Bodies in code interfaces with digital media

The shift away from grand globalizing themes, which characterized the earlier more prescriptive practice, had to do with a more immediately localized and focused perspective which was ready to embrace political alliances acrossrace and ethnicity. By the late Eighties I was beginning to arrive at a position of exploring issues based on my personal interests, with a view that whether these issues gel on a subjective level with individual members or the audience is a question out of my hands, and that it is also to a degree independent of their membership in any particular social, ethnic, racial or gender constituency' (cited in Mercer, 54).

xxiii. For a discussion of the Foucauldian basis of Piper's work, see Sean Cubitt, “Keith Piper: After Resistance, Beyond Destiny." Mercer's discussion of Piper's evolution also makes reference to Foucault's conception of the imbrication of power and resistance. For example, "What distinguishes Piper's use of digital multimedia is his reflexive approach to the questions of power and knowledge intrinsic to the use of such visual technologies in surveillance and policing strategies that seek social control over the burgeoning chaos of urban space" (15). Like Cubitt, Mercer suggests that Piper gradually comes up against the limits of Foucault's model of knowledge/power, but goes one step further in citing Piper's concern with the emotional problematic of residual identification (what I am calling affect) as a means to complexify and move beyond the Foucauldian impasse. See, especially, 58 ff.

xxiv. For an account of the role of (in)visibility in art history, see Michele Wallace, "Modernism, Postmodernism and the Problem of thc Visual in Afro-American Culture." Specifically, Wallace invokes the “paradox of invisibility": “On the one hand, there is no black difference. On the other, the difference is so vast as to be unspeakable and indescribable"(43).

xxv. As Mercer puts it, Piper actively uses the loss of certainty “as an opportunity to expand one's awareness of how the past has positioned the self in relation to others," to effect a “reconciliation across generations" and a "return to the enigma of the unknown past as a political obstacle to social reconciliation in a racially structured society"(67).

xxvi. As if to literalize the universality of this implication, by zooming in on its target and framing it with the clicking noise of the camera aperture, the interface implicates the viewer (again no matter who it may be) in the unavoidable violence of classification.

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xxvii. Poster links the contribution of the technologies of the virtual to their nonlocalization in physical space—that is, to the deterritorialization they accomplish, as well as their transitoriness:

If cyberspace is the occasion of a great spiritual renewal of the planet, have we not surpassed in some sense the historic forms of ethnic identity and begun to move toward some as yet unknown relation of individual to group? ... Linked to the continuously shifting global processes of textual, graphic, and aural formations, individuals in cyberspace cannot attach to objects in the fixed shapes of historic ethnicity." (169–170)

In my opinion, this (like the work of Pierre Lévy from which it draws) represents a massive overstatement of the impact of computer technologies on ethnicity which stems from the conflation of technology with archive. Rather, as I see it (and this is the burden of Piper's work), the archive forms the raw material which must be differentially actualized in a particular process of ethnicization. Rather than being (solely) the material support for the archive, technology facilitates this entire process.

xxviii. I borrow this term from Bernard Stiegler's brilliant analysis of Leroi-Gourhan in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, 134-179.

xxix I borrow this term "collective intelligence" from Pierre Levy. Collective Intelligence: An Anthropology of Cyberspace.

xxx. As the mechanism for articulating figures of ethnicity that reflect their "electronic constitution in virtual spaces" (Poster 164), digital technology does not simply furnish a new, nonphysical place for memory, as Poster suggests; on the contrary, it brokers a new phase in the ongoing coevolution of the human and technology in the technico-social-cultural differentiation, characteristic of the human species, that French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan names (in specific opposition to genetic differentiation) ethnic differentiation. On this view, ethnicity has always been technical, in the sense that it coincides with the possibility for passing on memory that is nongenetically programmed, that is external to the individual: ethnicity is, in a word, "epiphylogenetic," to use Stiegler's felicitous term.

