smaller chunks of information that align with the internalized idiosyncratic logic of their mental schema (Rugg & Gerrard, 2014; Saariluoma, 2003).

Information perceived through the senses is not simply understood and experienced through its raw form. That is, what each individual knows about the world is not based on an exact replica of the physical world; rather, the mental world and its contents are
interpretations—reconstructions or compositions—combining the perceived sensory information with various types of other mentally bound information and contents, such as memories and emotions (Helfenstein & Saariluoma, 2006). Thus, it is more apt to describe the perception–experience relationship as apperception (Saariluoma, 2005; Silvennoinen, 2017; Silvennoinen, Rousi, Jokinen, & Perälä, 2015).

Apperception can be described as “seeing something as something” (Saariluoma, 2005, p. 77). In this apperceptive meaning-making process, already existing mentally based information is integrated with new information obtained through multiple senses and constructed into a meaningful mental representation (Husserl, 1936/1970; Kant, 1787/1998; Saariluoma, 1995, 2003, 2005; Silvennoinen et al., 2015). Experiencing something as something—for instance, microscopic images of snowflakes or even granules of sand (see Figure 2) as complex and intriguing—involves apperceptive attention in detecting meaningful parts of the encountered entity (Saariluoma, 1995). Apperception differs from mere perception in terms of the act in which people mentally represent information contents that are not perceivable by nature, whether in terms of sense data or remembered sensory experience (Russell, 1917/1951) or qualia, the solely subjective qualities that shape the experience for the individual and cannot be entirely communicated to another individual (Jackson, 1982). Unperceivable contents or phenomena additionally include concepts of time, such as eternity or future instances (i.e., tomorrow; Saariluoma & Rousi, 2015). In other words, unperceivable contents cannot be reduced to perceptual stimuli but can be informed by past experiences and ideas of what such concepts may mean. Thus, apperception does not require the occurrence of sensory perception (e.g., Saariluoma, 20


, ‘What’s it for? What is it you want to do to me?’ (446)

This woman wanted to know why the institution wanted to ‘engage’ with her, as it seemed they wished to do something to or for her in a way that assumed they had to make some sort of
change in her in a manipulative sense. Lynch brings into focus the politics of engagement, and the tension between meaningful contact and technology of control. As Lynch points out, many museums fail to realise that Clifford’s contact zone is a political space, and that engagement policies unexamined and misused can result in problematic and unequal encounters.

If cultural institutions like museums are to be viewed as sites and agents for social relevance and for democratic practices, engagement would entail less the idea of institutions reaching out and including others to ensure that visitors participate, and more of the idea that participants will assert their own agency, and make their own choices in the way they use culture and heritage as a resource. These perspectives have been differentiated by cultural policy theorist Kevin Mulcahy (2006) as two forms of democratic process, the ‘democratisation of culture’ (the process by which cultural institutions enable broader access to their programs), or ‘cultural democracy’ (which means releasing agency so people can be culturally active on their own terms). Revised museum mandates make clear their desire to democratise in some way. The ‘democratisation of culture’ has involved developing exhibitions on minority subjects or difficult issues, often involving participation in collaborative processes of peoples ‘othered’ by race, gender, class or ability (Lynch and Alberti 2010; Sandell 2007, Smith et al 2010). But as Lynch and Alberti point out, consciously or not, “Western institutions continue to maintain borders and to privilege particular ways of knowing (2010: 14).” Mulcahy’s ‘cultural democracy’ or the suggestion that ordinary people have real agency in the constructing of cultural and historical knowledge, has had more difficulty gaining acceptance in museums. Many museum staff and managers might not even be aware of the difference between the two perspectives. Their institutions remain ‘invited spaces’ with limited subject positions for participants situated as beneficiaries, where a deficit model assumes that the public has ‘gaps’ which need filling (Cornwall & Coelho 2007 cited in Lynch 2011). How to deal with outsiders who reject the subject position of beneficiary and assert conflicting and contradictory engagements is a challenge that many museum personnel are not equipped to handle.

Fiona Cameron has written extensively on the need for museums to develop new ways of thinking about their processes that stress liquidity, pluralism and assemblages (Cameron 2006; Cameron & Mengler 2009). Cameron argues that ‘liquid museums’ offer “models of order where power is dispersed across multiple actors and dispersed sites, legitimising the pluralisation of authoritative opinion, expertise, multiple rationalities, different technologies and techniques for acting (2011, pg. 91).” She suggests that museum workers imagine themselves as part of broader assemblages of actors and processes in the social world, and be observant of the museum’s “emergent possibilities (92).” Cameron’s ideas of liquidity are equality applicable to the engagements of democracy. The ‘messiness’ of democratic practice is a recurring theme in political theory, where it is acknowledged that debates over knowledge can be divisive, conflict-ridden and unruly (Mouffe 2000). Mouffe argues that the political conditions inherent in democracy always involve diverse, and conflicting, alternatives. Mouffe encourages instead an ‘agonistic’ process of democracy wherein irreconcilable differences lie at the centre of human relations. She criticises the idea of ‘collaboration’ as a more worthwhile alternative to antagonistic relations. The discourse of ‘engagement’ appears to idealise democracy as “a world beyond politics” where conflict is a thing of the past, controversial elements are smoothed over and cleansed, and power relations removed (Tkacz 2010, pg.46). Bernadette Lynch suggests, drawing on Mouffe, that museums must acknowledge “passion and partisanship” as a democratic form of museum practice, and that relations between adversaries who can come together to confront difference and power relations is an important part of engagement in the museum contact zone (2011, pg. 453-454).

**Engagement at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM)**

I was interested in finding out how Canadian museums approached democratisation and engagement, particularly since the challenge and crisis generated by the Royal Ontario Museum’s *Into the Heart of Africa* exhibition of 1989-90. The ROM is Canada’s largest museum, and this controversial exhibit has become a touchstone for the country’s museums. *Into the Heart of Africa* has been described as an early attempt to broaden the museum’s historical narratives to engage diverse audiences. But some African-Canadians viewing the exhibition took exception to the way representations carried unconscious meanings that were offensive to them, and reactions towards the museum and the exhibit’s curator became violent (Butler 2008). The ROM in reaction insisted that
their exhibition benefitted African-Canadians as subjects, and that these few dissidents were threatening the museum’s intellectual freedom (Mackey 1995). The crisis generated by that show was followed by a decade of self-reflection at the ROM, and consultations with implicated stakeholders became a key part of exhibit planning (Exhibit planner interview, Nov. 20, 2009).

Then, in the years between 2000 and 2010, the ROM embarked on a redevelopment called Renaissance ROM, a $280 million dollar project involving the construction of a Daniel Libeskind architectural facelift, renovation of most of its permanent galleries, and generation of a new sense of purpose. The Toronto development was the lead project in what was billed locally as a ‘cultural renaissance’ in Toronto aimed, according to the City’s Culture Plan, “at positioning Toronto as an international cultural capital and placing culture at the heart of the city’s economic and social agenda (2003).” It was also one of a number of high-profile museum expansion projects across the globe in this decade that emerged from this urban cultural planning perspective (Message 2006). The Renaissance project was driven by then-Director William Thorsell who announced in 2007, when the ROM had finished its architectural project, a re-positioning of the museum as an “agora” for dialogue and idea exchange (Thorsell 2007). This vision proposed the ROM as a cultural commons where assembly, debate, and discussion could take place. Late in 2008 the ROM changed its branding logo to ‘Engage the World’ where the museum would “engage the public to explore cultural change and serve as an informed advocate for science and nature (ROM 2009, pg 6).” Engage the World was to be “more than just a new tagline—it summarized the overarching philosophy of the new, revitalized ROM (Ibid).”

