Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

Once again, digitally facilitated vector modelization furnishes the means to transform the axial synchrony characteristic of architecture—the synchrony of the "vertebrate axis of man" and the "horizontal symmetries of classical Greco-Christian space"—into the initial coordinates of a temporal virtualization that generates a spatial form supersaturated with the entire repertoire of interstitial spaces buried ‘in-between" these two axes. Here, vectors allow for the morphing of the static museum and the dynamic ferry terminal into one another so that the differences between them are absorbed as the potentiality of the new spatial form.

Unlike the morphing of cubes in Virtual House, however, this process of vector modelization is a means to an end, in the sense that it furnishes the generative source for the built form. In this role, vector modelization functions to supersaturate the built form with interstitial spatial potentialities that comprise so many triggers for (variant) actualization via embodied inhabitation. It is precisely this potential for inhabitation that differentiates Eisenman's project from Frank Lloyd Wright's and Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museums. Like theşe museum designs, Eisenman's deploys a“centroidal structure." However, whereas both Guggenheims deploy some kind of vertical central organizing axis, the spatial form of the Staten Island Institute envelops and twists on what is, in reality, a central void, effectively denying the orienting function of a large central axis that could link parts together in a continuous itinerary.

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Insofar as it highlights the way in which the Staten Island Institute interrupts the narrative continuity characteristic of architecture—the continuity between vertebrate man and axial building"—this comparison serves to expose just how integrally the experiential dimension is built into Eisenman's project. Although, like the Guggenheim museums, it seems massed toward the center," in it “the subject moves across the striations, and is denied any continuous spiral." Moreover, "the smooth nature of the space is striated by deep V-shaped sections which begin to define a series of interlocking interstitial layers. The organizing principle of these layers comes from a resistance diagram of flows and vectors. The spatial experience becomes an incomplete narrative, a destination without end” (23).

In this regard, the Staten Island Institute culminates Eisenman's exploration of interstitial space in earlier projects like the Wexner Center, the Columbus Convention Center, and the Aronoff Center; here, specifically, what originated as a technique designed to interrupt linear spatial narrative is substantially complexified by the deployment of vector modelization.xvi Thus, "the linear nature of the warps and striations" of the earlier projects becomes “torqued into a centroidal mass' made all the more complex by its deceptive similarity to a central axis (23). In experiential (or "narrative") terms, as the separate architectural forms of museum and terminal interpenetrate (the waiting room literally becoming the museum hall), the itineraries characteristic of each blend together in the local flows of people moving through them.

Dissolved into "bands intersected by vibrant slits and deep Vshaped grooves," the architectural object no longer functions to guide the vertical body through horizontal space (Galafaro, 78); rather, as a continuously dilating fluid space, it draws on the "active, magmatic underground energy” of the site as a force capable of “displacing the body from its hierarchical, upright position within the axial system' (78). The result is a seepage of the spatial dilation onto the body as the conversion of this force into affect replaces the constituent material elements of the building as the index of the architectural sign.

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By moving from the vectorial deformation of the site (liberation of the force of the interstitial) to its eventual longitudinal bodily inhabitation (processing of force as affect), this project exemplifies the refunctionalization of framing that is at stake in Eisenman's digitally inspired work and that confers a distinct architectural inflection on the concept of wearable space. Bluntly put, Eisenman transforms framing from an "objective" condition of the site into a process encompassing site, space, and body or, as I put it in New Philosophy for New Media, from a static, black-boxed technical frame to a dynamic bodily-generated one. Thus, he manages to displace the formal binary opposition—form vs. unform—that (with no small encouragement on his part) has been used to characterize his work.xvii

For the most recent Eisenman, the important task is specifying the conditions for reframing—how to deploy the potentiality of the site as the trigger for an embodied framing that brings together site, space, and body in the production of wearable space. Viewed in this context, we can see that Eisenman's interest in affect functions to displace the domain in which framing can be said to operate—to displace it from architectural form to the affective excess that, in the language of "Visions Unfolding, continuously unfolds alongside it. In this new vocation, framing foregrounds the necessity for what Eisenman has called the "third step": the confrontation of the smooth spaces of today's lifeworld (and computer modulation) with architecture's (constitutive) interiority. Thus, he can insist, once again with an eye toward the younger generation: "I am not interested in forming amorphic projects, rather I am interested in spacing the formless" (Zaera-Polo, "Interview," 20).

