Explaining that the “real motivation behind relational architecture is the modification of existing behavior," Lozano-Hemmer stresses the creativity of this recursivity: Relational artworks, he maintains, "create a situation where the building, the urban context and the participants relate in new, alien' ways." A relational work can be considered successful, he explains, if its intervention “actively modifies the point of dynamic equilibrium between the public's actions and the building's reactions, and vice versa," thereby generating “chaotic ... or emergent behaviors."32
Functioning together in this way, embodiment and information generate temporary transformations of built urban space that are simultaneously collective individuations of embodied human actors. By taking “indivision" to its ultimate point—the point where embodiment and information, functioning transductively, operate to “dematerialize" the environment—Lozano-Hemmer's project forcefully demonstrates that embodiment today can only be conceived as collective individuation, as an individuation that requires a certain disembodiment of embodied individuals. The reason for this is simple: Because human embodiment no longer coincides with the boundaries of the human body, a disembodiment of the body forms the condition of possibility for a collective (re)embodiment through technics. The human today is embodied in and through technics.
Just such a realignment of the basis of embodiment is at issue—in a fully performative manner—in Lozano-Hemmer's Re:Positioning Fear— Relational Architecture 3 (1997; see Figure 1.9). Designed as an intervention into one of Europe's largest military arsenals, the Landeszeughaus in Graz, Austria, the work consists of two components: an archive of "Internet relay chat" (IRC) sessions devoted to the discussion of contemporary fears and a“tele-absence" installation involving projection of shadows and text on the facade of the Landeszeughaus' inner courtyard.
By linking the legibility of the text (the projection of the IRC sessions) with the projection of amplified shadows of participants' bodies, Lozano-Hemmer directly correlates disembodiment with the informational transformation of the spatial environment. In this respect, he literally creates a “body-in-code," as I have been developing the concept here, and in the process correlates the concept with a certain margin of disembodiment. Because the text only becomes legible against the background of an amplified shadow, the embodied participant's transformation into shadow forms the enabling condition for the transformation of the physical façade into informational space. This latter in turn becomes the stimulus for continued participant interaction via the shadow interface, and an evolving feedback loop is established.
BODIES IN CODE
95