To what extent did the ROM’s claim to engagement indicate a strengthened dedication to a democratic positioning? To assess this possibility, I undertook a study of the ROM exhibition Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World (DSS) opened in 2009 within the strategic mission to ‘Engage the World.’ The study was part of a broader research project that inspected the ‘publicness’ of the museum’s organisational structure, processes and relationships (Ashley 2011). The ROM had declared in its news release that this exhibition was the most significant project in the ROM’s recent history, and it was to serve as an exemplar for the ROM’s new planning procedures for blockbuster exhibits. The DSS exhibition enabled particular scrutiny of the extent to which the ROM had re-thought exhibitionary ‘engagement’. Did it imply new ways of thinking about the ROM’s relationships to its publics?

In this section I explore the ways that the museum’s departments deployed the word ‘engagement’ in planning the exhibition, and how divergent understandings of the word affected the forms of democratisation demonstrated on the ground. Analysis indicated mixed and conflicting impressions of how and why the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition should engage. For example, the comparison of the objectives for the exhibition as set out in the project planning document, the remarks expressed by visitors or curators or marketers, and what was actually presented, indicated differing and conflicting attitudes about the public nature and purpose of that exhibit. Different interpretations brought scientific, social, market-oriented and interactive perspectives on the word ‘engagement’. But when engagement was interpreted by political activists to mean drawing attention to social and political issues—in this case Palestinian claims of ownership of the scrolls—the museum and its exhibition were taken into another realm of ‘contact zone’. I argue that a more radical and high-risk positioning of engagement, while not embraced by the ROM, offers the museum transformative potential. Such a positioning must involve the recognition of engagement as an agonistic political field, and museums as potential arenas for making public the perpetual struggles and irreconcilable differences that are intrinsic to processes of democracy.

**The Dead Sea Scrolls Project**

1 The study involved the review of internal and external documentary materials about the DSS exhibition, observations of the exhibition and visitors, and semi-structured interviews with staff, audiences and various outsiders. Documentary data included museum-wide Board policies and annual reports; DSS-specific project brief, minutes, exhibition planning reports and marketing/press materials; and external media and interest group reports and news items. Sixty-nine interviews were conducted over the course of the broader research project, including the nine staff members and volunteers cited here and ten visitors who specifically came to the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit


 frugally financed from surplus funds also made it possible for CIT to utilize a rich granite façade. The granite sections of the building's face are 2 inches thick, set in stainless steel frames, and given the latest curtain-wall treatment. The cost of this polished, conservative facing was $382,500 ($8.50 per square foot) as against an estimated $270,000 ($6 per square foot) for an embossed aluminum façade of the same area.

The building's richness is more than skin deep. It extends from the unusual ceiling height (9 feet, 3 inches) to the floor-to-ceiling doors; from the deep narrow windows between hidden columns to the executive-style greenery on the eighth-floor roof terrace and second-floor setback. The building plan provides for a one-third expansion in the company's size. Another unusual feature: the entire second floor is devoted to employee facilities (27,000 square feet out of CIT's net total 284,000).

But even with such custom features Vice President Ittleson figures that CIT's space is reasonably economical. One explanation for his satisfaction is that the firm is not paying the high rentals of other recent New York buildings. Nor is it paying interest on a heavy building loan; the entire construction cost (about $10 million) was paid from capital surplus. In addition, CIT's management feels there are large intangible rewards in the building's fine quality and in the pride with which its employees view their new home.

In a day of mass production, CIT has invested in a custom-made palazzo. Its new headquarters is peculiar, but only in the best sense of the word.

**Ground-floor reception room** of its own was one of CIT's goals when the building was in the planning stages. The lobby's curved walls of light marble and its arched ceiling provide a welcome contrast to the rectilinear precision of the exterior.
At night the building looks more like a jewelry display case than an investment house. Even the sidewalk has built-in sparklers: mica and carborundum chips set in concrete. CIT's generous employee facilities are located on the indented second floor, above the offices of the building's only tenants, New York Trust Co. and E. F. Hutton & Co.

Employees eat in three shifts in the brightness of their second-floor cafeteria, operated by Schrafft's. The cafeteria can be separated from the lounge and library (foreground) by means of a floor-to-ceiling folding door (recessed at right).

Executives dine in a formal dining room on the second floor. CIT's new elegance is more obvious here and in the wood-paneled executive suites on the top floor than it is in other areas.

Perimeter offices have flush, conservatively draped walls and deep-set windows with wide sills. For easy cleaning, windows are vertically pivoted. Fluorescent lighting is recessed in the ceiling.

Typical floor plan shows how perimeter offices lap around a central bull-pen area. At either end of the L-shaped plan are stairways and employee restrooms. The sketch of an outside bay (right) shows a system of three exterior columns teamed with two interior columns. Blank wall sections, interposed between the exterior columns, reduce the glass area and thus lighten the air-conditioning load.
2. A tall tower for TIME Inc.

The projecting columns of Rockefeller Center’s latest addition will support 47 big floors. Behind the glass façade, a new approach to office layout.

By the end of the board of directors’ meeting on Nov. 30, 1955, the most important decision had been made. TIME Inc. would stay in New York, would find or build itself the best possible commercial space in midtown Manhattan. Last month foundation pouring began for the building that, in the eyes of its owners, architects, and major tenant, will fulfill that objective. Scheduled for occupancy late in the autumn of next year, Rockefeller Center’s new TIME & LIFE Building will rise 47 stories tall from the west bank of the Avenue of the Americas at Fiftieth Street, boasting the largest tower floors built in New York since the war.

Although the projected giant has obvious origins in the shapes and attitudes of other Rockefeller Center towers, it contributes much more to the art of city-making than a careful choice of antecedents. Not only will it have vast area per floor (32,000 gross square feet) and an extraordinarily broad free span from core to exterior wall (see sketch below); the building also represents a unique idea for the design of office space. The so-called bay plan (see p. 98) eliminates one of the two conventional ring corridors found in many skyscrapers, promises to save TIME Inc., which will occupy 20 floors, a full floor of space.

The second most important date in the development of the building was Aug. 31, 1956. It was then that Rockefeller Center bought the Roxy Theater, which shares the block with the TIME & LIFE site. New York City’s zoning law demands that a building’s upper floors (above 19) cover no more than 25 per cent of its site. Managers of the new TIME & LIFE Building were able to side-step this restriction.
A model of the new TIME & LIFE Building fits comfortably into a view of Rockefeller Center from the northwest.
by expanding the “zoning envelope” through an agreement with the Roxy’s purchasers. The agreement gave the TIME & LIFE Building added tower space equal to 25 per cent of the Roxy plot (12,000 square feet). Endowed with greater freedom, the building is designed by Harrison & Abramovitz & Harris to soar some 587 feet, straight up.

This month, with a good year and a half of construction still to go, leases have been signed for 85 per cent of the total 1,525,000 square feet of rental space. Thus one of the hobgoblins of New York’s real estate is permanently laid to rest.

The traditional belief was that the Avenue of the Americas, along which the Sixth Avenue Elevated once rattled, could never be overcome as a psychological barrier to the westward development of high-cost buildings.

The TIME & LIFE Building’s decisive beachhead across the avenue clears the way. It opens a wide frontier for an expanding city. And it gives a forceful impetus to Rockefeller Center’s open space philosophy (see page 106).

The new building also represents a new departure in Rockefeller Center economics. TIME Inc. will join as a 45 per cent partner in the $70-odd million undertaking—the first time a Center tenant will have shared in equity financing. TIME’s urge to participate was a result of several elements. Not the least important was confidence in the Center’s approach to the real estate business as observed at close range during 20 years of tenancy in the old TIME & LIFE Building, 9 Rockefeller Plaza.

Another element was TIME Inc.’s desire partially to fill the gap between the prewar rent it has been paying (about $3.50 per square foot) and the estimated rent it will pay (in the neighborhood of $7 per square foot), by means of an income-yielding investment in the building.

TIME Inc. thereby took on a two-hatted role: one part of its management got busy working out the details of the building enterprise with Rockefeller Center; another group began thinking about the creative challenges offered by the prospect of a new home.

