Threshold: Non-Ordinary States of Accommodation

Justin Ascott
Abstract
This paper and associated short film screening, entitled Threshold, explores the
phenomenon of house, as a Cartesian construct of rational cultural detachment, set
in binary opposition to the indigenous understanding of nature as connected and
sacred. Threshold focuses on the liminal in-between zones of a house its doors
and windows which both separate and join the inside/outside domains - without
belonging to either of them. The film explores the liminal act of crossing this
ontological threshold - representing it cinematically as a vibrational, ocular/aural
wavering between two worlds. The intention is to destabilize this duality on an
emotional level in order to interrogate its validity. This strategy references
anthropological theory, which asserts that the liminal act stimulates the limbic
system containing ancestral, instinctual deposits. The function of the limbic system
(part of the triune brain model) accords with Jungs theory of the collective
unconscious - which views the house as an archetypal symbol, central to the
meaning of dreams - in representing the psyche of the dreamer. Threshold
attempts to invoke this and other archaic symbols as the camera journeys through
its interior spaces, discovering its material culture artefacts, which reflect the
psychic state of its inhabitants. The paper and associated film explores the
indigenous belief that there is a mystical (unitive, transformative) relationship
existing between space and acoustics, that can only be fully appreciated through an
emotional experience with it. The adoption of an arts interventionist approach, can,
the paper will argue, provide an important contribution to our expanded
understanding of Space & Place, as an embodied, emotional-cognitive act.
Key Words: Acoustics, archetype, binary opposition, cinematics, collective
unconscious, house, phenomenology, limbic system, liminality, symbolism
*****
1. Introduction
As a Fine Art based filmmaker, I take a phenomenological approach to the
study of Space & Place, referencing interdisciplinary theory in developing creative
interventions that explore the discontinuities of everyday experience. Places of
slippage that open up ways of viewing space as a form of art. I recognize the value
of didactic theory in informing my creative practice, as well as using my creative
practice as a nuanced expression of theory. My area of interest is in how the
sensing body perceives the built environment. I reconstruct this existential
relationship experientially using cinematics, in conjunction with recordings of site
specific (diegetic) acoustics - to render immersive, digitally mediated screen-based

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texts for the viewer to engage with and consider the deeper issues of experience,
association and belonging. Recent films I have produced - with the support of
Norwich University of the Arts - include Codified Space a non-narrative study of
an abandoned car park presented as a landscape of aberrant codes and signals,
which won first prize at the international Tenderflix Festival in London, and NonPlace: Passageway an examination of a narrow urban passageway as a transient
non-place, which has been broadcast in France and Germany on the Souvenirs
from Earth cable channel.
2. Cinematics and Sense Making
Film as a medium offers interesting mechanisms that can contribute to our
sense making and understanding of Space and Place - which will first be discussed.
Vivian Sobchack in her theory of the phenomenology of the film experience,
argues that the film experience is a system of communication based on bodily
perception as a vehicle of conscious expression.1 In other words expression of
experience by experience.2 Sobchack states:
While space and its significance are intimately shared and lived
by both film and viewer, the viewer is always at some level
aware of the double and reversible nature of cinematic
perception, that is, of perception as expression, of perception as a
process of mediating consciousnesss relations with the world.3
Cinema, Sobchack asserts, both presents and represents acts of seeing, hearing,
and moving as both the original structures of existential being and the mediating
structures of language.4 Working within this existential phenomenological
framework, cinematics offers me a powerful medium for sharing with the viewer
the immediate pre-reflective experience of the environment filmed, while
simultaneously presenting my authorial reflective and reflexive signification.
Primarily I am interested in communicating through film the emotional and
intuitive feelings and responses evoked by spatiality and acoustics, which are
structured and shaped by our bodies and our bodily interactions with it.5
The employment of the artistic technique of defamiliarisation such as acute
camera angles, and distortions and amplifications of diegetic acoustics, to present
the commonplace in strange unfamiliar ways, provides a formalist tactic of
signification to enhance perception of the ordinary. Viktor Schklovsky who coined
the term defamiliarisation in 1917 to define poetic language, states:
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are
perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to
make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult to increase the

