Accordingly, whereas Arakawa and Gins view sensory deterritorialization as a more or less ahistorical potential that inheres within the body and Eisenman conceives it as a specific correlate of a more general ontological shift in the materiality of culture, Diller + Scofidio explore it as a necessary consequence of the historically unprecedented interpenetration of body and media. They thereby bring a level of concreteness to Eisenman's keen understanding of the correlation between electronic media and a postvisual, affective phenomenology. What is at stake in the Blur Building is not simply a “seeing that can no longer interpret,’ but rather a wholesale short circuiting of the role of vision, such that the affective body is literally compelled to “space the void” (Eisenman, “Visions Unfolded," 84).
The Blur Building, in short, deploys the deformation of architectural form—the displacement of visible, planimetric enclosure by the amorphous, atmospheric fog enclosure—as a means to render the impact of the digital revolution experientially salient, to give us a sensory correlate – spatialized affectivity – to its deformations of space. Recalling the twin epigraphs to this chapter, we can now see why, precisely, the conjunction of a complete fluidity, respectively, between body and media (Picard) and body and space (Novak) allows space to become wearable. Although media make space flexible and invisible, it is embodiment that allows mediated space to be experienced sensorily, precisely as space made wearable.
BODIES IN CODE
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