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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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Further exploration reveals another symmetry set into this space because the large restraining wall running along one border of each transition from concrete “floor" to sand “wall" diagonally divides the entire space into two mirror-image segments. Insofar as the respective symmetries built into this space exist in internal tension with one another, they place architectural landing sites within the space that function precisely to catalyze a shift from the body's habitual perceptual grasp of space as extended to an imaging or longitudinal grasp of space as affective. Here, architecture is deployed in a most radical manner: its pregiven spatial conventions are dissolved in favor of a variant deployment of gravity, one that constitutes space through the body's self-recalibration.

Yet another example, the Critical Resemblances House (1985–1986), makes even clearer why imaging landing sites (and longitudinal perception) are instrumental to the forging of the architectural body (see Figure 4.5). Once again, the operative mechanism is a superposition of alternate spatial projections which functions to destabilize the body's perceptual grasp of space and trigger its self-recalibration through "alternate landing site configurations”" made possible “by means of imaging landing sites" (Reversible Destiny, 154). The first of Arakawa and Gins’ reversible destiny houses, Critical Resemblances House is composed of three levels of “reworked labyrinth” (defined as "groups of labyrinthderived patterns of wall segments"). These levels include a rectilinear group placed on top of two curvilinear ones: one on the ground level and another in the basement.

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Entering into this edifice consisting “primarily of entrances," the body is “invited to move through composite passageways—rectilinear above, curvilinear below—often in two opposing ways at once" (258). In phenomenological terms, this results in a radical deceleration of the body's passage through space because the normal perceptually guided negotiation of space yields to a longitudinal exploration that infolds imaging potential directly into the bodily constitution of space. "It could take several hours to go from the living room to the kitchen," claims the project description. "Parts of the kitchen or the living room reappear in the bedroom or the bathroom. It might take several days to find everywhere in the house that the dining room turns up" (258). In the end, this radical deployment of architecture catalyzes nothing short of a shift in the function of space: the process of passing through perceived space yields to that of dwelling with the imaging potential of space, what Arakawa and Gins aptly gloss as the “underside of things" (259).

Arakawa and Gins'architectural experiments thus expose the bodily source of architecture in its most extreme, indeed, bare form: for them, architecture comprises nothing short of an opportunity to alter "habitual and deadening" patterns of thought by soliciting the site where these patterns originate—namely, the body as imaging potentiality. Architecture, Arakawa and Gins bluntly state, "exists to provide landing sites" (Architecture, 121). That is why, ultimately, all architecture comes from the body: "What generates landing sites? The movement and power of the body. Through where does the body fall? Not through spacetime but through landing sites. In what does architecture have its origin? In the movements and exertions of body" (150).

By tapping the potential of bodily movement to create new landing sites, architecture supports the body's concretization of spacetime, its giving of time and space as the foundation for all real experience. Arakawa and Gins'work proffers many permutations of this technical exteriorization of embodiment. Consider, for example, the Trench House, which “accommodates and embodies the body's endless desire to draw close and be in rapport with virtually everything" (105). Consider Reversible Destiny House I, which offers a means for “a person to have a sense of her own extent" (99). Or, consider Double-Horizon Public Housing, designed to demonstrate the maxim that “to form the body endlessly is the purpose of the city" (121). In all of these cases, architecture is built out of the body; it comprises an instrument to tap the body's capacity to constitute space.

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By positioning the body as the hinge that renders all space (potentially) architectural, Arakawa and Gins furnish a grounding point that will prove crucial as we explore the impact of digital design technology on space and, specifically, on the potential for space to become wearable. Their work foregrounds the role of the body as the “converter” of force into affect, thereby installing the infralinguistic, indeed infratactile, body at the very core of architectural framing.

The internal complexity of the infralinguistic body, following philosopher José Gil's conception, is precisely what informs its capacity for imaging or longitudinal perception. According to Gil, as we have seen in Chapter 1, the infralinguistic body (which, importantly, is different from the body as a biological, existential, or phantasmatic unity) mediates all forms of social power, including spatial organization and language; it does so not as a passive inscriptional surface, as in the early work of Foucault and the majority of today's theorists of the performative or socially constructed body, but rather as a wielder of power in its own right.iv Because its processing or conversion of force into affect is responsible for all meaning in the world, the infralinguistic body is instrumental in the production of all forms of social power.

