xvi. Eisenman characterizes his work on the three just mentioned projects as
primarily linear parts which attempt through various striations to deny their axiality and thus interrupt narrative. At the Wexner Center, two grids, each of which define[s] a different narrative axis, collide to disrupt not only each other's dominance but also each other's linearity. This collision is not marked by any formal entry point, thus the building does not provide entry for the subject into the narrative. At the Columbus Convention Center, while there is a linear axis parallel to the main street, the spatial striations of the volumetric mass of the building cross this axis, interrupting its linear continuity. At Aronoff Center in Cincinnati, while there is again an axial spine of circulation that runs the entire length of the building, the architectural narrative is defined by a wholly other geometry, that of a series of articulated volumetric boxes that twist, turn and step through the spine. (“Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences: Escape from New York (and the Guggenheim)," 23)
xvii. Specifically, the issue is not whether and how the trope of folding (or any other trope for architectural form) better captures the virtual dimensions of the site, as John Rajchman suggests in writing:
There exists a “complexity," or a potential for folding, that is not contained within any frame or grid; on the contrary, a frame or grid only exists within a larger virtual complexity that exceeds it. What is thus implicit in a space, which it cannot frame, may at any point or moment break out of it and cause it to be reframed. (John Rajchman, “Folding,” 18/20).
From Eisenman's final perspective, no trope can access the virtual without the mediation of embodied spacing.
xviii. As Eisenman explains in a 1997 interview with Zaera-Polo, he is interested in a "conceptual formlessness which requires a beginning ... from a void, and produces form out of formlessness" (Zaera-Polo, "Interview," 20).
xix. This is a notion I have developed in my work on new media art. See New Philosophy for New Media, Chapter 6.
xx. Like the Deleuzean notion that is its source, the digital ASW exploits the untapped potential lurking in empirical spaces. (Deleuze develops the ASW in Chapter 7 of Cinema 1: the Movement-Image, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986].) Yet, whereas the cinematic variant liberates spatial forces from their determination, deploying them "as they are expressed for themselves, outside spatiotemporal coordinates, with their own ideal singularities and their virtual con junction," the digital ASW expresses a supplementary analogy that actualizes the virtual force of the digital in the form of bodily affect. In his study of the cinema, Deleuze links the cinematic ASW specifically to the shift in the experience of space following the Second World War, in which the human being was confronted with “disconnected" and “deserted” spaces that short-circuited the capacity to move and to act.
NOTES
287