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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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This correlation of architectural framing and embodiment entails a certain understanding of architecture's technical dimension: architecture in the digital age must do more than simply deploy the technical capacities of the computer in an effort to overcome constraints of form dictated by the properties of architecture's raw material. This is partly because buildings—even digitally designed buildings—must still be built; more fundamentally though, it is because they must still be inhabited, which is to say, calibrated to our embodied form of life. No amount of freedom from formal constraint can undo architecture's constitutive correlation with embodiment, even if it can shift the locus of embodiment from the pregiven materiality of architecture to the embodied experience of inhabitation triggered by built form.

Indeed, the more digitally deterritorialized the architectural frame is, the more central the body becomes as the framer of spatial information, as the source of its “autonomy” or “interiority," following the conceptualization of the formalist critics of the 1970s. Just as the body assumes a renewed importance in the aftermath of the digital explosion of the technical frame, so too does it counterbalance the digital dissolution of spatial form, offering an indirect and supplementary—but no less fundamental—means to couple deformation and inhabitation, formal play and real life. For this reason, architecture must reconceive its function for the digital age: as the art of framing par excellence, it must embrace its potential to bring space and body together in the creation of “wearable space."

To the extent that this vocation involves a double dematerialization—of architecture as built form and of embodiment as static body or rigidly bounded organism—architectural framing might be said to furnish a generic body-in-code as a strict correlate to the rematerialization I am here proposing to name wearable space. While wearable space designates the becoming-fluid of spatial form that results from the imbrication of architectural framing and embodiment, body-in-code names the disembodiment-re-embodiment that ensues from this same imbrication. Wearable space is to architecture what body-in-code is to embodiment. Accordingly, if architecture is indeed the art of framing par excellence, is not its embodied correlate—the architecturally triggered body-in-code—in fact the generic form of embodiment, the process of disembodiment-re-embodiment that encompasses all other instances (including those we have focused on thus far) in which the body is distributed beyond its organic boundaries?

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1. ENCOUNTERING THE BLUR

You slowly proceed down a hill toward an amorphous, cloudlike mass looming above the lake beneath you (see Figure 4.1). At the end of a long, narrow bridge heading off across the lake in front of you and terminating in the middle of what you can now discern to be a huge clump of fog suspended over the water, you come to a “log-in station," where you are invited to fill out a brief survey consisting of twenty more or less personal questions. Upon turning this in, you are handed a heavy translucent raincoat that, you are told, has been programmed with your "profile." Excited and a bit flustered, you hastily don the raincoat as you walk onto the narrow bridge and toward the dense mass of fog looming in front of you.

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As you gradually become enveloped by the vaporous surround emitted from the fog mass, you lose visual and aural contact with the terrestrial environment you have just left and begin to immerse yourself in a cool zone made up of soft sounds of water spray and the semisweet smell of vapor. Upon reaching the end of the narrow bridge, you enter a space of indeterminate size, comprised entirely (or so it seems to you) of incredibly dense fog continuously billowing out all around you. Nestled into a densely packed, tactilely palpable, almost viscous medium in which the only thing you can sense with certainty is your body, you are struck by a vaguely uncomfortable feeling of constriction (see Figure 4.2).

Yet, you soon become accustomed to this oddly materialized space and, as you do so, you begin to perceive a forest of vertical red and green lights around you. Moving close to one of these lights, you notice that they are LED columns scrolling suggestive adjectives like "obsessive" and “passionate" which, you cannot help feel, are eerily apt descriptions of your personality. You notice too that your raincoat has started to glow with a faint blue-green hue; you also perceive a muffled ping reverberating at regular intervals and, as you concentrate on the sound, you realize that it is coming from your coat.

Feeling more and more at home in this weird, sensorily inverted world, you start to walk in the direction of a smaller, moving red light off in the distance. As you do so, the pinging noise emanating from your coat becomes more rapid and grows louder. Momentarily flustered by this, you look down at your coat and when you look up again, you see the blurred outlines of another person move toward you; you stop and, as you do, you notice that the red glow surrounding this person is becoming more intense as the distance between you diminishes. Excited and also a bit frightened, you perceive suddenly that the blue-green hue of your coat has become a red glow that is also gradually intensifying. Recalling the instructions you distractedly read at the log-in center, you realize that this person is someone whose profile bears affinity with yours. What flashes instantly to your mind is whether you will have the courage to talk to this person when he reaches you; overcoming your natural inclination to flee into the now altogether inviting neutrality of the fog, you steel yourself for contact.