As a contribution to the conceptualization of wearable space, Gil's work shows specifically how and why the body must be understood to be the source for the spatiality of space. By “exfoliating" itself into its concrete environment, the body creates spatiality as something like a field of energy:

It is only through abstract form that information resulting from the spatialization of space is integrated. Because of its anatomical and physiological structure, the human body encodes information through its sense organs in a particular way. The form that this information takes is not, therefore, that of the perceived object (taken “in itself"), but also depends on the structure of the body. In this sense, infralanguage acts as a primary encoder, ... organizing multiple and diverse sensuality into a unitary form. ... perception thus depends on the body organizing space in a certain way. Bodily space is the product of the double investment of the body by space (the information coming from the physical world) and the investment of space by the body (as a certain kind of receiver-encoder of this information).... The space of the body is made of plates, exfoliations, surfaces, and volumes that underpin the perception of things. These spaces "contain" the relations of the body to things, insofar as they are integrated in the body itself and insofar as they are translated among themselves. (130/129)8

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This spatializing power of the body exemplifies the more general capacity of the infralanguage to decode forces into affects, to convert information originating in the material environment into meaningful experiences—experiences capable of affecting the body." Because it posits the conjunction of “body proper" and “architectural surround” as the effect of a more fundamental indifferentiation between bodily exfoliation and spatial information, Gil's conception of the spatializing power of the body explains the mechanism for Arakawa and Gins' architectural body. More precisely, it restores a complex balance to the conception of the architectural body, making this latter not so much the result of a subordination of architecture to the body as a figure for the co-origination and coevolution of body and space.

3. THE “INTERIORITY” OF ARCHITECTURE

Among contemporary figures in architecture, Peter Eisenman, more than anyone else, has insisted on the irreducibility of embodiment in architecture. From his early theoretical engagement with what he termed the "motivatedness of the architectural sign" to his recent concern with "reading affective relationships in the somatic experience" of architecture, Eisenman has struggled with the embodied constraints endemic to architecture. Within the trajectory of this struggle, the digital occupies a privileged place. The formal liberation facilitated by digital design techniques fundamentally reconfigures the correlation of architecture and embodiment, transforming what originated as an indelible material constraint cosubstantial with the “architectural sign" into a dynamic aspect of the architectural framing of space. By means of a digital conversion, Eisenman's concern with the intrinsic embodiment of architecture has morphed into an embrace of the (human) body as, to borrow Gil's terminology, a converter of (spatial) forces into embodied affects.

To understand the significance of this transformation—and to appreciate why it renders Eisenman a singular figure among contemporary digitally-inspired architects--we need to revisit Eisenman's career-instigating insight into the specificity of the architectural sign. It is fairly well known, if little understood, that Eisenman distinguishes the architectural sign from all other regimes of signs on account of its motivatedness"—the fact that it not only serves as a sign, but always also embodies its architectural meaning or function. The architectural sign can be considered to be motivated because the “sign and signified are one and the same thing":

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In architecture, a structural element such as a column is both a real column and the sign of a column. In language, on the other hand, the word apple is the sign of a real apple, but the real apple is also the sign of something else, such as the "Big Apple" or the sign of temptation in the Garden of Eden. There is already a metaphoric and therefore representational condition in the object apple that reaches beyond the object itself. Thus the real apple has both a conventional relationship to the sign apple and also becomes a sign of this other metaphoric relationship. Unlike the real apple, which is removed from its sign, the physical column is simultaneously an object and the sign of the object. It is a more complex reality than the apple. Initially because the column is a sign of itself, it can be considered as an indexical sign in that it receives its motivation from an internal, prior condition—the interiority of its being.º

Unlike the linguistic sign, which acquires a degree of freedom and creativity from the nonidentity of its referential and signifying functions, the architectural sign is constrained by a conflation of reference and signification, by the fact that it is what it signifies. A column or a wall is unavoidably a column or a wall—a material structural element of architecture—at the same time that it is a sign of that structural element within the discursive system of architecture.

This special status of the architectural sign holds an altogether ambivalent status for Eisenman; it is at once the material constraint architecture must struggle against and the condition of its identity as a cultural practice. It is only by bearing this ambivalence in mind that we will be able to grasp the complexity of what emerges as the key term of Eisenman's theory: namely, the "interiority" of architecture. Variously configured at different times during Eisenman's long career, this term accords architecture a kind of internal, though certainly evolving, unity and includes among its most important elements the “targets' of Eisenman's early practice: most notably, the geometric grid and the notion of grounding.