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difficulty and length of perception because the process of
perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.6
Schklovsky argues that defamiliarisation is essential to the creation of art and
the prevention of what he terms over-automatization which in his view causes an
individual to function formulaically when interacting with everyday objects and
contexts.7
The linear, temporal structure of film also provides a mechanism for expressing
and making sense of space narratively - using both fragmentary and continuous
experience to construct emotional experience through montage and assembly.
Through the juxtaposition of shots of various frame sizes (close-ups and longshot) film provides a strong impression of the complex totality of a place,
conveying a sense of its form, structure, and activity. Film takes the viewer on a
sequential, visual journey that navigates and maps geographies, offering a route
through which to interpret spatiality and the dynamics that exist between the
physical form of a place and what happens in it.8 In his book Narrative
Architecture, Nigel Coates argues that narratives engage with the medium of
space, and form the basis on which buildings can be given meaning - which he
suggests stems from the associative possibilities arising from the gap between the
actual and the symbolic.9
3. Liminality and Archaic Symbolism
The theme of this paper is the representation through cinematics, of the
phenomenon of house, as a bounded physically defined site of complex cultural,
emotional, material, and symbolic meanings.10 We live in an age of global
standardized housing - yet rarely reflect on the humanistic meanings of these taken
for granted structures, which provide us with a protective membrane from birth to
death. The house is a matrix that has shaped the evolution of human consciousness,
and provides the primary interface between the individual, society, and the
environment. Humans have inhabited shelters of one form or another since cave
dwelling paleolithic times, and as such they carry deep, unconscious, symbolic
resonances.11
The implicit dualistic epistemology of home is informed by Cartesian
rationalism, and its science led mission to control time, space and activity through
technology - as a defense against the perceived irrationality and chaos of nature.12
Order and cleanliness can be considered as signifying in the small scale universe of
the modern home - the moral superiority of the forces of civilization over nature.
Western scientific culture has largely ignored the validity of indigenous
understandings and experiences of nature, which view all elements contained
within the landscape animals, plants and natural objects - as being animate and in
a symbiotic, ecological relationship with man.13 This stark nature-culture schism
that the site of the urban house represents at the micro scale, shapes how we

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conceptualize and engage with the external biosphere at the national and global
scales. In losing a connection with the forces and rhythms of nature in our homes,
our senses become dulled and we feel culturally and emotionally dislocated and
anxious. The natural environment in our materialist culture is viewed as an
external, agency-less raw material to be exploited for our home comforts - which
has led in part to the on-going degradation of the planet.14
The short film I will screen, entitled Threshold, uses as its subject the typical
English idyll of the suburban detached house specifically its doors and windows
- which both join and separate the inside from the outside domains. These inbetween thresholds can be considered as liminal zones. Liminality is a term coined
by anthropologist Arnold van Gennep in 1908, and later developed by Victor
Turner in the 1960s, to denote the transitional middle state in various social rites of
passage, which is considered ambiguous and disorientating. Turner states that
Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the
positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial.15
The term has been adopted and adapted in arts and spatial discourse to define the
conceptual, ephemeral relationship between people and spatial environments transitional spaces that are neither one place nor another but rather a third space
in-between.16 The film I will present in conjunction with this paper - connotes the
liminality of these boundary lines through the employment of visual and auditory
vibrations in the panes of the window glass, which can be considered to act as a
threshold in the vibratory composition of matter itself. In his book Sonic Warfare,
Steve Goodman argues that this ontology of vibrational force17 constructs a
politics of frequency that conjoins sonic physicality with semiotic significance breaking down the distinction between subject and object.18
My intention is to affect what transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof terms a
holotropic or non-ordinary state of emotional perception through these psychoacoustic oscillations in the vibratory basso/baritone frequency range of 70 -120 hz,
to destabilize the hylotropic (ordinary) perception that defines the house and
ourselves in binary opposition to nature.19 Grof states that:
All the ancient and pre-industrial cultures have held non-ordinary
states of consciousness in high esteem. They valued them as
powerful means for connecting with sacred realities, nature and
each other Altered states were also seen as important sources
of artistic inspiration and a gateway to intuition.20
I encourage the viewer of Threshold to experience on an emotional level, an
expanded transformational sense of being inter-connected or enmeshed with Space
& Place, and to access unconscious psychic associations, that I consider are the
source of creative engagement with it. The film attempts to revitalize how we feel,

