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# Bodies in code  interfaces with digital media

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That her interest in this context complicates and ultimately displaces the desire for total vision ultimately explains why the installation literally deconstructs the modernist creed of architectural transparency," as Dimendberg suggests. It undermines the ideology of unmediated vision, of the picture window, "by laying bare its most fundamental premise: the body of the observer as it contemplates and is framed by architecture" (75). The Desiring Eye, then, moves from the questioning of the purity—the nobility—of vision staged in Slow House to a reckoning with the consequences of its contamination: namely, the exposure of embodiment as the “origin" of all architectural framing.

This exposure is just what is at stake in Diller + Scofidio's Blur Building, where the monumental framing of nature typical of the world exposition as an institution is undermined and displaced in favor of a framing via the slow time of bodily experience. As critic Ashley Schafer points out, in the Blur project as in the Slow House, technologies "produce nothing, or at least nothing that does not already exist; rather, they simply reframe the existing view by visually and temporally displacing it."27 Not only does the project involve a shift from architectural interiority to exteriority, with the embodied spectator becoming the generator of“wearable space," but also, even more centrally to our concerns here, it foregrounds the imbrication of architecture with the digital, as Diller + Scofidio explain:

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The media event is integrated with the enveloping fog. Our objective is to weave together architecture and electronic technologies, yet exchange the properties of each for the other. Thus, architecture would dematerialize and electronic media, normally ephemeral, would become palpable in space. Both would require sophisticated technologies that would be entirely invisible, leaving only their effects. (Blur, 44)

The transduction of nature and technics exposed in earlier works like Slow House here becomes the very basis for a heightening of the creativity of embodiment. Accordingly, as the visual domination of space diminishes, the capacity of digital media to catalyze new embodied inhabitations of space, and thus new embodiments of architecture, grows. This, I suggest, is why Diller + Scofidio “needed technology to amplify the atmosphere of uncertainty, to technologize climate further, as they put it.28 By vastly speeding up and artificially punctuating the fog environment's recursive self-regulation, Diller + Scofidio create an experiential atmosphere conducive to the exposure of embodied framing, of wearable space, as the origin of architecture.xxiii

A "defense mechanism against surveillance," as Aaron Betsky puts it, the technique of blur thus emerges as Diller + Scofidio's most recent strategy to exteriorize architectural interiority, to foreground it against the very context of incorporated conventionality that gives life to the social, not to mention formal, codings of architecture.29 Blur, in short, allows habit to be suspended so that the unexpected and the unpredictable can emerge. That is why, for Betsky, Diller + Scofidio's ambition is

to use the techniques of blur to make constructions in which one is never quite sure what one is experiencing, where one is, or how one should behave. The codes of behavior that tell us what to want and what to buy no longer work, as we don't know what we are meant to do. (35)

That this suspension of knowledge becomes an opportunity for creative embodiment serves to link Diller + Scofidio's “embodied conceptual art" to the corpuses of work we have explored previously. In perfect alignment with the architects' view of their project as part art and part architecture, we can place the Blur Building somewhere in the middle of the continuum stretching from Arakawa and Gins' instrumental (or artistic) deployment of architecture to throw the body out of balance to Eisenman's vectorial liberation of the interstitial potential of space to trigger affective response.

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Like Arakawa and Gins, Diller + Scofidio deploy architecture as a means to catalyze a fundamental shift in the sensory economy of the body, from a frontal, visually dominant modality to a longitudinal modality that draws heavily on both hearing and touch, as well as properly bodily senses like proprioception. In contrast to Arakawa and Gins, they do this not only to uncover a truth about the body, but also to bring out the bodily component of spacing—the way that architecture, at least in this age of medial fluidity, must open itself out to the body as an environmental source of heterogenesis, of architectural exteriority, that is crucial to its ongoing individuation or internal resonance.

Like Eisenman, Diller + Scofidio invest space with the potential for triggering longitudinal experience, such that the shift in the body's sensory economy cannot be said to ensue solely from powers contained within the body, but rather to be the result of an encounter between the body and the longitudinal dimensions of space released through the crossover of architecture and electronic technologies. In contrast to Eisenman, however, this encounter of bodily affectivity and interstitial spacing is far more immediate, something that can be experienced explicitly within the confines of the bodily inhabitation of the blur. Indeed, in the Blur Building, space becomes wearable not as some abstract correlate of a distinct figural liberation of the interstitial, but rather as the condition for effectuating the interpenetration of architecture and media that is at once its primary phenomenological and architectural goal: the dematerialization of architecture into “atmosphere' and the becoming-palpable of electronics (the digital) as “habitable medium."