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Indeed, Eisenman's career--at least up to the point when he began to deploy digital design techniques—can be summarized as a directed struggle against these elements of architectural interiority. In his House projects and his early institutional commissions, Eisenman's aim was to confront specific elements of that interiority in order to transform them from within—to preserve their architectural specificity in the very act of critiquing and modifying their signifying potential.

The advent of digital design in architecture punctuates Eisenman's ongoing struggle with the evolving interiority of architecture in a most significant way: it allows Eisenman to refunctionalize embodiment entirely, transforming it from an indelible aspect of the architectural sign (hence a kind of negative, if enabling, constraint) into an agent in the experience of architecture (hence a creative capacity rooted in the bodily spacing of architecture). This theoretical displacement from the embodiment of the architectural object to embodiment in the experience of architecture is signaled by a shift in Eisenman's ambivalence toward interiority. In the earlier, "predigital" phase of his career, Eisenman tended to view interiority as a problem to be deconstructed; in the aftermath of the digital revolution, by contrast, his emphasis falls squarely on defending interiority as that which gives architecture its material specificity.

Nowhere does this shift appear more pronounced than in Eisenman's criticism of the currently ascendant generation of younger architects, many of whom he helped to train:

Reacting against an understanding of the diagram that characterized it as an apparently essentialist tool, a new generation, fueled by new computer techniques and a desire to escape its perceived Oedipal anxieties ... is today proposing a new theory of the diagram based partly on Gilles Deleuze's interpretation of Foucault's recasting of the diagram as “a series of machinic forces," and partly on their own cybernetic hallucinations.... [This theory] challenges both the traditional geometric bases of the diagram and the sedimented history of architecture, and in so doing ... question[s] any relation of the diagram to architecture's anteriority or interiority. (Diagram, 30)

Odd as it sounds given Eisenman's own theoretical debt to Deleuze in all of his work from the '90s, this criticism must be understood as a retrospective reaffirmation of the architect's basic commitment to interiority, even at those moments when it contradicted his primarily transitional, theoretical attachments.vi

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What is ultimately at stake in this theoretical différend with the younger generation is the potential for affęct to play a crucial constructive role in the formal genesis of space and, with it, the potential transformation of architecture into a process of embodied spatializing. For Eisenman, affect is the vehicle for the transfiguration of embodiment, and, as the conclusion of Diagram Diaries makes clear, its emergence as the crucial element of a new conception of architecture's interiority corresponds to a digitally facilitated metamorphosis of the diagram:

The diagram has come full circle from the strategies of reading to the tactics of visceral experience. At the same time, the diagram seems to disappear from the built work. In projects such as the Virtual House, the Staten Island Institute, and the IIT student center, it becomes more or less a virtual entity, rather than being made explicit in the projects. This is because the diagram becomes more of an engine in the projects rather than something which transforms itself into a physical reality. The external diagram provided a series of formal relationships and organizations that when given form, structure, and function in an architectural context, did not permit these forms to be understood as coming from a known interiority—that is, a sedimented relationship between form and function. Lastly, and perhaps of equal importance, these diagrams shifted the focus of the reading strategy from its origin in formal relationships, and then linguistic and textual relationships, to the possibility of reading affective relationships in the somatic experience itself. (208–209)

In its digital instantiation, the diagram functions precisely to interrupt the conflation of sign and being (or sign and embodiment) that defined architectural interiority for Eisenman. Because it allows form to emerge from an architectural context without its being dictated by architecture's preinscribed interiority, the digital diagram provides nothing less than a vehicle for the transformation of that interiority. Effectively, the forms it generates are spared the condition of having to embody the things of which they are signs and thus freed to be embodied otherwise—that is, for Eisenman at least, to be embodied through the bodily affect that they catalyze.

This shift in the tenor of interiority is, I suggest, just what Eisenman means when he contrasts the indexicality of affect with that of architecture's traditional structural elements: the diagram, he contends,

attempts to unmotivate place, to find within place space as a void, as a negativity or nonpresence to be filled up with a new figuration of the sign. This new figuration is no longer within a semiotic system but is rather an index of affect, and, as affect, the void becomes a sign of not-presence, and thus the beginning of the transgression of the metaphysics of presence ... (215)

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By confronting us with a space that does not signify according to architecture's traditional interiority, diagrammatic “figuration" indexes something else—namely, the body—which it brings into the fold of architecture's spatializing activity. Viewed schematically, the diagrammatic process thus divides into two stages: first, it generates forms which disturb architecture's interiority; second, it triggers an affective reaction in the body that, in a certain sense, fills in the void of interiority left in its wake. If the former stage triggers a crisis of figuration, the latter stage invests the body with the infralinguistic, infratactile capacity to convert the force of this crisis into the somatic experience of affect. It literally produces a body-in-code.