xxxi. Piper, quotation from the "Background" section to "Tagging the Other," on the CD-ROM, "Relocating the Remains"; emphasis added.

xxxii. Indeed, it is hardly incidental that the originally envisioned CD-ROM project was to have been titled after this work. In answer to a question about the racial construction of cyberspace, Piper explains why:

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[The CD-Rom that I'm currently working on] is provisionally entitled ‘Caught Like a Nigger in Cyberspace,'and essentially it's an attempt to further explore what I saw as the particular ways in which black people have been characterized in terms of the digital domain, in terms of the ways in which our presence is often seen as transgressive, as the embodiment of threat and disorder. It's meant to have a computer game-type feel, even though it hasn't!" (Keith Piper, "In the Ring.")

xxxiii. Here is Deleuze's definition of the affection-image:

There is therefore a relationship between affection and movement in general which might be expressed as follows: the movement of translation is not merely interrupted in its direct propagation by an interval which allocates on the one hand the received movement, and on the other the executed movement, and which might make them in a sense incommensurable. Between the two there is affection which re-establishes the relation. But, it is precisely in affection that the movement ceases to be that of translation in order to become movement of expression, that is to say quality, simple tendency stirring up an immobile element. (66)

xxxiv. Agamben has criticized Deleuze's deployment of the concept of the image in "Notes on Gesture," in Means Without Ends. Agamben argues that the gesture lies beneath the image.

xxxv. Here I mean the fact that it is—at least ostensibly—intended for all viewers. For this reason and despite the fact that video games have been shown to have built-in race and gender biases, Piper can use the video game interface as a signifier of that supposed universality.

xxxvi. Even though it ignores the phenomenon of contemporary techniques for direct intervention into the body which many see as a new phase of capital, one in which it is the body (and not just the image) that is capitalized. See the discussion in Muriel Combes and Bernard Aspe, “Retour sur le camp' comme paradigme biopolitique. Giorgio Agamben," (20,23). Agamben, of course, addresses biotechnology directly in Homo Sacer and Remnants of Auschwitz.

xxxvii. Simondon develops his analysis in the two volumes of his thèse d’état, L’Individu et sa Genèse Psycho-Biologique (Paris: Jerome Millon, 1995) and L’Individuation Psychique et Collective (Paris: Aubier,

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1989). The introduction to the first has been translated into English as “The Genesis of the Individual" and appears in Incorporations, eds. J. Crary and S. Kwinter.

xxxviii. Indeed, Simondon's analysis of individuation parallels Agamben's understanding of potentiality as the potentiality not to be: in both cases, it is the domain of the nonactual—of the nonactual in principle, as what need never be actualized—that provides the margin of indetermination necessary for the subject to remain in continual genesis.

xxxix. It thus puts to work the very conception of the human advanced by Agamben: "There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this something is not an essence or properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality." (1993, 43).

xxxx. Muriel Combes and Bernard Aspe make a similar point with regard to Agamben's analysis of"bare life" in Homo Sacer. According to them, Agamben's intuition that politics is already contained within bare life requires a displacement of the couple zoē/bios as the basis for political thinking. Rather, the task is to “understand on which basis a collective subjectivation is constructed, to understand, for example, in what way affective life, already in itself something entirely other than mere life in the biological sense, is through and through [d'emblée] political, in what way the collective as such finds itself always already engaged" ("Retour sur le 'camp' comme paradigme biopolitique," 19). In a sense, Agamben's invocation of Simondon can be understood as responding to this injunction because it replaces the motif of Homo Sacer—namely, the search for an occulted indistinction between zoe and bios—with the concept of an internal relationality.

CHAPTER 4

Although the media component of the project as described here was scrapped due to financial constraints, the uncertain status of all of Diller + Scofidio's work on the cusp between art/architecture and theory emboldens me to treat it as an unrealized yet essential conceptual dimension of the Blur project. Put another way, in addition to being a temporary built project in the world, the Blur Building exists as work of embodied conceptual art preserved in the archive of traces that document its making and that include—as a central core of its drama—the media components.