To cope with the latter task, TIME Inc. marshaled a squad of commit-tees comparable to the successful, energetic building committee of Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. (FORUM, Sept. ’57). An early committee function was to draw up a short list of desired features. Heading the list: exterior columns should not project into perimeter office space (a flush wall had long been wanted both for appearance and for ease of shuffling interior partitions); modular design should be used.

Another of the suggestions made by TIME Inc. to the architects was to try an “accordion wall”; i.e., a striking façade of in-sloping windows, out-sloping spandrels (see model and mock-up, right). The objective was to get the best possible internal space. The accordion design sought to give office holders three benefits: less glare; sunshade; a “control tower” feeling of full visibility. The suggestion had a lively run but was finally retired. Against it were three drawbacks: the architects did not believe it could be made handsome; there was a loss of rentable area; some minor difficulties in drapes and air-conditioning ducts were involved.

The most important feature of the accordion wall was retained, however: the exterior structural columns (see sketch at right). Limestone faced, strongly vertical, they offer an opportunity for visual tie-in with the rest of Rockefeller Center. They will also leave perimeter offices free of the usual, elbow-nudging intrusions.

**Tower of glass**

Between the columns is a distinctive aluminum and glass grid; in every 28 feet there will be five 4-foot 8-inch window modules and one blank column module. To cut down the air-conditioning load, the windows were originally drawn small and square. But, for esthetic reasons, the sills were lowered to desk height (2 feet 6 inches), which also made it possible to sheathe the spandrels in single sheets of glass. The clear glass spandrels are backed by gray aluminum mesh, intended to look like the equally clear glass of the windows.

Secondary vertical features are the twin air-conditioning risers in each bay (see sketch). These service the peripheral air-conditioning
Early experiment: The accordion wall was considered at one point in the façade’s development. The lower view is a full-scale mock-up of the model at top. It proved to be


05; Silvennoinen, 2017). Further, certain patterns of information are easier to recognize cognitively than others (Chater & Vitányi, 2003). Mach (1959) suggested that perhaps the human cognitive system both should and does prefer patterns that present data in simple descriptions, such as the bullet point lists of recipes, headings and subheadings, or even images containing a few clearly defined objects or actors without too much clutter. Descriptions such as seen in the example of headings or subheadings enable the reconstruction of data, whereby the level of simplicity or complexity is defined by

![Figure 2](https://www.sandgrains.com)

**Figure 2.** When sand, which is typically understood as uniform in composition, is magnified, the heterogeneity of the substance becomes evident. This figure shows some components from a magnified sand sample. (Permission to reprint from www.sandgrains.com)
the description’s length. That is, the longer a heading and/or its subheading is, the more complex the text is to comprehend. Thus, in terms of cognitive processing, the shorter the heading (data code or description), the less redundant the representation and the easier it is not only to comprehend but also remember (Attneave, 1954; Barlow, 1959). This rule applies equally to machines as it does to human beings (Watanabe, 1960). Thus, people’s cognitive systems prefer patterns that give the shortest codes of data, and these data codes, such as simple shapes (e.g., triangles, circles) are most easily recognized against perceptive noise, such as clutter or too many figures and objects in an image (Chater & Vitányi, 2003; Hochberg & McAlister, 1953; Van der Helm & Leeuwenberg, 1996).

However, although the cognitive system prefers patterns that comprise shorter code, it also can be seen that people (and their sensory systems) are attracted to patterns that give the most information in understandable packages. For example, research has revealed that people are more likely to gaze at informative areas of objects, scenes, and other phenomena, that is, the areas revealing the most information about the art or design, such as two or more people in an image who are interacting (Antes, 1974; Loftus & Mackworth, 1978; Mackworth & Bruner, 1970; Mackworth & Morandi, 1967; Pollack & Spence, 1968). This means that people are cognitively predisposed to gaining as much information as possible in as concise a way as possible. This phenomenon functions in favor of simplicity and has been researched in design aesthetics through the concept of the maximum effect for minimum means principle (Hekkert, 2006). It should be noted that, from an experiential perspective, for example, the areas of an image or scene that are deemed informative (i.e., with more detail in terms of objects and characters and, for example, reference to a narrative or action) also are the areas that comprise areas of physical discontinuity or surprise and somehow offer “something more” in relation to the rest of the image (Mackworth & Morandi, 1967; Yarbus, 1967).

From an information processing point of view, simplicity can be considered as the ease of interpretation. Devices that capitalize on simplicity in the design process are, for instance, prototypes and mashups (i.e., the assemblage of various elements to represent a design idea). Prototypes and mashups are, by nature, materialized versions of ideas and concepts that demonstrate the form and potential product envisioned by the end of the design and development process (Garrard, Lambon, Hodges, & Patterson 2001; Rugg & Gerrard, 2014). These can be seen in paper prototypes, three-dimensional printed prototypes and sketches, and/or even collages of various elements, including images and materials that attempt to convey ideas of values and emotional qualities (such as in the case of mashups). Without these material manifestations, ideas remain on the abstract level of thought and are open to unlimited interpretations by individuals encountering the concepts. Through embodying ideas, that is, giving physical form to concepts, there is the possibility to generate a common understanding among people regarding the concept in practice. Moreover, prototypes are easier on the mind of those to whom the designer is wishing to communicate than are verbal descriptions. For example, in icon design, a prototypical icon for printing with only the most essential visual features displayed is easier and quicker for the viewer to cognitively grasp than a printing icon with highly complex and detailed visual features (particularly when the features are not necessary for communicating the icon’s represented function). Prototypes allow others to experience design concepts as well as to afford the possibility of the concept being experienced as aesthetically pleasing through the beholder’s ability to simultaneously understand the object and utilize various cognitive
processes involved in appreciation and imagination (Winkielman, Halberstadt, Fazendeiro, & Catty, 2006; Yu, Benatallah, Casati, & Daniel, 2008). Prototypes and aesthetic appeal have been found to be intertwined when experiencing paintings (Hekkert & Wieringen, 1990; Nedungadi & Hutchinson, 1985) and furniture (Whitfield & Slatter, 1979). However, according to Reber, Schwartz, and Winkielman (2004), while processing fluency can predict aesthetic appeal, several other processes contribute to relative preferences for complexity. For instance, the repetition of a stimulus that was either unknown or experienced as neutral at the beginning can enhance the likelihood of people developing a positive relationship with that stimulus (Bornstein, 1989; Lane, 2000; Zajonc, 2001). This principle has played a major role in advertising, marketing, and brand building for decades (Belch, 1982; Campbell & Keller, 2003; Mitchell & Olson, 1977; Schumann & Clemons, 1989). For example, repeating stimuli to increase its likability has been found to work in a variety of stimuli, such as faces, words, and melodies (Bornstein, 1989). However, this effect cannot be generalized to more complex relationships between people or between people and objects. For example, it does not possess explanatory power to explicate how exposure to one’s husband’s face in a 20-year marriage affects the probability of liking or disliking of one’s husband. Thus, this effect does not take into account established long-term affective relationships with complex meaning structures between people and between people and objects, but applies to more simple settings in describing cognitive processing fluency (in terms of repetition) in increasing affective responses in short-exposure times with fairly unknown stimuli.

However, this effect for less complex stimuli is known as the mere-exposure effect (see Zajonc, 2001), is influenced by the number of times a person is exposed to the phenomenon. Consequently, while repeated exposure has been found to steadily enhance the level of liking of a particular product, Van den Bergh and Vrana (1998) noticed an exposure threshold at around nine presentations. Subsequent presentations after this threshold result in a decline in the level to which a person favors the stimulus (Van den Bergh & Vrana, 1998). This effect is also influenced by the complexity of the stimuli: The more complex the stimulus is, the greater the number of presentations a person can endure before experiencing a decrease in fondness or an increase in disinterestedness, boredom, or dislike (Bornstein, Kale, & Cornell, 1990). Even though a more simplistic stimulus is easier to process, the dynamics of the mere-exposure effect indicate the necessity for complexity in meaningful experiences of repetition.

