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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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4. INTERNAL RESONANCE

By thus incorporating bodily imaging potential, architecture trades in an interiority based on preexistent properties for an emergent “internal resonance" generated from the architectural framing of the material flux. As theorized by French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon (one of Deleuze's significant influences), internal resonance designates the capacity for certain systems to mediate between disparate levels of being—that is, to process potential energy (“the necessary condition for a higher order of magnitude") into organized and distributed matter (“the necessary condition for a lower order of magnitude").ix,13 Specifically, internal resonance corresponds to a living system's capacity to bring disparate orders of magnitude into communication and thus to maintain the metastability that is the precondition of its ongoing individuation:

The living being is also the being that results from an initial individuation and amplifies this individuation, not at all the machine to which it is assimilated functionally by the model of cybernetic mechanism. In the living being, individuation is brought about by the individual itself ... The living being resolves its problems not only by adapting itself—which is to say, by modifying its relationship to its milieu (something a machine is equally able to do)-—but by modifying itself through the invention of new internal structures and its complete self-insertion into the axiomatic of organic problems. The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system and also a system that individuates itself. The internal resonance and the translation of its relation to itself into information are all contained in the living being's system. (305)

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As a form of permanent individuation internal to and constitutive of a system, internal resonance offers a concept of unity that does not rely on internal closure; specifically, it allows for the maintenance of an optimal level of creativity (heterogenesis) at the same time that it ensures the maintenance of the system (autopoiesis). Put another way, internal resonance permits a system to maintain its life-giving "communication' with the metastability of the material flux while at the same time giving the mechanism for a system to individuate itself—that is, to achieve a certain degree of autonomy vis-à-vis that metastability.

Although it may stop short of rendering architecture a living system, internal resonance accords it a capacity that is not available to it on the machinic paradigm of today's cyberartists: the capacity to transform its interiority by opening it to forces in the environment or, more precisely, by encompassing the body as a locus of such force.x In this way, internal resonance answers to the problematic that architecture faces in our contemporary informational culture: can and how can it maintain a minimal autonomy or system closure even as it embraces the “active, informational penetration of matter" carried out through the microchip and the development of so-called “smart" materials?¹4

Eisenman's particular recipe for internal resonance—the conjunction of digital deformation and affective bodily spacing-addresses the softness" that, for architectural theorist Sanford Kwinter, has come to define the contemporary material domain, "a world where everything flows seamlessly together in real time" (227). Specifically, Eisenman's reconfiguration of architectural interiority through the internalization of forces and their conversion into affect articulates a "soft system"—a system “driven by its very softness" or openness to the environment, by its capacity to move, to differentiate internally, to absorb, transform, and exchange information with its surroundings, to develop complex interdependent sub- and supersystems whose global interaction ... creates secondary effects of damping and self-regulation" (210–211).

The emergent result of subsystems of digital deformation and bodily affect, Eisenman's soft system produces internal resonance specifically by introducing two concrete "delays" into the material flux: the extrusion of a third dimension (the figural) and the conversion of this matrix of forces into affect. This conjunction of digital and infralinguistic, indeed infratactile, translations functions to process the material flux in a way that parts company with the monist ontology central to the Deleuzean model embraced by younger architectural practitionersxi Insofar as it selects forces and solicits their bodily conversion into affects, architecture is better seen as an intervention into the material flux designed to trigger new affections than as a “phenomenological integration of the human nervous system into ... multilevel, multiscaled networks and environments."15

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Accordingly, far from calling on architecture to “become computationally coextensive with the aggregate's unfolding, so that all reaction is instantaneous" (81), we must correlate its concrete task as a material practice in the information age with the longitudinal indetermination of the body—the way that the double delay of the digital and the affective allows the internalization of interactions with the material aggregate to constitute and maintain architecture's identity-conferring internal resonance. Does not just such an imperative motivate Eisenman's recent interest in a “new organicity” built on computation, “a new idea of flow and movement, which is a model of self-organizing, self-generating systems of organization"? (Eisenman, “Architecture," 110).

