In Arakawa and Gins' terminology, the body can be said to experience the longitudinal dimension through its imaging capability. This, however, means that the longitudinal dimension is always in recursive correlation with the imaging body so that, to matter, space must enter the “variable horizon" of the body's imaging landing sites. The strict recursivity linking space and body informs the radical purpose to which Arakawa and Gins apply architecture: namely, throwing the body out of balance. Radical architecture furnishes architectural landing sites that challenge the body's "habitual and deadening" submission to “spacetime" or space as “objective" geometric extension. What makes this possible is the capacity for the organization of space—conditioned, as it is, by the body—to destabilize the body's perceptual landing sites and thereby to call into play the body's normally imperceptible imaging landing sites. By altering the body's typical architectural landing sites, radical architecture perturbs the body, compelling it to draw on its “longitudinal” sense of space in order to right itself.
That is why the two methods of subverting the body's submission to spacetime—“to cause an overload of the familiar by putting surroundings forward in a manner so concentrated that they wax unfamiliar; and to have the body be so greatly and so persistently thrown off balance that the majority of its efforts have to go entirely towards the righting of itself"—are, in the end, necessarily complements of one another (Architecture, 8). It is also why, at bottom, all architectural landing sites are hybrid—in part a perceptual and in part an imaging landing site" (21). By short-circuiting the body's perceptual grasp of space, architecture compels the body to concentrate on recalibrating itself as the correlate of its longitudinal imaging landing sites.
Arakawa and Gins' Ubiquitous Site Nagi's Ryoanji Architectural Body (1992-1994) submits its inhabitants to precisely this two-part recalibration of the body. The first of Arakawa and Gins' large-scale architectural surrounds, this work comprises a cylindrical building, 70 ft in length and 30 ft in diameter, which constitutes one-third of the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art. Ubiquitous Site is quite literally a piece of architecture that refuses to recognize the vertical conventions of architecture: rather than a floor and ceiling surrounded by walls, the piece juxtaposes two sets of symmetrical surfaces, which flow more or less seamlessly into one another (see Figure 4.4). On the bottom and the top is a curved concrete “floor” equipped with a see-saw, a bench, and a metal bar; on the two sides are rock gardens set into sand.
BODIES IN CODE
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