For these reasons, Diller + Scofidio's Blur Building is the quintessential expression of wearable space as a phenomenological and architectural condition directly tied to the massive infiltration of digital media into the contemporary lifeworld. It puts into action, on the cusp between architectural (in)form and the affective body, the program of sensory deterritorialization—specifically, the dethronement of vision—championed, in various ways, by Arakawa and Gins and by Eisenman. And it does so with a sensory immediacy that has the effect of inverting the function of architectural presence, transforming it into a source of affective intensity capable of making space wearable, not as an abstract design condition, but as a concrete phenomenological reality.

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Accordingly, whereas Arakawa and Gins view sensory deterritorialization as a more or less ahistorical potential that inheres within the body and Eisenman conceives it as a specific correlate of a more general ontological shift in the materiality of culture, Diller + Scofidio explore it as a necessary consequence of the historically unprecedented interpenetration of body and media. They thereby bring a level of concreteness to Eisenman's keen understanding of the correlation between electronic media and a postvisual, affective phenomenology. What is at stake in the Blur Building is not simply a “seeing that can no longer interpret,’ but rather a wholesale short circuiting of the role of vision, such that the affective body is literally compelled to “space the void” (Eisenman, “Visions Unfolded," 84).

The Blur Building, in short, deploys the deformation of architectural form—the displacement of visible, planimetric enclosure by the amorphous, atmospheric fog enclosure—as a means to render the impact of the digital revolution experientially salient, to give us a sensory correlate – spatialized affectivity – to its deformations of space. Recalling the twin epigraphs to this chapter, we can now see why, precisely, the conjunction of a complete fluidity, respectively, between body and media (Picard) and body and space (Novak) allows space to become wearable. Although media make space flexible and invisible, it is embodiment that allows mediated space to be experienced sensorily, precisely as space made wearable.

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The Digital Topography of House of Leaves

Zampanò only wrote “heater." The word “water” back there [in The Navidson Record]—I added that. Now there's an admission, eh?

Hey, not fair, you cry. Hey, hey, fuck you, I say.1

For Mark Danielewski, perhaps the central burden of contemporary authorship is to reaffirm the novel as a relevant—indeed newly relevant— cultural form:

Books don't have to be so limited. They can intensify informational content and experience. Multiple stories can lie side by side on the page.... Words can also be colored and those colors can have meaning. How quickly pages are turned or not turned can be addressed. Hell, pages can be tilted, turned upside down, even read backwards.... But here's the joke. Books have had this capacity all along.... Books are remarkable constructions with enormous possibilities.... But somehow the analogue powers of these wonderful bundles of paper have been forgotten. Somewhere along the way, all its possibilities were denied. I'd like to see that perception change. I'd like to see the book reintroduced for all it really is.²

House of Leaves, the novel Danielewski wrote to reintroduce the book for all it really is, is a tour de force in typographic and media experimentation with the printed word. From its cover page and initial inset to its enigmatic final page, the novel defies standard expectations in a rich variety of ways. Making pseudoserious reference to the blue highlighting of hotlinks on webpages, the blue ink of the word "house" in the work's title transforms this keyword into something like a portal to information located elsewhere within and beyond the novel's frame. The color collage comprising the first inset page juxtaposes what looks to be a randomly selected group of common-use objects with snippets of manuscript copy as if to suggest some underlying equivalence between them. The final page—curiously situated after the index and credits page—bears the inscription “Yggdrasil" in the form of a “T” followed by four lines of text and a fifth line containing a single, large font, bold "O." A reference to the giant tree supporting the universe in Norse Mythology, the page startles in its apparent randomness, reinforcing the cosmological closure effected by the novel it culminates, yet shedding no new light on just what should be made of it.

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Although these examples begin to expose the medial basis informing the novel's typographic play, they in no way exhaust its engagement with media. (The adjective “medial," by now adopted as a standard term in media studies, will here mark the specificity of analyses concerned with the materiality of the medium and of media generally.) Indeed, as we shall see, these examples form so many symptoms of what can only be understood (following Danielewski's aim to reintroduce the print book for all it really is) to be a media-technical, and not simply a stylistic or formal, shift in the function of the novel.