5. A NEW ORGANICISM

The correlation of computation and organicism becomes particularly pronounced in projects in which affect comes most centrally into play (Eisenman, you will recall, mentioned three in particular: The Virtual House, the ITT Proposal, and the Staten Island Institute). This correlation thus illustrates how the spatializing of the body and the affectivity that is its index are empowered by the computer-facilitated vectorization of space that has, following Eisenman's understanding in "Visions Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media, literally transformed our lifeworld: "The electronic paradigm directs a powerful challenge to architecture because it defines reality in terms of media and simulation, it values appearance over existence, what can be seen over what is. Not the seen as we formerly knew it, but rather a seeing that can no longer interpret."16

Not only does digital technology thus dematerialize architectural embodiment, but it also displaces vision from its privileged position as the foundation of architecture's interiority: “Architecture, unlike any other discipline, concretized vision. The hierarchy inherent in all architectural space begins as a structure for the mind's eye.... The interiority of architecture more than any other discourse defined a hierarchy of vision articulated by inside and outside” (86). In phenomenological terms, this transformation involves nothing short of an eclipse of the role of vision and a shift to a perceptual modality anchored in affect, proprioception, and tactility—anchored, that is, in the bodily infrastructure out of which vision emerges.xii In architectural terms, this same transformation calls on us to struggle against the specter of interiority under yet another guise: the longstanding privilege of vision and the one-point perspectival system upon which it is based.

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To grasp how the vectorization of space triggers such a phenomenological and architectural revolution, let us turn to Eisenman's project for the Virtual House competition (1997). According to Luca Galafaro, one of Eisenman's assistants, this was the first of Eisenman's projects to use vectors in the place of hand-drawn models.¹7 In mathematics, vectors are quantities "having direction as well as magnitude, denoted by a line drawn from its original to its final position" (OED). Because they have direction and density, vectors express forces or potentialities, rather than simply representing something already known. When they are used as the basis for architectural modeling, vectors liberate the architect from the need to convert a mental conception of space into a hand-rendered, axial drawing or modelization. Accordingly, vector modelization frees architecture from its rootedness in static spatial conditions: by injecting time into space, vectors unfold space as a field of intensity, a spatial field coequivalent to the matrix of potential connections it affords.

Virtual House was based on the memory of the spatial concept from Eisenman's House IV (1971), for which he wrote a text entitled "The Virtual House" (1987). Effectively, Virtual House deploys vector modelization to actualize the potential of the project that Eisenman considers his "first purely diagrammatic project"xiii and that Kurt Foster, in the Jury discussion to the Virtual House competition, describes as the summation of Eisenman's early House projects, where the "cube itself does not become the site of operations but a cube separated from itself."18 In Virtual House, the potential field of interactions among the nine cubes of House IV is actualized via the expression of each potential connection as a vector.xiv Each vector unfolds a field of influence in which its virtual movement through time is actualized; this actualization is, in turn, visualized through the effect of each vector on the lines within its sphere of influence. In this way, the lines, with their constitutive geometric properties, become forces, and, because they emerge through a set of arbitrarily assigned constraints operating on one another as local forces, the traces left by these lines record the condition of each vector within the space (see Figure 4.6).

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The “abstract machine" of Virtual House comprises two components arbitrarily constrained by parameters introduced by the architectural team. Thus, in a first operation, two of the original nine cubes are isolated from the rest and placed “side by side”; the computer reads each side of each cube from corner to corner, recording the traces of each reading. In a second operation, this process is repeated with the same two cubes “constrained" by one another; here the computer reads each process of constraint, again recording their traces. In this way, the interrelations between cubes become vectorial expressions of their potential connections within each operation and, importantly, across the two operations.

This process could be repeated for all permutations of the nine cubes and indeed (so long as new constraints could be found) potentially to infinity; however, the arbitrary selection of two cubes and two operations serves the architectural team's stated purpose to constitute “a single moment in the multiplicity of virtuality." This single moment bears witness to the possibility of deploying vector modelization to supersaturate a space with interstitial or figural relations because, despite its primary function as a theoretical exercise, what is at stake here is the machinic enumeration of potential connections within a spatial field or, put another way, a demonstration that space (at least as modeled with the aid of the computer) necessarily enfolds its virtual permutations (see Figure 4.7).

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Its Deleuzean vocabulary notwithstanding, the project description of Virtual House seems to embrace the virtual more operationally than ontologically, as a means to liberate architectural space from the constraint of interiority rather than as an autonomous philosophical concept. Although this is already apparent in the arbitrary restriction of the machine to two cubes and two operations, it surfaces most forcefully in the necessity for the machine to stop by itself, at that point when the constraints produce a state of reduced activity or, more precisely, "when the differences in the system are so minimal that they are no longer perceptible” (23).