The Aesthetics of Simplicity in Gestalt and Experimental Psychology

From the cognitive to the psychological, the issue of simplicity plays a major role among Gestalt psychologists in their quests to ascertain the objective determinants of aesthetic beauty. The notion of beauty is broad and much contested (Münsterberg, 1909; Soderholm, 1997; Zuckert, 2007). In fact, due to its subjective nature and vast array of interpretations, understandings, and preferences demonstrated throughout societal dimensions such as culture, technological development, and social construction (the type that occurs through, e.g., the mere-exposure effect [e.g., Bornstein, 1989] of advertising and trends), the quest of defining objective determinants of beauty is highly criticized particularly in the fields of art and design (Ostrow, 2013). Beauty was typified by historian George Bancroft as being “the sensible image of the infinite” (cited in Hotchkiss, 1895/2009, p. 22). Questions surrounding
beauty have regarded its definition, components, whether or not there is a universal beauty, and the types of physiological, sociological, and psychological effects associated with experiencing it (Danto, 2003). In particular, researchers in the field of aesthetics continually seek to describe and determine the principles involved in the experience and understandings of beauty (Chandrasekhar, 1987; Jacobsen, Buchta, Köhler, & Schröger, 2004).

Thus, this section


illa war served as an analog for cultural rivalry, peasant resistance as a model for Arte Povera’s renunciation of consumerism, and Vietnam as a metaphor for university protests.

Celant’s desire to dismantle the barricades between art and life, between politics and aesthetics, was short-lived, however. Arte Povera’s metaphorical armed struggle prefigured actual violence, and once the utopian ideals of 1968, which Celant’s writings anticipated, degenerated into the dystopian reality of the bombings, assassinations, and terrorism of the early 1970s, Celant’s prophetic words of 1967 accrued a more sinister meaning, when he spoke of “A revolutionary existence becoming terror.” The violent rhetoric of Celant’s early theorizations of Arte Povera, which invoked anarchist thought and spoke of the viewer being “truncheoned” by the aesthetic assault of the artists, was recanted once the student battles gave way to real violence and Arte Povera achieved international recognition. The fact remains, however, that Celant has spoken of the “undeniable” reciprocity between Arte Povera and politics, and his theoretical framings of the group were inextricably linked to Italy’s political background, with both the founding manifesto and his call for the group’s dispersal in 1971 enmeshed in its

7. As Massimo Teodori writes, “During the 1960s a new wave of anti-Americanism went through Italian politics and society, fostered by the protest movements which originated in the U.S. itself. Both the traditional Communists and . . . different credos, Marxist-Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, thirdworldist, took the variegated world of that protest—the student revolts, the campaigns for civil rights and against poverty, and the opposition to the war in Vietnam—for something similar to a revolutionary movement of a Marxist and Communist left.” Massimo Teodori, _Maledetti Americani: Destra, sinistra e cattolicì: storia del pregiudizio anti-americano_ (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editori, 2002), p. 85.
respective potential and failure to respond to the contemporary social situation.\textsuperscript{9} Arte Povera therefore had two interrelated political agendas: a real art-world battle against American hegemony and a romanticized revolution that legitimized this insurgency. Added to this was the group’s own delicate and occasionally divisive internal politics, with Celant’s tendency to speak on behalf of the artists causing friction among the members of the collective. Even if they shared a political position—one that was often ambivalent—the gap between Celant’s critical and curatorial ambitions and the artists’ individual agendas made this a fragile alliance.

This article explores these issues and the political dilemma for Italian artists of the period against the backdrop of the growing outrage over the Vietnam War, student riots, workers’ strikes, and the beginnings of terrorism in the country. The recent resurgence of interest in and rapid translation of political philosophers such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno—who began as founding members of the radical political group Potere Operaio (Worker’s power) during this period—suggests that a reappraisal of Arte Povera in terms

\textsuperscript{9} Germano Celant, \textit{Arte Povera/Art Povera} (Milan: Electa, 1985), p. 15.
of its relationship to politics is overdue. Now, more often eulogized than analyzed by authors either unwilling or unable to critically examine the group, Arte Povera may accept a richer reading through reincorporating a historical framework that reframes it in a social and political context. This task is complicated, however, by prevalent formalist and apolitical readings of Arte Povera that have championed style over substance, presupposing something innately Italian about it—a condition that Roland Barthes has termed “Italianicity.” An example of this approach, which describes Arte Povera as if it were another over-aestheticized but beautifully designed Italian export, along with Alessi appliances and Illy coffee cups, is the following: “Above all, they are Italian in their ability to present images which, however ‘ordinary,’ are handled with uncanny ‘style.’” However, privileging the aesthetics of Arte Povera to the exclusion of more contentious issues may in itself be symptomatic of a problematic political background. As Claudio Fogu has argued, the construct of an innately Italian sense of style may well be the most durable and insidious legacy of Fascism: “Lest we want to give in to that dangerously essentialist notion that Italians have style in their blood, we cannot but recognize that this cultural construct . . . might be the most enduring legacy of Fascist modernism.”

*

Celant’s rhetoric was indicative of a youth movement that, as Paul Ginsborg has argued in his history of postwar Italy, accepted “a dangerously casual attitude towards violence, adopting contemporary South American and Asian liberation struggles as their models, with little reflection on their applicability or likely consequences in the Italian situation.” Celant’s appropriation of the model of Asian and Latin American urban guerrilla movements for his manifesto was an analogous position to the one that would ultimately be taken up by “red terrorism,” with a two-volume study of the Tupamaros published by Feltrinelli becoming “a

10. See, for example, Grey Room 21 (Fall, 2005), which published an interview with Paolo Virno and translated several of his texts. Antonio Negri’s collected writings from the 1970s were recently published as Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, trans. Arianna Bove, Ed Emery, Timothy S. Murphy, and Francesca Novello (London and New York: Verso, 2005), while Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi’s 1980 collection of essays, Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, was reissued by Semiotext(e) in 2007.
sort of do-it-yourself manual for the early Red Brigades.”

Celant’s original conception of Arte Povera referenced Marx and served notice of a rejection of “consumer society,” eschewed the debased role of the artist as producer, and criticized Pop art and “primary structures.” While the language of Celant’s writing is often opaque, and his politics vague, certain affinities can be established. The oppositional stance of Celant’s texts on Arte Povera, for example, which link cultural hegemony to broader socio-political issues, is reminiscent of the writings of Antonio Gramsci, whose *Quaderni del Carcere* (*Prison Notebooks*, 1948–51) called for a successful revolution to be preceded by a war of ideas, and posited the utopian possibility that politics could be influenced by art and culture.

Celant’s characterization of Arte Povera reflects Italy’s struggle to reconcile and adapt to its transition from a relatively impoverished and predominantly agrarian country ravaged by World War II to the rapidly industrializing nation propelled by the Marshall Plan–backed *miracolo italiano*, or economic miracle, in the late 1950s and early ’60s. Together with American aid, the growth of companies such as the Turin-based automobile company Fiat (which by 1967 was selling more cars in Europe than any other company) and other firms such as Olivetti and Zanussi contributed to Italy’s burgeoning foreign trade. Yet this “miracle” caused Italy a great deal of social tension and upheaval. A case in point was the dislocation engendered through the geographical and economic schism of mass migration from the poor South to the rich North. This diaspora was documented in Luchino Visconti’s *Rocco e i suoi fratelli* (*Rocco and His Brothers*) of 1960, which juxtaposed the harsh reality of the North’s newfound prosperity against the South’s pool of cheap labor. Visconti’s modern fable was a testament both to the dramatic transformation that Italy experienced during this time and the struggle for some of its populace to keep pace with this change.

