What is a Cuff?

What is a Cuff?

A Change in Direction – where something extra slowly accumulates

            -detritus (lint, people, gunk in a pipe)

                                    (Where attention is grabbed)

            -collar, ledge

                                    (Where movement is redirected)

            -a glancing blow, a bicycle path underneath a bridge, a french curve

 

How do you reverse engineer a cuff?

            -I think we know how to build a cuff – an architecture that catches – but this is not necessarily a cuff in and of itself. A cuff is what is left behind, is an environmental co-composure, the human observing and engaging with the more-than human. Perhaps building a cuff is an exercise of subtraction, where peeling back the layers built up and around a cuff might reveal the product of the cuff.

The cuff is not an architecture; it is that which is surrounded by an architecture.

A Cuff is the space between where a vacuum cleaner wants to go and where it can’t go. It is similar in this way to the infrathin, but it is not as concerned with perceptibility/imperceptibility.

A Cuff is the moments around the punctum – but not the punctum itself. It is attention sliding around a subject, trained but not entrained by it.

A Cuff is a slip, series of microadjustments and slight change in direction that you fall in to rather than fight. A cuff is an oxbow in a river – the curve needs to be traced back, may no longer be visible.

A Cuff is a movement-architecture relation.

 

The French curve:

Ludwig Burmester, a German geometer, invented the Burmester curve also known as the French curve.

What is a linguistic French curve? Can a French curve cuff? One of the things that I love about a French curve is that you can see through it - there is no negation involved in capturing a cuff with it (think of the french curve to cuffs as the binoculars are to birding). 

Oxbow

The process is which a river flows, snakes so agressively that it eventually breaks through a loop in the river, abandoning it in favour of more direct, less decorative routes. A cuff, here, is a detour that has calved from the main event and begun to event for itself (with some memory).

Finding oxbows can be fun! The process of creating an oxbow over historical maps, by layering one on top of the other.