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imagine, sense and think about space. This creative tactic references Victor
Turners interdisciplinary anthropological theory, which draws on neurobiological
Triune Brain studies, in arguing that the anti-structural liminal act, and liminoid
phenomena such as works of art - which subvert cultural binary structures activate the archaic brain stem, the reptilian complex and paleomammalian
complex (limbic system) of primitive emotions which contain ancestral, instinctual
deposits.21 Turner argues that this model of the brain gives validity to Carl Jungs
Analytical Psychology theory of the collective unconscious and archetypes.22
In the model of the mind that Jung proposes, symbols are the natural language
of the collective unconscious, a genetically inherited psychological structure
common to all humans and analogous to the genetically inherited human
anatomy.23 Jungs concept of the archetype was developed as a correlate to the
concept of the collective unconscious. Archetypes he defines as archaic remnants,
innate, primordial emotion charged tendencies to symbolize reality through
mythological motifs and dream symbols.24 The home in Jungs theory of the
unconscious is a central recurring symbol in representing different aspects of the
psyche.25 Jung argues that inducing archetypal ways of psychic behaviour accessed
through the bridge of the emotions can create a wider horizon and a greater
extension of consciousness.26 I employ this rationale to invoke unconscious,
instinctual feelings and symbolic associations about home, through the medium of
cinematics.
4. Re-Imagining Home
The narrative spatial imaginary presented in my film Threshold, foregrounds
archaic symbols and constructs resonant acoustic frequencies in the site of the
house, and in so doing, acknowledges indigenous beliefs that there is a mystical
(unitive, transformative) relationship existing between space and acoustics, that
can only be fully appreciated through an existential, encounter with it. The
mediated cinematic journey begins at the threshold doorway to the 1950s era
suburban house. It stands symbolically as the gateway between the known and
unknown, a place of transition from one state to another. Shoes are removed before
entering the inner world as in a sacred temple - to symbolize the casting off of
worldliness, or a reversal of standpoint. 27 We see a stained glass rose embedded in
the factory manufactured front door - a sacred symbol of love - attesting to home
as a feeling state of belonging, safety and contentment.28 A fly lays lifeless on a
window ledge evidencing the discontinuity between the exterior, natural order and
the interior man-made order. The camera begins to push slowly into the houses
womb-like, protective passageways and rooms, revealing material culture artefacts
- decorations, objects, photographs and furniture - which express both conscious
and unconscious aspects of the occupants lives.29 In the laundry room, cleaning
detergents stand inanimately on the window sill as a defence against the perceived
bacterial menace of nature. In each room visited, the camera is drawn inexorably to