L’USA usa: *From Venice to Vietnam*

In 1969, Emilio Prini produced *L’USA usa*, a play on words that translates as “the USA uses.” The work consisted of a tape machine that continuously recorded the sound of its own mechanism until this incessant usage caused it to self-destruct, echoing the cannibalistic aspect of capitalism. If we rewind to the emergence of Arte Povera, it must be foregrounded against two situations in Italy

15. Ibid., p. 362. During the late 1960s and early ’70s in Italy, there was a groundswell of interest in this guerrilla group. See, for example, Oscar José Dueñas Ruiz and Mirna Rugnon de Dueñas, *Tupamaros* (Milan: Sapere, 1974); and Alain Labrousse, *I Tupamaros: la guerriglia urbana in Uruguay* (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971).

16. The first edition of Gramsci’s *Quaderni del Carcere* was arranged according to the subjects Gramsci pondered during his imprisonment, and included the role of the intellectual, the party as “modern prince,” and the “national-popular” tradition in Italian history. The definitive critical edition was published in four volumes as Antonio Gramsci, *Quaderni del Car


 Price’s Fun Palace. The success of the image of the scheme lies, then, as Banham argued in his critique of the finished building, in ability to construct a very large building in the spirit of Giedion’s new monumentality, one that asserted a monumental image without the monument’s stability or claims to permanence. Yet the scheme did so without resorting to the tactics of clustering and modular growth that sponsored the terraced urban landscapes of Erickson and Safdie; rather, it shamelessly asserted a very urban façade reminiscent of such monumental mise-en-scènes as the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. This paradox was underscored by the fact that at the end of the 1960s, the tactics of urban terracing and metabolist aggregation behind many of the anti-monumental schemes now represented, as Porter pointed out at the time, “the desire to have an opportunity for a massive architectural expression.”

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89 Piano, Rogers, and Picon, Du plateau Beaubourg au Centre Georges Pompidou, 12.

90 This point is made in Cohen, “Monuments for a Mass Cult,” 25.

91 Gregory Ulmer has recently discussed this paradoxical aspect of the information monument and the way information might enable the construction of a kind of “new monumentality.” See Gregory Ulmer, Electronic Monuments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

Sources and contradictions of the competition scheme

The competition scheme’s amalgamation of cool, generic shed with hot, media-saturated frame reflects contradictions among its precedents. Where the vast interior floor plates and simple geometry has roots in research into the serviced shed and industrialized building by Rogers, Foster, and other British and American architects, the sweeping technological utopianism and pop imagery was rooted in the work of Archigram and Price. Rogers would certainly have known Price through the AA, where they both taught and where earlier Rogers was a student, but Price’s ideas were in general circulation among intellectually ambitious young architects in mid-1960s London, where he had acquired an almost cult status. Archigram was part of the same group of like-minded young architects, all contemporaries. From this segment of the British scene emerged ideas and forms that offered Rogers a framework for attacking the brief. But although they all shared an interest in technology, these sources also were the source of contradictions and paradoxes that demanded a closer consideration of architecture’s role in the information society.

Price was the most eloquent spokesman for what Royston Landau called the “problem-solving” approach, the search for a “value-free” and image-neutral architecture

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93 Most observers writing in English point out the scheme’s debt to Price’s Fun Palace. As Rogers later put it, the project reflected the optimism of the 1960s and he openly cited Price and Archigram in their “importance of movement, flexibility, the playful character of their colorful assemblages, and the transformation of services into a free and tentacular system pushed to the envelope of the building, already present in the Fun Palace of Price, in Plug-In City, or in the project of Archigram for Monte-Carlo.” (Piano, Rogers, and Picon, Du plateau Beaubourg au Centre Georges Pompidou, 15.)

94 Appleyard provides a thorough survey of the UK scene of which Rogers was a part. See Appleyard, Richard Rogers, 181–85.

95 Cook and Rogers were one year apart as students at the AA.
understood as a “problem-understanding and question-asking process.” Price had launched this search in response to what he described as the “transference of pre-war attitudes to post-war conditions” and the concomitant failure of architects “to realize that they are primarily concerned with providing a socially acceptable commodity.” Postwar British architecture had responded to its situation by re-asserting values from an earlier modernism—whether the everyday realism of people’s detailing, the assertion of architecture’s classical roots, or a return to the modern masters—none of which adequately responded to a new condition, “a three cornered situation between the ‘apparent soulless, faceless entity of the vast state and local government client’, the ‘multitude of anonymous, homeless people’ and the architect.” This “three cornered situation” transferred well to a French bureaucratic apparatus in the process of adjusting to critiques of top-down cultural policy in the post-1968 context, in which the building’s sponsors became an administrative abstraction and the “real” client was the user.

97 Quoted in Porter, “A Value-Free Architecture,” 541. Porter took stock of the situation in 1970: “It is about a determined effort by a small number of architects, mainly in Britain, to rid the procession of some of its hallowed values. It is a polemical stance; a reaction to a set of inherited values which, seen from within the profession, are inherent in the architect’s responsibility to society, but are in fact, a mere encumbrance that prevent the architect from coming to terms with the true nature of contemporary society.” (Ibid., 451.)

98 Ibid.

99 Lombard’s programming team further confused these categories because, from the perspective of the architects, it represented (and abstracted) both the client and the end-user and kept the architects at a distance from both.
At the heart of this approach were the mantras of change and indeterminacy. A supple and flexible architecture was the only suitable response in a problem-solving approach since preconceived solutions and prior forms imposed already obsolete and petrified configurations onto dynamic realms, and stopped them in their tracks.\(^{100}\) In place of enduring monuments, buildings should be opportunistic and responsive to particular problems and situations, all of which would last only a few years at most. As Landau pointed out, “The importance of being able to accommodate the problem of change with a suitable hardware is basic to [Price’s] philosophy, which implies the need for seriously questioning that time-honored attitude to an architectural cornerstone principle which equates design excellence with top-quality long-lasting materials.”\(^{101}\)

Price’s work also provided Rogers with ideas about institutional reform through technology that meshed easily with those of the brief. In an introduction to a workshop on “New thinking for new universities,” Price brought to the question of university building in the postwar era the very same invocations of populism, information, and flexibility that Rogers brought to Beaubourg five years later.

The concept of the University as a self-contained self-renewing entity is questioned. The translation of such a medieval idea into architectural terms results in the construction of impermeable, monumental

\(^{100}\) Buckminster Fuller is an extreme example of a modernist belief that fusing operational needs and operational techniques would lead to pleasure and beauty of forms and would result in a quasi-biological condition; no intervening mental operations on the part of the architect were necessary or even desired. (See Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” Perspecta 12 (1969): 71-74.)

\(^{101}\) Landau, New Directions in British Architecture, 77. Banham provided a convenient tie-in between the broad notion of an architecture that dealt with change through the rejection of permanent, durable materials, and the idea of a shift from defining of volumes and enclosure to technologies of servicing, whether services supplied air or information. His famous essay, “A Home is Not a House” of 1965 argued that, as Landau put it, “it is not the castle character of the dwelling that people are addicted to [...] but rather the comfort standards produced by the new, better, and more efficient servicing.”
structures. [...] ‘A collection of books’ must be replaced by a knowledge supermart. The university should be local and national. Available methods of teaching and information exchange are best served by a network of universities in their present form. ¹⁰²

Certainly, the rhetoric of the competition entry text owed much to these ideas, and the cross between “a computerised Times Square and the British Museum” was not far off Joan Littlewood’s “university of the streets” (a moniker for the Fun Palace, and one that Rogers later borrowed when later talking about the project) and which Rogers later borrowed. ¹⁰³

In contrast to Price’s architecture of problem-solving and performance, the work of Archigram offered an approach in which architecture’s role was to give concrete form and apprehensible image to contemporary technology. Archigram did so by merging Pop and Science Fiction imagery with the technological utopianism of Fuller. ¹⁰⁴ The image-conscious work of Archigram drew upon the logic of advertising, the importance of which as a new form of information had not been lost on their mentors. To the Smithsons and the Independent Group, as Nigel Whiteley observes, “[a]dvertising represented dense, direct, and effective communication, and was strong in imageability.” ¹⁰⁵ In 1956, the Smithsons argued that advertisements “are packed with information—data of a way of life and a standard of living which they are simultaneously inventing and

¹⁰³ Piano and Rogers, “A Statement.”