As Kate Hayles has argued, House of Leaves is obsessed with technical mediation and the complex media ecology that has been introduced and expanded since the introduction of technical recording in the nineteenth century. The broad outlines of a theory of the media revolution in literature have already been laid out in the work of self-proclaimed "media scientist" Friedrich Kittler, who, in Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, has catalogued the disenfranchisement of literature—its "devolution" from the exalted role of universal medium" to a more humble vocation as one medium among others in a hybrid media ecology consisting of audio recording, image recording, and now digitization.i Yet, where Kittler seems content to identify the specific media forms—gramophone, film, and typewriter— as three broadly similar recording apparatuses, Danielewski takes pains to circumscribe the constitutive limitations of each and, in line with his previously stated aim, to champion the superiority of print.

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Paradoxical as it sounds, the privilege of literature stems less from its capacity to ape the flexibility of technical media than from the novel's longstanding correlation with the body (the exemplar of which would certainly have to be Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel). By updating this correlation in the context of today's complex and hybrid media ecology, Danielewski manages to submit the novel to a formal transformation, one that compels its adaptation to our allegedly "posthermeneutical" informational culture. It does so by treating the novel as a body subject to development and deformation.

In the broadest sense, such an updating of the novel's tie to the body is precisely what is at stake in its central thematic engagement—with the topological figure of a house that is larger inside than outside. The effort to document or otherwise make sense of this physically impossible object generates a series of mediations which, as Hayles has shown, stand in for the void of referentiality at the novel's core. Lacking the force of indexicality, these mediations can only acquire the force of conviction by eliciting embodied reactions in their fictional and actual readers. They garner their rhetorical effect by triggering what I shall call "reality affects."

The conjunction of the novel's host of mediations and the reader's embodied response comprises yet another type of body-in-code, one that is robustly distributed between the embodied selective framing of the singular reader and the peculiar embodiment of mediation that characterizes the novel in our contemporary culture. As a frame for the nonrepresentational impact of the digital, the novel furnishes a source of exteriorization for the embodied reader, taking her outside and beyond the scope of habitual existence and thereby allowing her to experience something new, something that would not be otherwise experientiable.

In this way, House of Leaves not only exemplifies the most general sense of virtuality as a dimension of human life—virtuality as the power of the imagination or, better, of the imaginary (following Cornelius Castoriadis³) but also specifies how language forms an important medium, perhaps the medium, for the actualization of this virtuality. By subordinating its orthographic function—recording something that exists elsewhere, in absentia— to its role as a trigger for the production of meaning via embodiment, House of Leaves exemplifies language's capacity to produce new images understood as material realities in their own right rather than as representations of something else, following Paul Ricoeur's conception. Indeed, the process of embodied response catalyzed by House of Leaves perfectly exemplifies how, as Ricoeur puts it, the "emergence of new meanings in the sphere of language generates an emergence of new images."4

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More specifically, House of Leaves demonstrates how embodiment furnishes a medium for the passage between language and image, and thus how new linguistic formations—here, the deformation of the novel's body—can yield new experiences and thereby, as Ricoeur puts it, shape reality." By tapping the power of the imaginary, of the imaginary as a bodily power, House of Leaves thus catalyzes the genesis of a myriad of bodies-in-code, each one corresponding to the concrete actualization of the text by a specific reader. Here, indeed, the role of code as a source of exteriority becomes synonymous with the role of the imaginary as an excess of embodiment, as a surplus intrinsic to individuation that furnishes the source for new acts of embodiment

Given the novel's obsession with media and mediation, it is hardly surprising that the first of its many mediations is a film, The Navidson Record, compiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson from videos made by him, his wife, Karen Green, and several of the characters involved in exploring the new house they moved into in order to begin afresh—the curious, “warped" house on Ash Tree Lane that turns out to be larger on the inside than on the outside. The events captured by this film come to us through the mediation of one Zampanò, a Borges-like figure, apparently named after the protagonist in Fellini's La Strada, who possesses a diabolical penchant for mixing real and fictional sources in an apparent bid to garner verisimilitude for his enterprise. (House of Leaves, in consequence, is littered with footnotes, an indeterminate number of which are pure inventions of its author.)