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its windows the symbolic eyes of the house - where it oscillates visually and
sonically, and jumps between the interior and exterior domains. The camera enters
the kitchen which symbolically evokes the central hearth - a place of
transformations - both of foodstuffs and ourselves creatively.30 At the kitchen sink,
water - a symbol of purity and cleansing - drips forth from the tap. Within the
kitchens sunlit geography, we observe the dweller a professional musician rehearsing Beethovens Violin Concerto, which harmonically embodies the
classical era paradigm of order, hierarchy and control. The music resounds
throughout the house, contrasting sonically with the asymmetrical, phonological
syntax of birdsong heard outside. The metronomic beat of invariant, mechanical
clock time is counterpointed by the cyclical, variant time of the seasons, and the
birth-death cycle of vegetation in the garden.31 Apples from the symbolic tree of
knowledge, lay rotting on the lawn. Clouds pass overhead embodying both a
connection to, and release from the earth.32
The camera continues its journey through the house, ascending the stairway
from the lower realm, to the higher symbolic realm of consciousness.33 It enters the
intimate sanctum of the bedroom - the place where the naked self journeys each
night to the underworld of unconscious dreams.34 The narrative resolves in the
windowless, hidden space of the attic, the highest point within the house, where
accumulated biographical artifacts residues of past experiences - lay forgotten in
storage boxes. The attic and roof carry symbolic meanings associated with the
human head, consciousness and spirituality.35 We hear the amplified bass
frequency acoustics of the boiler, reminiscent of cave acoustics, which the
emerging field of archaeoacoustics speculates were used in paleolithic shamanic
ceremonies to induce holotropic states.36 The equilateral triangle structure of the
roof forms a fundamental engineering principle based on the golden ratio of phi
(1.61803398) which recurs throughout nature, and represents a numerical
constant of the universe - used by sacred geometry in the planning and
construction of religious structures.37 It is yet another example within the site of
the domestic house of a deeply resonant archaic symbol, that remains largely
unconscious to its modern inhabitants.
5. Conclusion
As this paper has argued, the various mechanisms of cinematics - its
phenomenological verisimilitude to lived experience; its ability to defamiliarise the
ordinary through distortions; and its ability to re-construct the complex totality of a
space through temporal-spatial narrative sequencing - can be used critically and
imaginatively to interrogate and revitalise our engagement with Space & Place.
These cinematic mechanisms have been employed in my short film Threshold, to
explore and examine existentially, the material site of the house and the emotional
notion of home, in terms of its ambivalent ontological relationship to the external

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natural world. This has been achieved through the creative device of liminal
vibrations, which attempt to collapse this binary structure, through affecting a nonordinary state of awareness, that aims to activate the unconscious limbic system.
The film additionally presents the house as a domain containing a multitude of
psychically charged archaic symbols, which may be similarly accessed from the
unconscious through the bridge of emotional experience.
Cinematics therefore can be seen to offer a rich medium of creative expression
to intervene in normal beliefs systems about Space & Place, in order to stimulate a
change in the viewer on both an emotional and rational level, by bringing together
feelings and symbols from the unconscious, and ideas from disparate disciplines
into new relations with one another. It therefore provides an important contribution
to our expanded understanding of Space and Place as an embodied emotionalcognitive act.

Notes
1

Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 9.
2

Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 3.

Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 10.

Sobchack, Address of the Eye, 11.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, ((London: Routledge,

2005), 21.
6

Lawrence Crawford, Viktor Shklovskij: Diffrance in Defamiliarization.

(Comparative Literature 36, No. 3 1984) 212.
7

Crawford, Viktor Shklovskij, 216.

Nigel Coates, Narrative Architecture, (Chichester: Wiley, 2012), 14.

Coates, Narrative Architecture, 46.

10

Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home, (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 2.

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11

Vishu Magee, Archetypal Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. (Taos:

Archetype Design Publications, 1999), 5-11.
12

Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, (London: Penguin, 2006), 16.

13
Frederique Apffel-Marglin, Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the
World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 105-110.
14

John Koch, Pole Frame Magic: Bringing Awareness into Architecture, (Somers:
Landscape Temple Books, 2014), 10-15.
15

Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, (London:

Aldine Transaction, 2008), 95.
16

Catherine Smith, Looking for Liminality in Architectural Spaces, Viewed 24

June, 2014, <http://limen.mi2.hr/limen1-2001/catherine_smith.html>.
17

Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear,
(London: MIT Press, 2010), 82.
18

Goodman, Sonic Warfare, 81-84.