Effectively, the vector modelization of Virtual House maps the two cubes onto one another through two operations, and then maps these mappings onto each other so that the entirety of interstitial spaces contained within their differences is absorbed into the system. The result is a spatial form burgeoning with its potentiality, a spatial form that encompasses into itself the temporal unfoldings of all of its possible connections—in short, a “formal expression of the virtual." If this result makes it possible to “model in real space the actual time and movement of the abstract machine relations," this possibility bears the marks of architecture's singularity and its difference from philosophy. Only by freezing a segment or cross-section of the virtual material flux (in Kwinter's neo-Deleuzean sense) and exhausting its specific virtuality (the repertoire of potential interstitial connections it contains) can architecture actualize the virtual (see Figure 4.8). Put somewhat differently, it is only by actualizing the virtual that architecture can deploy it.x

This is precisely how project designer Ingeborg Rocker understands the necessity for the machine to stop:

When we talk about stopping the process, it is important that we don't limit architecture to its physicality, because architecture is also about the process within the building, how it will be inhabited. If we stop the process at a certain moment, we create spaces that maintain the process or its programmatic aspects. (Rocker, in Foster, "Jury Discussion," 36, emphasis added)

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For Rocker, the architectural constraint of the virtual is directly correlated with the capacity of embodied affect to transform architecture's interiority.

This observation returns us to our opening discussion of the singularity of architecture within the field of digital media, its privileged status as the art of the frame. We can now see that architecture must be differentiated from other aesthetic engagements with new media precisely because its vocation is to frame space for inhabitation: architecture alone deploys digital media to conjoin spatial form and embodied inhabitation. This vocation is inscribed into Virtual House through the architectural team's embrace of“incompletion” as the operative element of this confrontation of spatial form and embodiment. In Virtual House, the supersaturating of space through vector modelization yields a spatial form containing a field of forces: the result of a certain delimitation (and protoactualization) of the virtual, these forces can only be actualized as affects through the embodied inhabitation of this spatial form, which can be said to complete the space (though only provisionally), leaving it open to other affective responses and potential completions.

Through this coupling of formal incompletion and embodied inhabitation the virtual comes to infiltrate architecture; as against a simple and literal materialization of the immaterial, at issue here is a “working of architectural space that affects subject and object." The payoff is the coevolution of response and form so that the necessity of stopping the virtual at the level of form has as a necessary correlate finding a way to continue the virtual by other means—that is, through the affective inhabitation triggered by digitally synthesized spatial form. That is why the building's “realization" is the mode in which it "continues to become" (Rocker, "The Virtual," 23).

If Virtual House articulates the theoretical program for such a coevolution, Eisenman's project for the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences puts it into practice (see Figure 4.9). The project is an ambitious attempt to cross-pollinate two architectural institutions—the ferry terminal and the museum—by breaking down architectural barriers that have long served to separate them:

Our idea is to take an established institution, the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences and, instead of locating it in a nineteenth-century manner at the Snug Harbor parkland, place it in a transformed and enlarged museum facility on top of the ferry terminal. In doing so, the waiting room will open up to become the atrium for the museum. Instead of the traditional museum experience, we propose a museum concept with several different and flexible museum venues. Thus the museum will house interactive displays of science and technology based on the Institute's permanent collection, a "kunsthalle" for large traveling exhibitions, and possibly a New York Sports Hall of Fame. In addition, there will be an IMAXlike theater, educational facilities, shops and restaurants available for all users of the terminal. Thus a new dimension of an intermodal facility would be introduced, bringing art, commerce, and travel into a new synthesis.19

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In the more theoretical terms proper to Eisenman's architectural discourse, the project aims to deform what is perhaps the most fundamental element of architecture's interiority—the ground—by submitting it to the complex and contradictory forces of mobility that permeate this site. (According to Eisenman, the Staten Island ferry terminal is quintessentially "a place of movement": a nodal point for bus, car, and ferry transport used by over 18,000,000 people annually.) In his project, Eisenman channels these forces of mobility into a fluid spatial form that confronts the two kinds of places—static museum and dynamic ferry terminal—with one another and thus undermines the preexistent spatial interiority characteristic of each (see Figure 4.10).

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