What is currently promoted as "digital" architecture is marred by a fatal assumption that innovation in architecture is today mainly expressed through form. No doubt, the topological geometry is presumed to be the basis for an adequate formal language. With unrelenting eloquence, somewhat like an adolescent rebellion against the formal dogmatism of Modernism, the focus has been on visualizing what is believed to be its greatest asset—the extravagance of form--thereby ending up with a new dogmatism that is no less rigid. The fascination with the new digital processes for the creation of architectonic form is certainly understandable. But it is equally obvious that the formal experimentation they permit cannot by itself lead to a new architecture.... One can only hope that architecture will resist such trivialization and, having discovered the form of this new paradigm, will go on to discover its performance. (204–205).
x. If this is the case, it is hardly surprising that The Navidson Record begins with an invocation of the digital as its guiding theme:
While enthusiasts and detractors will continue to empty entire dictionaries attempting to describe or deride it authenticity" still remains the word most likely to stir a debate. In fact, this leading obsession—to validate or invalidate the reels and tapes—invariably brings up a collateral and more general concern: whether or not, with the advent of digital technology, image has forsaken its once impeachable hold on the truth. (3)
It is not insignificant that this introductory passage ends with a footnote that directs the reader to Chapter IX, precisely the point where this thematic concern shades over into a symptomatology of the impact of the digital on the text.
xi. The citation is attributed to one Murphy Gruner, who informs us that “as the recording time for tapes and digital disks increases, as battery life is extended, and as camera size is reduced, the larger the window will grow for capturing events as they occur" (144).
xii. Though devoid of any consequential narrative action, this preliminary section does serve to reveal the potential tension between literary narrative and visual recording that will become central to the novel as a whole. When Zampanò seeks to reconstruct the film Navidson “set out to make" from the seemingly straightforward surveillance images and the innocent intentions motivating the project, he very deftly illustrates the medial difference between film and text, where what can only be the accurate registration of an innocent intention in film becomes, in effect, a portent of events to come. Thus, film transfigures Navidson's intention simply "to create a record of how Karen and I bought a small house in the country and moved into it with our children," to "see how everything turns out" (8). "In many ways," Zampanò observes, "the opening of The Navidson Record ... remains one of the more disturbing sequences because it so effectively denies itself even the slightest premonition about what will soon take place on Ash Tree Lane" (8). Once the house is revealed to be a physically impossible topological figure, however, this division of labor between technical recording and writing—simple registration of the event vs. imaginative supplementation—breaks down, and the two forms of media become far more complexly interarticulated.
NOTES
293