As a contribution to Lozano-Hemmer's larger project of producing a new collective individuation of embodiment, Re:Positioning Fear takes the first step of disembodying the individual body, thus opening the possibility for a break from the prosthetic model of technics. This is precisely why Lozano-Hemmer insists that “the shadow is not an avatar, an agent, nor an alias of the participant's body” but rather “projected darkness, a play of geometries, a disembodied bodypart." As a negation of the body's static positivity, the shadow does not so much act in its stead as open its potential to be otherwise, thereby transforming it into "a site of telematic activity."
This material transformation of the body is what, for Lozano-Hemmer, serves to differentiate relational architecture in general from its virtual counterpart:
Virtual buildings are data constructs that strive for realism, asking the participant to "suspend disbelief" and “play along" with the environment; relational buildings, on the other hand, are real buildings pretending to be something other than themselves, masquerading as that which they might become, asking participants to "suspend faith" and probe, interact and experiment with the false construct. Virtual architecture tends to miniaturize buildings to the participant's scale, for example through VR peripherals such as HMDs or CAVEs, while relational architecture amplifies the participant to the building's scale, or emphasizes the relationship between urban and personal scale. In this sense, virtual architecture dematerializes the body, while relational architecture dematerializes the environment. (“Relational Architecture")
On this understanding, virtual architecture makes common cause with the model of technics as prosthetics: because it retains the scale of the individual body, it simply cannot overcome the division between body and world except through the illusion of simulation; in Lozano-Hemmer's vision, this illusion serves to dematerialize the body. By contrast, relational architecture undoes this division and promotes “indivision" precisely by dematerializing the environment, by transforming it into a cocreation of embodiment and information, of bodily performance extended through information and of information embodied in such extension. What is thereby promoted is a model of technics as medium-for-individuation.
BODIES IN CODE
98