{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","id":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","uuid":"4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title":"Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media","normalized_title":"bodiesincodeinterfaceswithdigitalmedia","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0415970164","isbns":["0415970164","0415970156","9780415970167","9780415970150"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":348,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Bodies%20in%20code%20%20interfaces%20with%20digital%20media","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/4f7053d9-6508-49c8-9dd8-ec4dc5dadd53/search"},"page":{"printed_page":229,"pdf_page":242,"physical_index":242,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"66f0759cc3fb43013c238e479c9cf85d15dc307387fd33b39a937e379a804ae1"},"chapter":"bodies in code","content":"1. THE DIGITAL\n\nDanielewski observes that most people, if asked what House of Leaves is about, would say \"it's about a house which is bigger on the inside than the outside\" (Danielewski, \"Conversation\"). Put another way, the novel is about an impossible object, a referent that is absent not simply in the sense of being lost or unlocatable or even in the sense—common to all fiction—of lacking any existence whatsoever prior to and outside the fiction that conjures it up. House of Leaves is a realist novel about an object that, for precise technical reasons, cannot belong to the \"reality\" we inhabit as embodied beings: even the fictional existence of this house is, in some sense, impossible.viii\n\nIf we locate House of Leaves at the end of a long line of antimimetic novels—a line running from Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler—we can better grasp its (relative) novelty. Here, the referential impossibility is not narrative-based and epistemologically-focused so much as it is material: at bottom it stems from an incompatibility between the \"topo-logic\" of digital processing and the phenomenal dimension of human experience. House of Leaves is a narrative, as Kate Hayles has noted, that forthrightly admits the void at its center so as better to foreground the role of belief in its \"reality\" claim. Embodied belief is precisely the allegorical object of the hyperactive proliferation of mediation that comes to fill in the novel's central void.\n\nDespite its referential impossibility, it remains the case that the house, as Hayles has astutely observed, \"nevertheless enters the space of representation.\"7 In a quite literal sense, it is the intrusion of the house into the lives of the novel's characters—not to mention those of its readers-that generates the narrative. This fact should not, however, be taken as license to interpret the house too narrowly as a figure for the novel in which it figures (a literal house of leaves). Although it certainly is that, the house must also and more fundamentally be viewed as a figure for the otherness of the digital as it enters thematically into the world of the novel and also as it punctures the surface of its textuality.\n\nNot unlike the uneasy correlation between parameter-driven design techniques and built form in contemporary architecture (where the design possibilities materialized in the former vastly exceed the geometrical realities of the latter),ix what we encounter in this impossible house is a figure for a spatial dimension—a topological figure—that cannot find adequate representation in the forms of orthographic recording exhaustively inventoried by the novel. Its resistance to representation notwithstanding, this spatial dimension still manages to exert an immense impact as the very motor force driving both the host of recording technologies thematized in the novel and the recording technology that is the text.\n\nTHE DIGITAL TOPOGRAPHY OF HOUSE OF LEAVES\n\n229","previous_page":228,"next_page":230}