By "spacing the formless," bodily experience transforms the virtual excess of architectural space into a form not pregiven by, yet nonetheless inseparable from, architecture's constitutive interiority.xviii Such creative embodied framing, mobilized in the architectural construction of space, produces the condition of "wearable space," which can thus be considered a particular type of“digital any-space-whatever"xix-that is (following and extending the Deleuzean concept of the ASW), a production of space in which the body in effect forges an analogy where none preexists.xx In the context of architecture specifically, the production of a digital ASW through the body's infratactile capacity to convert force into affect explains how spacing can be understood as a dynamic operation of framing that manages to avoid grounding: it is an ongoing, embodied framing of space that is not given in this or that form, but only as an ongoing process open to the "longitudinal."xxi

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Recalling Cache's argument, we can now appreciate just how much the privilege accorded architecture as the quintessential art of framing for our time owes to its constitutive embrace of the body.xxii Simply stated, embodiment is the operator of all interchanges between space and architectural interiority. It is from the bodily conversion of force into affect that new framings of space—dynamic framings “adequate to" the new spaces and, above all, the infospaces of the contemporary technosphere—always ultimately arise.

1. WEARING THE BLUR

How exactly do digital media contribute to architecture's privilege as the quintessential art of framing for our time? To answer this question, we must deepen our understanding of Eisenman's correlation of the digital with a certain refunctionalization of architectural interiority. How, we need to ask, does the digital effectuate an opening of the autonomy of the architectural sign such that it is made available for a re-embodiment through the bodily affects it triggers?

To address this crucial question, let us return to Diller + Scofidio who, as I shall now suggest, represent a legacy of Eisenman's efforts to retool architectural interiority that stands in marked contrast to the one currently pursued by today's so-called machinic architects. In a general sense, this divergence can be discerned from Diller + Scofidio's penchant to use technology against the grain, as a means of introducing delay into the temporal flux of contemporary experience. Rather than seeking to maximize productivity and efficiency, as capitalism preaches, or to make seamless contact with the material flux, as the machinic architects urge (following Kwinter's characterization), Diller + Scofidio deploy technologies as a means of introducing indeterminacy and instituting delay so that something unpredictable, something new, can emerge. The crucial question, then, will concern their use of digital media to open architectural interiority for the creation of new experiences.

In an insightful article that situates Diller + Scofidio's practice in relation to the 70s generation and, specifically, to John Hejduk and Eisenman, Michael Hays traces the singularity of Diller + Scofidio to their effort to expand the motif of interiority/autonomy beyond its narrow architectural embodiment. Whereas the"theory-practice alignment of the 1970s produced built (or at least buildable) objects (mostly private homes) that used elaborate formal devices to visibly lay bare the compositional procedures that had generated the object in the first place, that is, to represent the formative logic of the object in the object itself," Diller + Scofidio deploy the formalist code “in a different, higher register in which the new work sought to reveal the unintended presumptions that ostensibly autonomous architectural techniques had enabled or had tried to remove from the possibility of thinking."21

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Thus, in early projects like The withDrawing Room (1987),

The concern with the internal, autonomous working of architecture is not abandoned so much as folded into various discourses of context and exteriority, recalibrated according to what is sayable or thinkable in the ideolects of psychoanalysis, feminism, and other theoretical systems that seek to analyze the hidden structures of domestic life. Specific architectural forms, techniques, and operations, previously presumed to be purely self-reflexive, are now valued not for themselves, but rather for their ability to scan the domestic system they had tried to detach themselves from, map its ideological functions, and produce concepts whose ultimate horizon of effect lies outside of architecture “proper," in a more general sociocultural field. At this point in their work, then, "scanning" meant disclosing the extrinsic, ideological structures that contaminate and complicate the intrinsic, supposedly pure forms and techniques of architecture. (130)