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ii. In Matter and Memory, Bergson argued that perception and affection were inseparable though distinct modalities of sensation:

We must correct, at least in this particular, our theory of pure perception. We have argued as though our perception were a part of the images, detached, as such, from their entirety, as though, expressing the virtual action of the object upon our body, or of our body upon the object, perception merely isolated from the total object that aspect of it which interests us. But we have to take into account the fact that our body is not a mathematical point in space, that its virtual actions are complicated by, and impregnated with, real actions, or, in other words, that there is no perception without affection. Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our body which we mix with the image of external bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to get the image in its purity." (58; emphasis added)

Bergson's theory forms the basis for my account of new media in New Philosophy for New Media, where I argue that digital artists, in their efforts to distance themselves from cinematic conditions of perception, pursue a “Bergsonist vocation.'

iii. In Bergsonist terms, we must differentiate two “extremes" related to the "body": on the one hand, the corporeal body and, on the other, the larger field of the “out-of-body" where the body merely propagates, and does not filter, images. Indeed, the body acts “like a magnetic field," encroaching on these two zones, winning over the out-of-body insofar as we can delay our reactions and winning over the mineralized body to the extent that we can punctuate our automatisms. Perception can be said to take place only where both of these bodily actions are involved, only when “there is an increase in the field of images between the out-of-body of interactions and the mineralized body of our automatisms" (147). What this means is that perception is contaminated by affection in two ways: first, following Bergson, through its accompaniment by an affective correlate in the perceiving body; second, through the nonperceived force of the longitudinal—that is, the way the milieu of interactions forms a “texture of sensation” that pervades and influences the body's framing of space.

iv. Here is how Gil contextualizes his intervention:

This work is about the relations between power and the body. This does not mean those which result from the effects of the former on the latter.... Nor does it include those which come from the action of the body on power, which covers a domain occupied by all sorts of ideologies and “liberatory” doctrines of the body. It is about the effects on the circulation of bodily powers that nourish formations of power in all fields. In other words, and we must stress this notion, it is not a question of studying forces ... according to their representational contents, but to grasp them in the way they function in their own right, that is, in the way they may differ from the signs and symbols that are attached to them. (xii)

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V. In Gil's study, this conversion is best illustrated by the symbolic efficiency of myth: "Symbolic efficiency ... consists in remote control,' magical action of words on body parts. For this action to have effects, words must release forces in the body; these forces must react directly on organs, on their physiology, and the body has to offer itself as a receptive surface of forces"; as a “mediator between organs and discourse," the infralanguage "must necessarily articulate paths for the circulation of energy in discourse (forces) with paths for the circulation of energy in the body (affect)" (143). Generalized beyond the example of myth, Gil's project articulates nothing less than a theory of power as bodily power; in it, the infralinguistic body becomes the source for all meaning in the world, and meaning effectively converges with affect.

vi. From Eisenman's fully enlightened vantage point as author of the teleological recapping of his career, Diagram Diaries, the newer generation's theory of the diagram is fundamentally hampered by its “indifference” to the “three conditions unique to architecture": architecture's “compliance with the metaphysics of presence"; the “already motivated condition of the sign”; and its “necessary relationship” to a “desiring subject" (30). In their too enthusiastic embrace of models foreign to architecture, younger figures like Greg Lynn or FOA simply turn their backs on the motif of interiority, which is to say, on what, for Eisenman, constitutes the source of architecture's complex identity.

vii. Specifically, Eisenman appropriates Deleuze's conception of the extraction of the figural developed in his study of the painter Francis Bacon. Given the singular “presentness" of architecture, this process must be reconfigured in the domain of the architectural. Specifically, in painting the contour can be literally blurred through various spatial techniques; however, in architecture, no such blurring of the profile is possible because architecture must remain a "literal shelter." What is possible instead is a blurring of the diagram and with it the entire organization, such that it is "no longer seen as merely fulfilling a function of embodying its interior form' ("Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo's Idea of the Machinic," 28). By itself, however, this extraction of the diagram from its pregiven function cannot "guarantee" the modification of the traditional tropes of architecture."The figural in itself," says Eisenman, "does not necessarily embody the tropes of architecture.' Consequently—and this is what makes Eisenman's position so important—something more, a "third step," is needed to correlate the figural tropes given in the machinic with the transformation of architectural interiority.