¹⁰⁴ The most complete overview of Archigram and these ideas is Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (MIT Press, 2005).

¹⁰⁵ Whiteley, Reyner Banham, 134.
documenting. [...] And this transient thing is making a bigger contribution to our visual climate than any of the traditional fine arts.¹⁰⁶ In one way, then, work of Archigram, like


 severe mental and physical disabilities.

Besides that, there are also benefits like child allowance (Japan Statistical yearbook 2004: p.640), established in 1972, with the purpose of achieving stability for families with dependent children and helping them to bring up healthy and better qualified children. And, there are benefits which do not directly go to children, but had an effect to children welfare, such as health and medical care (including maternity benefits) and family allowance (including income support for single parent family).

The Child Welfare Law underwent large-scale revisions in 1997. The revised law (http://www.sg.emb-japan.go.jp/JapanAccess/welfare.htm#angelplan) provides for the establishment of support centers for households with children (jido katei shien senta) which work in close communication with the child guidance centers and give many types of advice and guidance for children in their geographical areas of jurisdiction. The names and functions of several previously existing types of child welfare facilities have been changed so as to specify their function not merely as facilities for custodial care but as facilities to encourage the growth of “self-reliance” (jiritas). For example, the former “homes for training and education of juvenile delinquents” (kyogoin) have been renamed “children’s self-reliance support facilities” (jido jiritas shien shisetsu), and “homes for fatherless families” (boshiryo) have been renamed “livelihood support facilities for mothers and children” (boshi seikatsu shien shisetsu). The revisions in the Child Welfare Law emphasize going beyond the concepts of protection and emergency relief to address the issue of supporting children in ways that will help them become socially, spiritually, and economically self-reliant by the time they are young adults.
The new Child Welfare Law was made in order to respond to changes in the living environment of children the last 50 years; since the end of the Second World War. Economic growth, health development and changes in social life in Japan pushed fertility rate from 4.54 in 1947 to 1.33 in 2001. (Maternal and Child Health Statistic of Japan: 2002, 21) The predominant pattern where both husbands and wives work to maintain the family income; the trend toward nuclear families with no more than two generations per household; and the decrease in the number of children were prevalent. The constant decrease of fertility rate was noted from 1982 to 2001. This condition will put Japan’s government in a difficult position in maintaining the commitment of a welfare state. This phenomenon pushed the government to establish the Angel Plan.

The Angel Plan

The Angel Plan, established in 1994, deals with the falling birth rate and the increasing participation of women in public affairs. The Angel Plan was devised by the government incorporating the basic policy direction and essential measures for supporting child rearing. The Angel Plan is based on the idea that child rearing at the family level must be supported by the society as a whole so as to create an environment where anyone wanting to have a child may give birth and raise a child without anxiety, assuming that the best interests of the child should be of primary consideration in the promotion of measures for achieving that goal (http://www.mofa.go.jp/policy/human/child/initialreport/measures.html). Essential targets set under the Angel Plan include:

- coordination of the working environment to balance work and child-rearing;
- consolidation of various nursery care services;
- reinforcement of the maternal and child health care system, making child bearing and rearing smoother and less worrisome;
- improvement of housing and living environments;
- promotion of “relaxed school education”, non-school activities and home education;
- mitigation of financial burdens involved in child rearing; and
- establishment of infrastructure to support child rearing.

The Ministry of Education is working to relieve the financial burden accompanying child rearing and education, to consolidate home education, and to realize “relaxed school education” by alleviating competition in entrance examinations. Specifically, the Ministry promotes measures for: 1) mitigating the financial burden accruing from child rearing, 2) consolidating home education by facilitating the counselling framework to deal with worries concerning child rearing, 3) improving the quality of non-school activities by affording opportunities for children to engage in dynamic activities, and 4) encouraging “relaxed school education”. These were developed to create better condition for children and to support parents to have more children so as to help the welfare system, which needs a productive age population.

The Sukoyaka Family 21

Sukoyaka—meaning happy and healthy in Japanese—Family 21 is the vision to clarify both pending and new issues, and to present major initiatives to be taken in the 21st century concerning the issue of maternal and child health. Sukoyaka Family 21 acts as a measure to address the declining birth rate and to form the basis for an environment giving birth to children that is free of anxiety and in which parents can raise their children in good health. In addition to this, Sukoyaka Family 21 will play a part in National Health Care Campaign i.e. the Health Japan 21 (Kenko Nippon 21). This campaign aims to create a society in which people can live happily and stay in good health.

The four major agenda related to the maternal and child health issues are:
1. stepping up health care measures and promoting health care education for adolescents;
2. assuring safety and comfort during pregnancy and childbirth, and supporting infertility;
3. maintaining and improving the standards of child health care and medical services; and

The Sukoyaka Family 21 is one of the important policies in improving the child health and child welfare condition in Japan. Besides the new Child Welfare Law and the Angel Plan, and the Sukoyaka Family 21, a dominant policy related to the child welfare and child education is the Rainbow Plan. This plan is one of the major policies; also known as the education reforms plan for the 21st century.

The Rainbow Plan

The Rainbow Plan, which focus on revitalizing schools, family and communities, has seven basic strategies as follows: (http://www.mext.go.jp/english/topics/21plan/010301.htm)
1. Improve students’ basic scholastic proficiency “in easy to understand classes”. There are three main tasks related to this strategy:
   - implement the 20 students per class system for fundamental subjects and advance placement classes;
   - improve classrooms in order to be able to conduct IT classes and the 20 students per class system (establish “A Learning Environment for the New Generation”); and
   - implement national academic achievement surveys.

2. Foster youth into becoming open and warm-hearted Japanese through community services and various programs:
   - encourage youth to participate in community services and various programs (or consider such a system) and establish the “Children’s Dream Fund”;
   - improve moral education (for example, development and distribution of the “Kokoro no Note” [notebook to be used by students in moral education]); and
   - take actions for educational revitalization in the home and in the community.

3. Improve learning environment to one which is enjoyable and free of worries:
   - enrich cultural and sporting activities (encourage school club activities);
   - take appropriate measures concerning problematic behaviours among children (improvement of the suspension system and measures to care such children); and
   - protect children from harmful information.

4. Make schools that can be trusted by parents and communities:
   - implementing school evaluation system, including the establishment of the self-evaluation system and introduction of school councillors;
   - revitalizing the school board by means of parental participation and disclosure of information; and
   - promoting the establishment of new types of schools to fit the needs of the different communities.

5. Train teachers as real “professionals” of education:
   - introduce an awards system, a bonus and a special promotion system for outstanding teachers;
   - establish a system where teachers have working community experience (cf: take working experience at companies); and
   - take appropriate measures on incompetent teachers such as teaching suspensions.

6. Promote the establishment of universities of international standard:
   - reinforcing university education and research functions for bringing up leaders of the next generation (improve the system for admitting 17-year-old students into universities, universally introduce a system for admitting students who have finished their third year into graduate school, and establish professional schools);
   - establishing a competitive environment (grant national universities the status of independent administrative corporations, promote fixed-term employment so that professors can transfer easily, increase competitive grants); and
   - implementing a strict grading system for university students and focus on the teaching abilities of academic.

7. Establish an educational philosophy suitable for the new century and improve the provision for education:
   - reviewing the Fundamental Law of Education and modify the law into one suitable for the new century; and
   - developing a comprehensive plan for the promotion of educational measures.

POLICIES AND DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES IN RELATION TO CHILD WELFARE DEVELOPMENT IN MALAYSIA

In Malaysia, the Department of Social Welfare (DSW) is the government agency responsible and associated with providing social welfare services to the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. The DSW was started in 1946 by the British Military Administration to address social needs consequent to the Second World War. Its main concern then was to assist in the social and psychological rehabilitation of the victims of war. The work was very much remedial. However, over a span of 57 years, the Department’s role has evolved with the changing environment and needs of the time. Service-provisions moved from remedial to provide preventive, rehabilitative and protection


 by the criteria of the French or the English. It is merely another play of superficial ornament over the old traditional Italian structure.