A work that "disables, divides, and bisects" the walls and furniture of a century-old wood-frame house in San Francisco in order to expose “the home's’ organizational strategies: property rights, rules of etiquette, the marriage contract, and the public codes of a private residence,"22 The withDrawing Room exemplifies Diller + Scofidio's constructive deployment of formalist procedures developed by Hejduk, Eisenman, and others as techniques specifically designed to address the problem of architecture's constitutive and constraining interiority. In Diller + Scofidio's hands, these formal techniques become instruments for a fundamental recontextualization of architecture in terms of the larger social codes and conventions—here (and often in the early work) conventions of domesticity-that inform the concrete embodiment of the architectural sign.

If this first phase of activity yielded a loosening of the scope of architectural embodiment, Diller + Scofidio's more recent work moves ever farther from the orthographic-geometric architectural apparatus of the 70s formalists. Indeed, beginning with their 1991 (unrealized) project Slow House, Diller + Scofidio have dedicated themselves to a more abstract recontextualization of architecture in terms of the sensory registers correlated with architectural embodiment. By deploying a strategy of direct defunctionalization of vision that has evolved from splitting to blurring, Diller + Scofidio now seek to interrupt the circuit connecting architectural interiority with the “nobility of vision"(to return to Jonas’ term) and thus to effectuate an expansion, indeed an inversion, of that interiority by way of a shift in sensory registers from the visual to the proprioceptive, the aural, and the tactile. Accordingly, whereas the work of the 80s aimed to lay bare the “objective" conditions for the real experience of architecture, the work of the '90s aims to expose the “subjective"—or better, the “protosubjective"—conditions for the real experience of space.

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Although this strategy of direct defunctionalization of vision certainly reaches its culmination in the Blur Building, it starts out as an attempt to split vision and thereby to catalyze an embodied synthesis—what Hays has called a “connective synthesis"—in the spectatorparticipant. Thus, in works such as Para-site (1989), Jump Cuts (1995), and X, Y (1997), Diller + Scofidio variously stage the presentation and consumption of irreconcilable images.

Developed for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Para-site screened images from three live feeds--the revolving entrance doorway, the escalators in the lobby, and the doors to the sculpture garden--on monitors installed in a gallery. As a critique of the institutional ideology that views the museum as a place of decontextualized, pure vision, this work effectively bridges Diller + Scofidio's early examination of social conventions and their later critique of the primacy of vision. The viewing gallery contains unusable chairs variously mounted on the walls and ceiling, cut in half, and imprinted with texts by Michel Serres and Jeremy Bentham, and the images screened on the cantilevered monitors are oriented at 90° or 180° with respect to the floor. The effect of this installation is to split the viewer's perspective, to put into question the normal taken-for-granted nature of bodily orientation to the image so that embodiment becomes an issue. Thus, in addition to consuming (indeed, in order to consume) the images presented, the viewer must reconcile his or her embodied perspective with the inhospitable perspective(s) presented by the images and the defunctionalized institutional props contained in the gallery space.

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In the later Jump Cuts and X, Y, Diller + Scofidio dispense with the domestic, institutional props, concentrating their attack on vision within the image. Both works record the insides of archetypal buildings—a movie theater and a pachinko parlor, respectively—from disorienting perspectives that survey movement from above. Installed at the United Artists Cineplex Theater in San Jose, California, Jump Cuts (1995) presented images of theater patrons riding the escalator (intercut periodically by movie trailers) on twelve liquid-crystal screens affixed to the outside of the theater building (see Figure 4.11). Here, the decoupling of the image from the viewer's embodied orientation—the decoupling already at issue in Para-site—is conjoined with (indeed, becomes the vehicle for) a critical intervention into architectural interiority, as Edward Dimendberg suggests:

Uncoupling the video image from the actual spatial orientation of the architecture supporting it, these installations display alternate points of view in a manner that treats space as malleable, separable from the observer, and reprogrammable in new combinations. Mounted on the façade of the cinema complex, Jump Cuts works by "flipping the building inside out, electronically" [citing a lecture by Diller]. It suggests the potential of digital technology to shift the boundaries between architectural interiority and exteriority.²3

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Because these and related works—Loophole (1992), Overexposed (1994– 2003), and Facsimile (2003)—effectuate a displacement of architectural embodiment into the space outside the building, we might think that they make common cause with the formalist techniques designed to disembody the architectural sign. Yet, to confine our analysis to such an understanding would be to overlook the crucial role Diller + Scofidio increasingly come to place on spectator-participant embodiment as the “origin” of architecture.