Left unfinished at his death, Zampanò's narrative in turn comes to us through yet another layer of mediation: that of the young tattoo artist's assistant, Johnny Truant, who assembles the pieces of the manuscript into a cogent order, and, in the process, adds a series of footnotes and appended documents that detail the destabilizing effects of the narrative on his already confused personal life. In yet another iteration of this framing structure, all of this material is said to come to us thanks to the efforts of a group of mysterious “editors," who have taken the work of Zampanò and Truant that initially—or so we are told—circulated on the Internet, and bound it together in book form, adding supplementary material allegedly worthy of the title of "second edition."

As if this bewildering proliferation of mediations were not enough, several further twists intensify the referential void at the novel's center.

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In his introduction to the manuscript, Truant gives voice to his suspicions that the film does not exist:

As I fast discovered, Zampanò's entire project is about a film which doesn't exist. You can look, I have, but no matter how long you search you will never find The Navidson Record in theaters or video stores. Furthermore, most of what's said by famous people has been made up. I tried contacting all of them. Those that took the time to respond told me they had never heard of Will Navidson let alone Zampanò. (xix-xx)ii

This mind-numbing evidentiary quandary is compounded by the even more startling revelation that Zampanò was "blind as a bat" and thus physically incapable of performing the job of mediation he has allegedly performed (xxi). Finally, jumping up a logical level, it has recently been suggested that Zampanò's identity as the main character in Fellini's La Strada makes him a fictional character within the fictional world of the novel, a fiction to the second degree.i In the wake of this thorough imbrication of the fictional and the real, any effort to mark this separation is, in principle, impossible.

Far more important, however, than the epistemological hurdles these twists introduce are the ontological indifference underlying them and the definitive departure that it signals away from the tired postmodern agonies bound up with the figure of simulation. It is as if mediation has become so ubiquitous and inexorable in the world of the novel (which is, after all, our world too) that it simply is reality, is the bedrock upon which our investment and belief in the real can be built. “See,' Truant announces with the confidence of embodied hindsight, "the irony is it makes no difference that the documentary at the heart of this book is fiction. Zampanò knew from the get go that what's real or isn't real doesn't matter here. The consequences are the same" (xx).

Far from an invitation to wax poetic about the simulacral pseudofoundation of contemporary media culture, this deceptively flippant maxim betrays a disturbing willingness on Truant's part to accept the waning of the orthographic function of recording. As the reader soon discovers, this willingness-far from betokening a curiosity stemming from Truant's (admittedly curious) psychological profile—is simply a necessary consequence of the novel's play with mediation and undermining of any "sacred text." From Truant's sustained alterations of the text to the reported interventions of the unidentified editors, from Zampanò's impossible perceptual acts to (Truant's mother) Pelafina's unreliability as a conveyor of her own voice, the novel insistently stages the futility of any effort to anchor thę events it recounts in a stable recorded form.

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Although the deployment of these and other characters as figures for the end of orthography certainly betokens a shift away from traditional realism and psychological characterization, the novel's challenge—to generate belief without objective basis—becomes acute only when the role of the reader is taken into account. As Danielewski explains in an interview, the novel's true protagonist is the figure of interpretation— that is, the act of reading or the embodied reader:

Let us say there is no sacred text here. That notion of authenticity or originality is constantly refuted. The novel doesn't allow the reader to ever say, "Oh, I see: this is the authentic, original text, exactly how it looked, what it always had to say." That's the irony of [Truant's] mother's letters [which are included as an appendix to the novel]: at first you probably just assume that, okay, this is the real thing, but then the artifice of the way they look starts to undercut everything, so you're not sure. Pretty soon you begin to notice that at every level in the novel some act of interpretation is going on. The question is, why? Well, there are many reasons, but the most important one is that everything we encounter involves an act of interpretation on our part. And this doesn't just apply to what we encounter in books, but to what we respond to in life. Oh, we live comfortably because we create these sacred domains in our head where we believe that we have a specific history, a certain set of experiences. We believe that our memories keep us in direct touch with what has happened. But memory never puts us in touch with anything directly; it's always interpretive, reductive, a complicated compression of information.⁵

Everything in this complex and rich novel—including everything that smacks of traditional realism (the investment in disturbed family dynamics, the oscillation among various focalizers, and so on)—is in the end subordinated to the task of posing the challenge of interpretation to the reader. The novel works, on the far side of orthographic recording, not by capturing a world, but rather by triggering the projection of a world-—an imaginary world—out of the reader's interpretative interventions and accumulating memorial sedimentations.

Literally meaning "straight writing," the orthographic function of recording designates the capacity of various technologies to register the past as past, to inscribe the past in a way that allows for its exact repetition.

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