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As a step toward the production of nontraditional tropes in “real architectural space," this something more necessarily involves the body as a constitutive element of architecture's internal resonance: the correlate of the excess named the figural, the body's capacity to sense space affectively opens up new, invisible, and properly interstitial spaces:

Architecture's being already has an internal consistency which could be considered machinic, that is, there could be tropes, already given which are not the same as a formal architectural trope which is always added to a functional container. Rather than a figural trope would be one that already exists prior to its unfolding in spatiotemporal coordinates. That is to say whether one considers figural tropes important to articulate or not is not the issue. Since their possibility already exists in a machinic process, they can only be repressed by choosing not to articulate them. If they are articulated, they will appear differently in space than they previously did as formal tropes. This difference can be seen, for example, in the trope of the interstitial." ("Processes of the Interstitial: Notes on Zaera-Polo's Idea of the Machinic," 31)

viii. See my book, New Philosophy for New Media, for an account of digital art as a catalyst for bodily affectivity.

ix. For an account of Simondon's conception of individuation that differentiates his ontology from Deleuze's, see Mark Hansen, "Internal Resonance, or Three Steps Towards a Non-Viral Becoming.

x. For a critique of contemporary cyberarchitecture along these lines, see the analysis of structural engineer Harald Kloft and critic Andreas Ruby. In an account of Bernhard Franken's "BMW projects" that would apply equally to any number of contemporary projects, structural engineer Kloft shows how the deployment of parameter-driven processes renders form autonomous:

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The actual form is achieved by arresting the process at a specific point and “freezing" the form. Franken describes the "freeze problem"--that is, "When do I say 'Stop' and freeze the process?"—as the key factor in this design method, for the process is launched without any specific idea of form, merely an idea of process, and then, as Franken puts it: “you wait for the form." 'This “subjective reality" generates a data record that defines only the external skin, which is fixed as a result of the design method. The consequences for the design of the structure are twofold. Firstly, the structure becomes formally an elemental component, because it constitutes either the internal spatial enclosure beneath the skin created by Franken or the skin itself becomes the structure, that is, external layer and internal layer are identical and only defined by the material thickness. Secondly, since the master form is fixed, optimizations to the structure cannot be implemented by means of changing the form. (Harald Kloft, "Structural Engineering in the Digital Workflow," in Digitalreal: Blobmeister, First Built Projects, 203).

By stripping formal genesis of any manual dimension and by rendering it a “qualitative multiplicity” (Deleuze), Franken's parameter-driven design technique successfully liberates architecture from the preinscription of form. Yet, as Andreas Ruby astutely points out, such liberation remains in force—at least in reference to digital architecture in its current state—only at the conceptual level, where architecture need not grapple with the material constraints of production and use. To his mind, the potential for digital design to stimulate a “new paradigm” remains largely unrealized:

What is currently promoted as “digital" architecture is marred by the fatal assumption that innovation in architecture is today mainly expressed through form.... With unrelenting eloquence, somewhat like an adolescent rebellion against the formal dogmatism of Modernism, the focus has been on visualizing what is believed to be its greatest asset—the extravagance of form—thereby ending up with a new dogmatism that is no less rigid. The fascination with the new digital processes for the creation of architectonic form is certainly understandable. But it is equally obvious that the formal experimentation they permit cannot by itself lead to a new architecture. (Andreas

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Ruby, "Beyond Form: Architecture in the Age of Digital Reproducibility" in Digitalreal, 206–213; here 211–213)

xi. Though to be fair, some younger practitioners recognize the necessity for translation, following a slightly different trajectory than Eisenman's. Consider, for example, the practice of Reiser+Umemoto, an architectural firm directly inspired by Kwinter's conception of “computational coextensivity." The firm seeks to engage media “in the so-called solid-state," that is the state in which “material formations are inextricably linked to the computational logics inherent in materiality itself" (Jesse Reiser, Solid State Architecture).