Yet this is not to deny the extraordinary beauty of many Italian Gothic works; it is merely to place them in their proper perspective. Rome has but one church, Sta. Maria Sopra Minerva, which even faintly approaches Gothic; and, while Amiens and Rheims were rising across the Alps, Roman architects were building the exquisite Romanesque cloisters of St. John Lateran and St. Paul's Outside the Walls, with their almost classic cornices and their brilliant inlaid mosaics.

Italian Gothic work can be divided roughly into three types: the Central type, represented by Orvieto and Siena, which carries over the old hori-
zontally banded black-and-white marble sheathing of the Tuscan Romanesque, and combines with it an overlay of Gothic pinnacles, crockets, and tracery; the Lombard type of brick Gothic, which controls also the great Gothic churches in Florence; and the Venetian Gothic, which consists largely of the adoption of tracery and the pointed arch and their application to the continuing Byzantine tradition. These three types are not strictly separated geographically; each reacts on the other, and many localities may have work of two of them.

In a sense, the brick type is that in which the pointed arch of the north and the ribbed vault achieved their simplest expression, as one sees them for instance in Sta. Croce or the cathedral at Florence. Here, simple piers carry simple pointed arches; there is a small clerestory; everything is consistently in the one vein—yet no one entering these churches would for a moment confuse them with the Gothic churches north of the Alps. It is the old Roman desire for great dimensions which has controlled. The bay widths are much greater than in northern work; all of the parts are simpler; there is much more plain surface. As a result, to one accustomed to the work of the north these buildings seem to lack scale, they never seem to appear their true size. In the Florence cathedral, for instance, the bays are over sixty feet from center to center; and, although the size of the church is colossal, the fact that it has so few parts—however enormous each part may be—makes it seem smaller than it really is.

On the other hand, the great size of the parts and the simplicity of the wall surfaces in these Italian churches offered an opportunity for mural decoration which no northern church could equal. It is no accident that the greatest mural decorators arose to fill this need, or that Giotto, perhaps the first great figure in the long tradition of Italian painting, found his most congenial opportunities in the church of St. Francis at Assisi or the Arena Chapel in Padua. This mural decoration, with its rich, solid color, its glories of blue and red, of green and tan, picked out here and there with golden halos, made perhaps for a total gorgeousness of interior effect unique in history; and it is only where that decorative painting has been completed, as in Assisi, in the Padua chapel, in the Spanish Chapel in Florence by Andrea da Firenze, and in parts of Sta. Croce at Florence by Giotto and the Gaddi, that the true aspect which was in the mind of the Italian Gothic church builders can be realized.

In the Central Italian type of church, such as that of Siena or Orvieto, the sizes of the units are smaller and the scale is therefore better; moreover, the horizontal banding of colored marble gives at once the sense of size.
DEVELOPMENT OF GOTHIC

FLORENCE CATHEDRAL.

TRANSVERSE AND LONGITUDINAL SECTIONS.

SCALE OF 100 50 100 150 200 FEET.

CATHEDRAL, FLORENCE; PLAN AND SECTION. (Simpson, Vol. II.)
which the plainer churches lack. In fact, for pure chromatic brilliance of decorative effect it would be hard to equal these magnificent churches, either inside or out. Yet, despite the richness of spire and crocket and tracery which ornaments their exteriors, pointed arches and round arches are used together in them almost, without differentiation of purpose, and the details of sculpture and decoration are far more influenced by ancient Rome than by what we know usually as Gothic. In fact, the Pisani, both Niccola the father and Giovanni the son, who were largely responsible for the decoration of Siena, were among the sculptors who most clearly gave evidence of a careful study of Roman work and foreshadowed the Renaissance which lay ahead.

Both Siena and Orvieto show another characteristic of Italian work, in that the fronts of each are mere decorative screens, the outlines of which have very little to do with the shape of the church behind. They are conceived as façades, places for the elaborate ornamentation which brilliant sculpture and mosaic could give, and not as parts of a building. In that, they reveal the typical Italian disregard of the structural basis of Gothic.

It was in Venice that the Italian genius for surface decoration achieved the most charming Gothic results, and it was in Venice that there was the least effort to copy the foreign Gothic forms and the greatest freedom in changing them to fit the Venetian needs and the Venetian Byzantine construction. Pointed arches replaced the old semicircular arches, but the sparkling surface treatment remained. In the palaces, the row of windows that had lighted the great hall was changed into a broad band of richly designed tracery, standing free, with the window frames set as separate elements behind, so that the play of light and shade over the lovely curved lines is exquisitely varied. Frequently crestings at the tops of the buildings gave a vivid termination to the whole without disturbing its flat façade, and the wall surfaces were paneled with colored marbles. Little sculptured panels in flat relief were often added at points of interest; and the fronts of the Gothic palaces, with their lovely marbles, their horizontal bands of tracery, and the occasional balconies, seem to have in them something of the gaiety and the radiance of the sun and sky reflected in the laughing waters that surround them. The Venetian sculptors, too, flung themselves upon the problem of Gothic decorative detail with a gay abandon little found elsewhere, avoiding the bad copies of northern crockets or the flat imitations of Roman work so often met with in Italy. The capitals of the great open loggias of the Doges' Palace are among the most beautiful medieval architectural sculpture anywhere in Europe; and, even where the northern forms
are more definitely adopted, as in the Porta della Carta, both the figures and the foliage are so imaginative and so free that the result is perhaps less Gothic than Venetian, yet altogether delightful.

The great wealth and the high level of development of the Italian cities gave rise to a tremendous amount of public and domestic building, which is in many ways the most distinguished contribution of Gothic architecture in Italy. Each town had its municipal palace, usually built around a court, with enormous upper halls for council meetings, courts, and the like. Each town had also its palazzo del podestà, the combined police station, prison, and palace of the military governor, a building usually more somber than the municipal hall but often equally grand. A great tower rose above the city hall, and often above the podesta as well; in addition, many noble families built treasure and fortification towers in the Italian cities, giving their skylines an extraordinary quality of dramatic contrast between these upright lines and the long horizontals everywhere else supreme.

But it was in the private palaces of the wealthy that the true character of this secular Italian Gothic most clearly appears, and it is in these that we see, too, most clearly the persistence of essentially classic ideals. Usually these palaces are four-square and simple, built around an arcaded court. The story heights are enormous and the stories are clearly differentiated from each other on the outside. Moreover, the principles of symmetry and regularity control the design again and again, and the palace fronts consist of rows of equal windows, equally spaced, separated by ample wall surfaces. It is an architecture of monumental repose, a repose essentially classic, and these palaces require but slight change in detail to become the more famous palaces of the Italian Renaissance.
BOOK V

The Renaissance
Chapter 16

THE DAWN OF THE RENAISSANCE

ALL through the Middle Ages the memory of classic culture still lived on, a sort of unreal will-o'-the-wisp that reached occasionally a more actual existence in the studies of the schoolmen and the poems which wandering scholars and ne'er-do-wells continued to write. Aristotle and Plato, Seneca and Cicero, were known, if not in the original, at least in early summaries and digests. Virgil was read; had he not prophesied the coming of Christ? And in the Goliardic verse which the wandering scholars sang as they traveled over the face of medieval Europe, a scandal to their more religious brethren, the nymphs and satyrs, with Diana and Aphrodite, still lived.