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Almost immediately, you find yourself face to face with this anonymous other, literally unable to look away from the intense red glow pervading the space between your respective raincoats. As if obeying the same program, you and your blurry interlocutor turn away at the same moment and, as your heart rate gradually slows, you attune yourself once again to the now decreasingly rapid and softer pinging noise, which, you realize in a flash, was also an index of your affinity to the other.

Making your way through the thicket of vertical LED columns looming at regular intervals out of the fog, you come to a stairway leading upwards and, as you ascend the stairs, you climb up out of the fog onto an observation deck (see Figure 4.3). There you are treated to breathtakingly clear views of land on one side and lake on the other. Reminiscent of an airplane's abrupt emergence from out of the clouds this ascent restores the predominant function of vision in your sensory ecology and in so doing brings some much needed relief from the intense sensory demands of the fog environment. Still, after some time relaxing on this “Angel Deck," you find yourself drawn back to the vaporous surround oozing just beneath you.

Almost immediately upon redescending into the fog, the sonar ping from your coat becomes quite furious in its rhythm and you see a bright red blotch of color in front of you; stopping in anticipation of another face-to-face encounter with another anonymous "soulmate, you are altogether flabbergasted to find your entire body vibrating in response to what, you quickly discern, is a tactile reaction by your raincoat. Stunned by the intensity of this experience, you race back toward the exit. Stepping onto the exit ramp, you scurry to shore, shedding your raincoat and hurriedly taking a password that will allow you to access your experience from the comfort and safe distance of your home.

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The experience just described is based on the original project proposal for Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio's Blur Building, a project developed for the Swiss Expo 2001 in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland.i An architectural project for a building made of water, Blur Building is intended to undermine our ordinary sensory interface with the environment and with architecture by putting vision more or less out of play. The result, as you have just experienced, is a compelling attempt to engage other, less used sensory modalities—proprioception, tactility, hearing—in the task of navigating bodily through space.

The infrastructure of the Blur Building is an edifice 100 m wide by 65 m deep by 25 m high that is cantilevered up from the lake below and that forms the base out of which the mist cloud is projected as well as support for the Angel Deck observation platform. The mist cloud is produced by an artificial fog-making system that filters lake water into a dense array of high-pressure water nozzles regulated by computer and adjusted to actual weather conditions in the surrounding environment. The resulting fog mass is, as the architects put it, “a dynamic form that combines natural and artificial weather forces."⁵ Into this dynamic mass is integrated a media environment whose function, again according to the architects, is to interweave architecture and electronic technologies, exchanging the properties of each for the other. Through the use of sophisticated technologies that “would be entirely invisible, leaving only their effects, ... architecture would dematerialize and electronic media, normally ephemeral, would become palpable in space” (Blur, 44).

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Fused with architecture in this way, electronic media are relocated from a high-definition context to a low-definition one, with the result that their typical and deeply rooted correlation with the sense of vision is almost wholly suspended: "The fog mass is primarily an experience of visual interference, thus the reliance on vision competes with Blur's most notable characteristic, obscurity" (195). Embracing this fact as a challenge for the project, the architects view the Blur Building as a kind of machine for “rebalancing the senses"; specifically, it furnishes an immersive environment in which the world is put out of focus so that our visual dependency can be put into focus" (195). Beyond exposing the imbalance of our habitual sensory ecology, the project aims to substitute for the “focused attention of a visual spectacle" an alternative: the attentuated attention of an immersive acoustic encounter" (198).

To this end, the architects structure disorientation into the Blur experience and equip the impaired, visually dependent visitor with a "braincoat," a raincoat with embedded technologies that forms “an acoustical prosthesis" to the body's natural system of navigation. Rather than forming a preexistent architectural ground for experience, the Blur Building can be said to result from the actual navigation of bodies inside the cloud of fog. The acoustically guided movement of prosthetically enhanced, blind bodies in a nonspace creates an architecture of nothing, an architecture that is as much in the bodily experiences as it is in the acoustic and tactile mappings of space which they trace.

