The expanded field diagrams offer one example of how non-traditional rationale might be productively applied to the fields of energy and policy to help citizens and municipalities cope with the profound complexities and contradictions at play in our current social, environmental, municipal, and capital relationships to terms frequently associated with energy and land use policy. Land use and energy policy face numerous distinct forms of criticism and while objections of stake holders vary, most agree that as a mode of participatory democracy and land use governance, the zoning code has become critically debilitated by its own bureaucratic weight. The expanded field offers one vantage from which to examine the contemporary meaning of these historically bounded categorical distinctions.
This project enthusiastically welcomes the submission of additional alternative frameworks for approaching the complexities presented by the intersection of land use regulation and energy management. Submissions in all forms are welcome through the contact form.
ABOUT THE EXPANDED FIELD:
First applied to art theory by historian/theorist Rosalind Krauss in 1979 as a productive diagrammatic framework by which to approach the ambiguous ontology of post-war American sculpture, the method of the Expanded Field derives from the mathematical framework of Klien Group or Vieregruppe theory. Kruass' reinterpretation of the productive capacity of Klien Group logics through the Expanded Field applies relationships of "expansion, convergence, adjacency, projection, rapport, and intersection" in the form of strict diagrammatics to help define sculpture by establishing new "field conditions" which expand upon sets of "complex", "neuter", and "deiexial" terms commonly used to define sculpture through "combinations of exclusions".
Specifically, in the absence of a clear working definition of sculpture, sculptural works were often described as being not-architecture and not-landscape. This is what Krauss would call a description of "pure negativity" or a "full condition of adverse logic". The negative condition was used to describe sculpture by clarifying that which was explicitly not sculpture.
By examining relationships between the source term and these neuter boundary conditions diagrammatically, Krauss argued that a state of field expansion was possible in which the categorical distinction in question ceases to be a "privileged middle term between two things that it isn't [...and..] becomes only one term on the periphery of a field in which there are other, differently structured possibilities."