We might say then that Eisenman's interest in the computer is more operational than ontological, that it forms part of his ongoing effort to disrupt the singular “motivatedness" of the architectural sign. "Digital information is a new kind of sign system which is no longer mechanical; it produces the possibilities of separation"—separation, that is, of the sign and its being.1º Far from being the first “machinic architect,' as Alejandro Zaera-Polo has dubbed him,11 Eisenman might better be considered the first affective architect: Not only does he subordinate the function of the computer to the genesis of affective space, but he also correlates affection with the body in a manner that is anathema to the Deleuzean context so central for the younger generation of architects and theorists.

Indeed, Eisenman's subordination of the computer exposes the fundamental limitation of the machinic perspective of the neo-Deleuzeans: their utter failure to account for the specificity of exteriority, to explain how it bears concretely on the embodied experience of architecture. These latter are simply unable to take the crucial "third step":

Neither the process of the machinic nor any computer program can a priori produce such a trope [a trope in architectural space]. This is what young architects, weaned on computers, fail to realize. Computers may produce blobs and other self-generated formless aggregations, but these are in and of themselves not any more architectural than they are graphic or illustrational.... Thus, a third step in the process takes a turn away from an aspect of the machinic, its possibility of extraction, towards its more arbitrary and aleatory nature, by taking the blurred two-dimensional diagram of superpositions and projecting it into the third dimension.12

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At stake in this “third step” is nothing less than the difference between a formal operation like folding and an interstitial process like spacing. As Eisenman sees it, the machinic perspective of his younger colleagues is insufficient on two, closely related counts: it only deals with the idea of becoming “as a state of the object” and it “does not differentiate between forming and spacing" (21). Because it leaves the traditional subordination of spacing to forming undisturbed, the machinic process is unable to disturb the traditional embodiment of architecture.

By contrast, precisely because it “remains untheorized” and without pregiven “value systems," spacing holds the potential to (re)embody architecture differently:

In the context of architecture, spacing ... begins to suggest a possible figure/figure relationship which in turn suggests a new possibility for the interstitial. Spacing produces an other condition of the interstitial. The interstitial proposes a dissonant space of meaning. Where figure/ground was an abstraction, figure/figure is a figural condition that is no longer necessarily abstract. It is a space as a matrix of forces and sense. It is affective in that it requires the body ... for its understanding. The interstitial, then, is the result of a process of extraction which produces a figural as opposed to a formal trope, and it exists as a condition of spacing as opposed to forming, as a presence in an absence, that is between two conditions of figure as opposed to figure and ground. (32)

Derived from Deleuze's concept of the figural,vii Eisenman's conception of spacing transforms the problematic of motivatedness from a restrictive into an enabling constraint, thereby transfiguring the experiential horizon of architecture. As the means of liberating architecture from the task of discovering a figure in the ground, form in the preformed, spacing exposes the forces inhabiting spatial forms and opens them up to an alternate processing by the body—to the bodily conversion into affect that, extending Gil's analysis, we have theorized as the labor of infratactility.

The process of spacing speaks to the singularity of architecture as the quintessential art of framing for our time. Rather than catalyzing the production of an affective space in the body, as the most interesting digital art (arguably) does,viii digitally generated architecture marshals the spatializing capacity of the affective body toward the constitution of new kinds of spaces—interstitial spaces. Eisenman's conception of spacing thus amounts to a plea to conceive architecture as a machine for producing longitudinal experience in the sense defined previously. As a recipe for reconfiguring architectural interiority, spacing functions precisely by soliciting an affective embodiment that exceeds the spatial bounds of the organic body. It thus deploys the longitudinal dimension as a means to access the space “in-between" empirical space and bodily imaging potential. In sum, spacing enlists the longitudinal dimension of the affective body in the larger process through which architecture is constituted, coupling it to a longitudinal dimension of space from which it is inseparable.

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