Here, in sum and in an altogether literal sense, space is made wearable. Divorced from any fixed spatial form, space is directly coupled to the movement and experience of bodies. Less a "building" than a "pure atmosphere," the Blur Building is, as the architects put it, a “habitable medium," (325, 162). Yet, even as it integrates the two dimensions of wearable space I enumerated earlier—the prosthetic extension of the body's contact with the environment and the affection of space as a medium of sensation—the Blur Building opens up some crucial questions that deserve further examination. How exactly does what takes place inside the body—the triggering of affective, proprioceptive, and tactile dimensions of experience—contribute to the constitution of space in the Blur experience? Why does the epochē of the visual through the deployment of a dynamic amorphous fog mass engage an alternate spatial sense and with it an entirely different kind of space? What is it about the body that allows it to use the sensory excess of its movement in this nonspace to generate a profoundly intensive spatial experience? Finally, what is it about space—or better, about its contemporary conjunction with media—that permits it to be so fluidly worn?

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2. THE ARCHITECTURAL BODY

Wearable space emerges out of the interlacing of body and architectural space. Nowhere has this interlacing been given better expression than in Japanese-American artist Arakawa's concept of the “architectural body." Defined, simply, as the conjunction of the “body proper" and the "architectural surround," this concept is meant to capture the recursive correlation literally intertwining the body with space. For Arakawa and his constant collaborator, Madeleine Gins, this correlation informs the very origin of the body:

If the body is born into architecture and is from then on inextricable from it, why not take it up in its full scope as an “architectural body" (the body proper plus the architectural surround)?... If the basic unit of concern is the body, not an abstract body considered apart from impulses and movement, but the body in action, then will not the concepts most central to the living of a life be those formed—no matter how fleetingly—through architectural encounters?⁶

In sum, because the body always is a body in space—or better, a spatializing body—it is by necessity an architectural body. Starting from the position that having a body includes having a world, Arakawa and Gins elaborate a theory of world constitution through landing sites. Defined as “spots at which stimuli for and effects of sensory modalities ... are positioned" (157), landing sites express the field of action connecting a body with space:

"The fabric of the world consists of a multitude, a plenitude, of sites.... Landing sites occur as a perceiver's perception, whatever that might be, lands here and there as the world.... A landing site is simultaneously an event and an event-marker. The concept of landing site is basically a heuristic device for mapping how a person forms the world and situates herself within it.7

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Landing sites are the concrete ways in which the body actively couples with space. Despite the emphasis on perception in the preceding passage, the world is in fact composed of three distinct types of landing site, each of which is integral to its constitution. Perceptual landing sites register the particular qualities of heres and theres, imaging landing sites fill in the gaps between areas of perceptual capture, and architectural landing sites afford an intimation of position.

In developing their concept of the architectural body, Arakawa and Gins have increasingly come to emphasize the role of nonperceptual, and especially, imaging, landing sites. Imaging landing sites form the necessary multisensory background within which any reality-conferring act of perception must be situated:

A full picture or view of the world, the total event-map of what goes on in daily living, requires the collaboration of an imaging capability or imaging landing sites to fill in the gaps between perceptual points or areas of focus.... Imaging landing sites "generalize" the world.... without even an indeterminate size, ... they fall into line with whatever perceptual and architectural landing sites sketch out. Imaging landing sites act as amorphous accordings of more information in the cause of perception than is available at one glance.... By definition shapeless, imaging landing sites are, nonetheless, shape-defining, for without them the world would be made mostly of holes. (20)

Imaging landing sites, in short, are responsible for rendering space potentially embodied or “embodiable," for imbuing it with a sensory richness that catalyzes bodily response.

That is why Arakawa and Gins can insist that “tactile-imaging landing sites register texture or near-texture in the world at large" and that "kinesthetic-imaging landing sites confer on the world at large some of how it feels to be a kinesthetic-proprioceptive body" (Reversible Destiny, 157). More than simply the extension of a perception of a here or there to alternative variant perceptions, imaging landing sites render space affective. In the case of kinesthetic imaging, for example, a "kinesthetic spillover" occurs whereby the "body, through imaging, lends to all it perceives a modicum of kinesthetic endowment" (158). This capacity of the body to affect space is largely responsible for the fact that the world is not “kinesthetically neutral," but always already endowed with the "kinesthetic context and feel of [the] sensoria" of embodied perceivers (159).