In projects like the Yokohama Port Terminal and the Kansai Library Project, Reiser+Umemoto seek to catalyze the "lateral communication" between building structures and components as a means of allowing architectural materiality to express its potential. In the case of the Yokohama project, this was achieved by opening up the truss structure to the potential forces that are “inherent within" their definition as structure, but remain untapped without the "provocation of some outside force (of an adjacent structure)." In the proposal for the Yokohama Port Terminal, the structural system begins as a set of repeated trusses conceived as flexible at their control points. Subsequently, as other systems (e.g., roads, gardens, etc.) pass through them, they are deflected from their original structural function. This yields what Reiser provocatively calls a “resonance across elements," a resonance of material potentialities catalyzed solely through the extrafunctional “intermixing" of structural elements. Now Reiser specifically characterizes this practice in terms of its double engagement with media: as a material substance in its own right and as a virtual or informing potential.

To the extent that these two notions of media are folded together in the concept of the diagram, they operate the participation of architecture in what Reiser calls a “universal structure": the “dynamical diagram which has no essential origin and can be incarnated in multiple materials, scales and regimes." Whatever resonance there is between this conception and Kwinter's perspective is, as I have said, not accidental, but Reiser's effort to apply a continuous conception of the material flux to concrete problems of architectural design introduces something not found in Kwinter: the necessity, in a “second" stage, to rematerialize the diagram “in the stuff of architecture with all of its attendant phenomena." As Reiser recognizes, this modelization of architecture as a system in perpetual individuation "demands a renewed recognition of the integration of matter and effect."

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Yet, to the extent that this integration demands a mediation—the conversion of force into affect—it necessarily brings in the body and indeed situates the body within the system of internal resonance operated by architecture. Otherwise put, if the liberation of the potentiality of matter manages to overcome architecture's traditional “rigidified structures," this is because it opens a whole new domain of sense (not signification): the domain of embodied affectivity. The forces actualized through the “lateral communication’ of architectural structures “provoke ever-changing conditions of inhabitation" precisely and only through their impact on the body or, more precisely, on the body's dynamic production of space.

xii. On this point, see the analysis of Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), especially Chapter 6. I evaluate Massumi's understanding of the correlation of vision and proprioception in my book, New Philosophy for New Media, Chapter 6.

xiii. Eisenman, Diagram Diaries, 69. Given Eisenman's interest in differentiating himself from the younger generation of so-called diagrammatic architects, this has to be seen as reinscribing the insufficiency of diagrammatic play—in and of itself—to generate new spatial experience. In this sense, it is also hardly surprising that House IV witnesses the first appearance of "affect" in Eisenman's work (or at least in his retrospective summation):

The House IV diagrams concerned the being of the diagram, such as the idea of wallness, as opposed to a mere plane. This was the first indication of the potential for affect to influence the diagram. The sign of wallness demanded overcoming not only the materiality of the object but also its function and meaning. (69)

xiv. The following description is a paraphrase of Ingeborg Rocker's project description, "The Virtual: the Unform in Architecture," 23.

xv. It is hardly surprising that this difference surfaces in Eisenman's intervention into the Jury discussion for the Virtual House competition. Unlike art, which "has no limits" and thus need not (and indeed cannot) ever stop, architecture—Eisenman insists--would not be architecture if it did not stop: "You shouldn't be asking architects, 'Why do these machines stop?' It's not architecture if they don't stop. 'Why do these machines enclose?' It's not architecture if they don't enclose. 'Why do these machines shelter?' They must shelter, or they become art" (Eisenman, in Foster, "Jury Discussion, 35).

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