19

Stanislav Grof, The Holotropic Mind: Three levels of Human Consciousness

and how they Shape our Minds, (New York: Harper One, 1993), 20.
20

Grof, The Holotropic Mind, 13.

21

Victor Turner, On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience, (Tucson:

University of Arizona Press,1986), 270-288.
22
23

24
25

Ibid.
Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, (London: Aldus, 1964), 56-71.
Ibid.
Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, (London: Aldus, 1964), 40.

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26

Carl Jung, Man and his Symbols, (London: Aldus, 1964), 90.

27

Kathleen Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images,

(Cologne: Taschen, 2010), 558.
28

Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols, 162-5.

29

Clare Marcus, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of

Home, (Lake Worth: Nicolas-Hays, 2006), 7.
30

Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols, 576-7.

31

Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time, (Cambridge: Polity

Press, 1995), 29-30.
32
33
34

35

Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols, 58-59.

Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols, 566-7.
Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols, 598-9.
Martin, ed., The Book of Symbols, 572-3.

36

Linda Eneix, ed., Archaeoacoustics: The Archaeology of Sound: Publication of

Proceedings from the 2014 Conference in Malta. CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2014), 33-37.
37

Koch, Pole Frame Magic, 45-47.

Bibliography
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Apffel-Marglin, Frederique. Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the
World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

10

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Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

Coates, Nigel. Narrative Architecture. Chichester: Wiley, 2012.
Codified Space. Film. Directed by Justin Ascott. Norwich:
https://vimeo.com/26260209, 2012.
Covery, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2010.
Crawford, Lawrence. Viktor Shklovskij: Diffrance in Defamiliarization.
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Becker, Judith. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing. Bloomington:
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Eneix, Linda, C., ed. Archaeoacoustics: The Archaeology of Sound: Publication of
Proceedings from the 2014 Conference in Malta. CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform, 2014.
Gennep, Arnold, Van. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961.
Goodman, Steve. Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. London:
MIT Press, 2010.
Griffiths, Jay. Wild: An Elemental Journey. London: Penguin, 2006.
Grof, Stanislav. The Holotropic Mind: Three levels of Human Consciousness and
how they Shape our Minds. New York: Harper One, 1993.
Jung, Carl C. Man and his Symbols. London: Aldus, 1964.
Koch, John. Pole Frame Magic: Bringing Awareness into Architecture. Somers:
Landscape Temple Books, 2014. Kindle edition.

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Labelle, Brandon. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life. New
York: Continuum, 2010.
Maclean, P. D. The Triune Brain in Evolution: Role in Paleocerebral Functions.
New York: Springer,1990.
Magee, Vishu. Archetypal Design: House as a Vehicle for Spirit. Taos: Archetype
Design Publications, 1999.
Marcus, Clare C. House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of
Home. Lake Worth: Nicolas-Hays, 2006.
Martin, Kathleen, ed. The Book of Symbols: Reflections on Archetypal Images.
Cologne: Taschen, 2010.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge,
2005.
Miller, Daniel. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors.
Oxford: Berg, 2001.
Miller, Daniel. Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press: 2010
Non-Place: Passageway. Film. Directed by Justin Ascott. Norwich:
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Penz, Francois, and Andong Lu, ed. Urban Cinematics: Understanding Urban
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Threshold. Film. Directed by Justin Ascott. Norwich:
https://vimeo.com/103404918
Turner, Victor. On the Edge of the Bush: Anthropology as Experience
(Anthropology of Form & Meaning). Tucson: University of Arizona Press,1986.
Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. London: Aldine
Transaction, 2008.

Bio
Justin Ascott (1964) is a UK based visual artist working with film and moving
image media. In conjunction with his independent practice, Ascott lectures at
Norwich University of the Arts (NUA) on the BA Film & Moving Image
Production course.