Nowhere is this emphasis on embodied response more apparent than in their critical negotiations with the modernist ideology of transparency. In the unrealized project Slow House (1991), Diller + Scofidio juxtapose “natural" and technically mediated visual frames in order to foreground not only the inherent doubling of contemporary visual perception but also, and perhaps more importantly, the bidirectionality of the gaze, the fact that the preeminent technology of modernist architecture, glass, has opened the path to our massively surveillant society. Designed as a vacation home in Long Island, Slow House is a passage to a view: presenting a façade entirely occupied by a 4-ft-wide by 18-ft-high front door, the house widens as it curves around to the left, culminating 100 ft from the doorway in a large picture window that frames the ocean view (see Figure 4.12). By subordinating all of its elements to this framing function, the Slow House is a "house-frame," a piece of architecture that exposes the contemporary framing function of architecture in its barest imaginable form.

Yet, what results is hardly a celebration of architecture's primitiveness in relation to electronic and digital media; rather, as Diller + Scofidio point out, Slow House foregrounds architecture's conventionality, the inherent cultural contextedness of its mediation of vision. "Having thoroughly naturalized and internalized the normally invisible' visual codes of perspective and landscape depiction, we fail to recognize that the picture window is as much a cultural construct as the televisual image."24 Indeed, if architecture can lay claim to a privileged role as the art of the frame, that is precisely because it is more technically advanced than television. “As advanced technology strives to dematerialize its hardware, leaving only its effects, is not the picture window, in fact, a more advanced technology than the television set, in that its socially and economically driven mechanisms are virtually invisible, leaving only a simple frame?"25

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As if to embed this question materially in the experience of the unrealized house project, Diller + Scofidio double the picture window with a small television monitor, placed directly in front of the window, that screens an electronically mediated landscape displaying a horizon that “is always out of register with that of the real' landscape visible through and mediated by the window."26 The camera can pan and zoom by remote control, thus introducing perspectives at odds with the perspective of the embodied viewer-inhabitant; moreover, it can play prerecorded images if (for example) the view becomes obscured on account of foul weather or darkness. The end result of this juxtaposition of viewpoints is a technologization of nature, or rather, an exposure of the inherence of technics within nature: “as the image is manipulated and changed," the Project Description tells us, “nature becomes a slow form of entertainment" (103).

Can we say then that architectural framing functions to illuminate the ineliminability of framing as a process that is at once technical and embodied? Does this explain architecture's current privilege as the art of framing par excellence? Diller + Scofidio's reworking of Slow House as a gallery installation transforms the project's assault on unmediated vision into a thorough performative investigation of the embodied basis for the impossibility of pure transparency. Rather than simply juxtaposing two modes of framing landscape, at issue here is the bodily activity that arises as the agent of the “connective synthesis" solicited by such a juxtaposition.

Comprising twenty-four artifacts (drawings, models, and texts) displayed on liquid-crystal monitors mounted in freestanding frames in a gallery space, The Desiring Eye: Reviewing the Slow House (1992) foregrounds the oscillation between looking and reading as a kind of lure that prevents the embodied spectator from achieving pure vision. Thus, although it is true that the "layered grouping [of these displays] in the gallery space frustrates the possibility of gazing unobstructed from one end of the gallery to the other," as Dimendberg claims (75), far more important for the installation's performative impact is the mobile viewer's seduction by the image stations. Given the wealth of information framed by the individual displays (details about waterfront real estate, architectural details of the house, etc.), what the viewer experiences is the rich contextedness of the supposedly pure picture window view (see Figure 4.13).

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