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With this conception of space animated by the projections of the body-and not simply those which the body specifically perceives and intends, Arakawa and Gins expand the affective body beyond the bounds of Henri Bergson's seminal account. Bergson argued that perception, rather than being a spiritual activity that added something to the material world, was in actuality a result of material diminution: the subtraction, from the universe of images, of precisely those that are relevant to a particular body or “center of indetermination." According to Bergson, this subtraction is necessarily informed by the affection of the body, such that there can be no perception without affection.i Yet, although Bergson understood affection to be a bodily correlate necessarily accompanying any act of perception, the affection of space by the body—and specifically by the body's imaging capability or imaging landing sites—projects affectivity beyond the physical-physiological confines of the body.

Such a projection yields what Bernard Cache (following Husserl) has called the “longitudinal" dimension of embodied perception:

Perception consists of two parts that could be called frontal and logitudinal. The frontality of perceived images would result from their action being suspended with respect to us; from the break between their solicitation and our reaction—an interval between our automatisms. The second part would then be longitudinal as we constantly expose ourselves to out-of-body images in order to always redefine the present of our perception or the variable horizon of our contractile body. According to the frontal component, we see clear articulations drawn between the objects that solicit the reactions of our solid body; while longitudinally, each of these images continually interacts with the others and with us, as in a test of resonance. For we must produce the tone of our present in order to adjust the horizon of our contractile body and find the right pitch. Unlike the great frontal articulations, our longitudinal perception constantly folds and rubs the fabric of images against itself, thus allowing the texture of things to emerge. (147)

With this beautiful image of a perceiving body nurtured by the rich texture of images surrounding it, Cache expresses the importance of a tactile and affective background to perception. As he sees it, perception cannot merely designate the virtual action of the body upon things, as if it existed in a vacuum, but must also somehow integrate the larger "milieu" of interactions within which the body necessarily finds itself located and which it experiences more as a tactile than a visual sensation.ii Accordingly, the body's capacity to act is never simply a property it possesses in isolation; it is always a recursive and constantly modulated function of its embeddedness within a rich “texture of sensation.'

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In Arakawa and Gins' terminology, the body can be said to experience the longitudinal dimension through its imaging capability. This, however, means that the longitudinal dimension is always in recursive correlation with the imaging body so that, to matter, space must enter the “variable horizon" of the body's imaging landing sites. The strict recursivity linking space and body informs the radical purpose to which Arakawa and Gins apply architecture: namely, throwing the body out of balance. Radical architecture furnishes architectural landing sites that challenge the body's "habitual and deadening" submission to “spacetime" or space as “objective" geometric extension. What makes this possible is the capacity for the organization of space—conditioned, as it is, by the body—to destabilize the body's perceptual landing sites and thereby to call into play the body's normally imperceptible imaging landing sites. By altering the body's typical architectural landing sites, radical architecture perturbs the body, compelling it to draw on its “longitudinal” sense of space in order to right itself.

That is why the two methods of subverting the body's submission to spacetime—“to cause an overload of the familiar by putting surroundings forward in a manner so concentrated that they wax unfamiliar; and to have the body be so greatly and so persistently thrown off balance that the majority of its efforts have to go entirely towards the righting of itself"—are, in the end, necessarily complements of one another (Architecture, 8). It is also why, at bottom, all architectural landing sites are hybrid—in part a perceptual and in part an imaging landing site" (21). By short-circuiting the body's perceptual grasp of space, architecture compels the body to concentrate on recalibrating itself as the correlate of its longitudinal imaging landing sites.

Arakawa and Gins' Ubiquitous Site Nagi's Ryoanji Architectural Body (1992-1994) submits its inhabitants to precisely this two-part recalibration of the body. The first of Arakawa and Gins' large-scale architectural surrounds, this work comprises a cylindrical building, 70 ft in length and 30 ft in diameter, which constitutes one-third of the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art. Ubiquitous Site is quite literally a piece of architecture that refuses to recognize the vertical conventions of architecture: rather than a floor and ceiling surrounded by walls, the piece juxtaposes two sets of symmetrical surfaces, which flow more or less seamlessly into one another (see Figure 4.4). On the bottom and the top is a curved concrete “floor” equipped with a see-saw, a bench, and a metal bar; on the two sides are rock gardens set into sand.

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