There are evidences of this afterlife of the classics even in some of the medieval buildings. Many of the capitals of Romanesque Languedoc still to be seen in the museum at Toulouse, as well as in the country churches, are carved with the creatures of classic myth, and centaurs and mermaids glance out of the intertwined foliage. Later, much French Gothic sculpture of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries shows signs of a careful study of the classical drapery seen probably on Roman sarcoph


 Museum of Contemporary Rubbish collects other people's rubbish and HOARD focussed specifically on the artist's rubbish generated through practice. Paper material from HOARD was later exhibited in August 2013 in Performing Paper #7: HOARD:PAPER at Paper Gallery Manchester which again looked at categories of materials and waste.

10 HOARD preceded the Rubbish Gallery (2012-2014) collaboration with Advertising Exhibitions which developed from an invite to guest curate. A brief was set for the artists in respective networks to document an item of rubbish from their practices and discuss it through interview.
Rubbish and other Crap, Debris, Detritus, Dirt, Discards, Garbage, Junk, Leftovers, Litter, Refuse, Rejects, Remains, Ruins, Scrap, Shit, Shreds, Trash and Waste

analysis of the work at various stages\textsuperscript{11}.

How rubbish ideas are translatable internationally has also been tested with presentation of art work\textsuperscript{12} and also presentation of the research project itself\textsuperscript{13}. Presenting ideas in written and spoken form\textsuperscript{14} as part of the research development has led to a major finding of the language-basis of determining the value of rubbish in art practice, which is discussed in this thesis.

The thesis articulates the process of the practice-led research which has manifested itself in the Newspaper, Dictionary and connected blogs. Practice and theory have developed along side each other, but the writing up of this thesis has been the final stage in the research process, after completion and dissemination of the practice portfolio. The thesis structure thus reflects the practice development process which tends towards a descriptive account with

\textsuperscript{11} **Axisweb Curated Selection**, published in April 2013, involved artists interviews which have subsequently fed directly into this project. On invite to contribute to *Waste Less Live More Week 2013*, a guest blog *The Art of Food Waste* published September 2013, discussed the 2013 theme of food waste in the context of contemporary art.

\textsuperscript{12} Museum of Contemporary Rubbish merchandise which was first produced for Holmfirth Arts Festival 2011 was further developed for *Market Value* in Chicago, February - April 2013, as a new range of 'international' rubbish merchandise exploring the notion of rubbish provenance and international travel/translation. *Rubbish (2011)*, often screened as part of Museum of Contemporary Rubbish exhibitions, has been shown as as a stand alone piece in film festivals and exhibitions (Bradford, Wakefield, Buenos Aires, Sheffield, New York, Edmonton Canada) and also as a solo show in Melbourne a Berlin première at 9th Berlin International Directors Lounge in February 2013.

\textsuperscript{13} A conference paper on the research project was presented via video at the Canadian Association of Geographers 2013 AGM Special Session: *Waste and Indeterminacy* at the University of Newfoundland. The local/regional and international contrast was also tested in the presentation of the project outcome of the Rubbish Newspaper at *Supermarket Art Fair*, Stockholm in February 2014, and at the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish Blackpool in March 2014, the latter receiving a review *Corridor 8* in March 2014.

\textsuperscript{14} Such as 'Rubbish Conversations' which piloted under this title at the Blackpool solo exhibition and have become increasingly present as referenced and documented exchanges throughout the project, such as *Rubbish Conversation with Lars Tharp*, at The Hepworth Wakefield in January 2014.
The practice is positioned by comparing and contrasting it with that of other artists through the Dictionary and Newspaper. This has dictated the thesis by focussing on the six key artists' work selected from the survey which are analysed in terms of similarities and differences. This comparative model creates an understanding of the relationship between value and rubbish in art practice, that is comparative to the status quo or *quotidien* of rubbish in art practice, and identifies both defining and unique values of this practice.
Introduction

This research project is a broad survey of contemporary artists using rubbish which seeks to understand the relationship between value and such practices, with the purpose of bringing new understanding of artists' rubbish practices generally and specifically to that of the author. The varied notions of what defines rubbish and its usage in art practice are at the centre of this research, however a basic definition of rubbish as low value or valueless objects and materials can be taken as a starting point. The analysis of 19 keyword, synonymous terms seeks definition of these terms and their attributable value to objects and materials that may be utilised in art practice in order to better understand the complexities of such practice.

The subjective notion of how rubbish is defined has developed as a research interest through the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish\textsuperscript{15}. The irony of working with low value, hidden and overlooked, repugnant and marginalised materials in the field of art, which is traditionally high value, often glamourised and spectacular, deals with paradoxes that address these value judgements that are enacted through language. For the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish, the paradox of objects being defined as both rubbish and art has opened up a research interest which questions these everyday,

\textsuperscript{15} See the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish website for more information http://museumofcontemporaryrubbish.blogspot.co.uk/
and often institutionally determined, values.

The thesis structure reflects some fundamental aspects of how rubbish and art are perceived and defined (Collections); how they are presented (Display) and discussed (Exchange); and what definitions are chosen as language evolves rapidly and globally in the advent of the internet. These terms offer different lenses or filters to perception and, through discussing rubbish in the context of contemporary art, may offer a platform for critical analysis of the subject through everyday concepts using language as the theoretical framework for analysis.

The Collection of found image and text presented as the research project is both the process and the resultant archive of previously uncollated material. Borrowing waste industry methodology of sorting similar material into categories for processing, particularly hand-picking sorting methods, the Collection has been sorted and categorised into 19 synonymous keywords, selected with a thesaurus based on their everyday language usage. Borrowing the notion of 'useful' from the waste/recycling industry, the artworks that are considered 'useful' or relevant when compared to the author's art practice have been selected for inclusion in the Dictionary, that defines the 19 keyword categories in relation to art practice, and subsequently this thesis. Each synonymous keyword is defined by the image and text categorising it and therefore forms a dictionary of reference for the author's art practice.

16 See Appendix 1.
17 This exists in full on the project blog https://contemporaryrubbish.wordpress.com/ as a
Rubbish and other Crap, Debris, Detritus, Dirt, Discards, Garbage, Junk, Leftovers, Litter, Refuse, Rejects, Remains, Ruins, Scrap, Shit, Shreds, Trash and Waste

The thesis uses selected quotes and references from the Collection, interwoven with the author's writing and footnotes, forming three interwoven strata of reference, theory and practice respectively. The remaining artworks, quotes and references that have less direct relevance have been 'discarded' from this process and 'recycled' in the Rubbish Newspaper by means of hand drawn studies and published as the 'waste product' of this research project.

This practice based research can be considered a notional literature review of artists working with rubbish and as such is embedded in the main body of this thesis together with the methodology. A multi-theoretical bricolage approach is used which accommodates (or 'litter-picks') the most relevant theories, such as Dickie's Institutional Theory and Kaprow's Nonart Modes which emphasise the relevance of context, from of the vast knowledge related to the research subject across various disciplines. Interpretative bricolage has allowed for the subjectivities and reflexivities of qualitative research data collection and critical analysis most appropriate to the complexities and pluralities of this practice based research.

Some major theories often used in art interpretation such as Freud's psychoanalytical theories have not been used, despite an obvious link to the abject/uncanny, a topical link to shit in Freud's theories of obsessive collecting deriving from anal-retentive behaviours, Freud himself being an obsessive collector and Freud’s notion of psychoanalysis being an archaeology of the resource and reference point with the process annotated on the a-n blog https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/rubbish
mind: "The psychoanalyst, like the archaeologist in his excavations, must uncover layer after layer of the patient's psyche before coming to the deepest most valuable treasures"\textsuperscript{18}.

Due to the limitations of this research project several important areas have been omitted, such as: the environmental sustainability debate intrinsically linked to rubbish that puts the base subject matter in the public eye, the psychoanalytical theories that Dada and Surrealism (of earlier rubbish-in-art practices) are often aligned with, and also the use of digital waste in art practice. In investigating the relationship between value and the use of rubbish in art practice, these areas can be considered as distinct strands of the vast landfill of information that may be useful to revisit at a later date in relation to the core concerns. The use of digital media is not completely omitted, with the project blog featuring documentation of artworks using rubbish, but artworks using digital waste have