The media event is integrated with the enveloping fog. Our objective is to weave together architecture and electronic technologies, yet exchange the properties of each for the other. Thus, architecture would dematerialize and electronic media, normally ephemeral, would become palpable in space. Both would require sophisticated technologies that would be entirely invisible, leaving only their effects. (Blur, 44)
The transduction of nature and technics exposed in earlier works like Slow House here becomes the very basis for a heightening of the creativity of embodiment. Accordingly, as the visual domination of space diminishes, the capacity of digital media to catalyze new embodied inhabitations of space, and thus new embodiments of architecture, grows. This, I suggest, is why Diller + Scofidio “needed technology to amplify the atmosphere of uncertainty, to technologize climate further, as they put it.28 By vastly speeding up and artificially punctuating the fog environment's recursive self-regulation, Diller + Scofidio create an experiential atmosphere conducive to the exposure of embodied framing, of wearable space, as the origin of architecture.xxiii
A "defense mechanism against surveillance," as Aaron Betsky puts it, the technique of blur thus emerges as Diller + Scofidio's most recent strategy to exteriorize architectural interiority, to foreground it against the very context of incorporated conventionality that gives life to the social, not to mention formal, codings of architecture.29 Blur, in short, allows habit to be suspended so that the unexpected and the unpredictable can emerge. That is why, for Betsky, Diller + Scofidio's ambition is
to use the techniques of blur to make constructions in which one is never quite sure what one is experiencing, where one is, or how one should behave. The codes of behavior that tell us what to want and what to buy no longer work, as we don't know what we are meant to do. (35)
That this suspension of knowledge becomes an opportunity for creative embodiment serves to link Diller + Scofidio's “embodied conceptual art" to the corpuses of work we have explored previously. In perfect alignment with the architects' view of their project as part art and part architecture, we can place the Blur Building somewhere in the middle of the continuum stretching from Arakawa and Gins' instrumental (or artistic) deployment of architecture to throw the body out of balance to Eisenman's vectorial liberation of the interstitial potential of space to trigger affective response.
BODIES IN CODE
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