We live in a world in which perception and process, randomness and chance, exist outside of the body and are instead relegated to predictability and reproducibility made possible by the machine. The mind participates in an overload of information-driven stimuli while the body lays dormant. Dormant or dying? Practicing architects and theorists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, creators of the Architectural Body Research Foundation, have a prescriptive plan to remedy this condition, exemplified by their straightforward declaration: “We have decided not to die.”

In their work, architecture becomes the mechanism through which an escape from the corporeal condition is possible, and the inevitability of death is re-framed as a “reversible destiny.” The gesture is one of defiance as they said in a 1997 response letter Jean-Francois Lyotard: “We are not concerned with reversing time but rather with adding a measure of reversibility to the mortal condition by squaring off against it.” It is an attempt guided by a careful consideration of the interaction of the body with architectural form, centered on architecture as a didactic tool that retrains the body through physical and cognitive interventions toward a state of self-awareness. The role of the computer as our intermediary with the world is replaced by architecture as an interstitial mechanism that allows for the re-programming of the body. The prescription is called “Procedural Architecture,” and it goes beyond an attempt at bodily self-possession toward a larger interaction with the universe itself. What elements would comprise this amorphous space of interaction? The space found in the abstraction of kinesthetic movement.

The work of Arakawa + Gins can be contextualized as a rupture in the evolution of artistically grounded kinesthetic experiments conducted throughout the twentieth century. Of particular interest are the kinesthetic properties investigated by Alexander Rodchenko in the early 1920’s and Nicolas Schöffer in 1956. Their respective attempts to give life to the inanimate object are re-assigned to life itself in the work of Arakawa + Gins, as they attempt to map architecturally responsive tactile and kinesthetic regions onto the body. Their line of questioning goes beyond the body itself, venturing into the amorphous realm of human/spatial interaction. A question posed by Arakawa + Gins in their 1993-97 work Outposts/Landing Sites of the Architectural Body no.1 leads to a consideration of these conditions, and to the inherent potential of this space:

What flows between one part of the atmosphere and another to instigate articulation?

It is the link between the ineffable and articulation that underscores a connection to the questions posed by Rodchenko and Schöffer’s experiments. In order to trace a kinesthetic evolution from object to body, we begin from a historical moment in which the seduction of mechanization marginalized human physicality. In the context of artistic practice, the Constructivist group, of which he was a member, saw mathematics as the conceptual underpinning of the machine, and they sought to define themselves as artist-engineers. Crucial to their project is the conceptual shift from the accepted logic inherent in mathematics to the realization of the creative potential contained in its abstraction. Yet, if abstraction took form, would it emerge out of tactile material or from ephemeral substance?

The achievement of Rodchenko’s 1920 Oval Hanging Construction No.12 is not found in the plywood pieces of its construction, but rather in the chance interaction of the physical form with light, air, and volume. It is in the seemingly random multi-planar adjustment of the mathematically-derived rings that the carefully-considered geometry takes shape. The work of art as a whole is drawn away from the deliberate production of the object and expands to include the randomness of the environment in which it is situated. The interaction of the object with the play of light, the breeze of the air, and the volumetric space that it inhabits crafts the construction. The construction, therefore, is actively kinesthetic, articulating its meaning through an interacti0on with atmospheric conditions.

Schöffer’s 1956 CYSP 1 (Cybernetic Spatiodynamic 1), an environmentally perceptive robotic sculpture furthers the concepts that define Rodchenko’s construction. Light, color, and sound, ephemeral phenomena all, ascribe motion to inorganic steel and aluminum through the processing of stimuli through a programmable electronic “brain.” Essentially, it is material constructed out of the lack of physical substance that brings life to the rigidity of the materials, a concept that can be traced back to the Constructivist group with a statement by Alexei Gan: “The material as substance or matter….time, space, volume, plane, colour, line, and light are also material for the Constructivists, without which they cannot construct material structures.”  Yet, the guiding tectonic principles of CYSP 1, namely the reception of and reaction to light, color, and sound, move beyond an engagement with materiality into the realm of intelligence. It is not simply material that is acted upon, but also, inherently human cognitive processes. To the list of intangible materials that comprise Rodchenko’s construction, can be added the term “cognition.” Undoubtedly, CYSP 1 is the logical extension of Rodchenko’s Oval Hanging Construction No.12. Schöffer begins at the point at which Rodchenko could go no further: the dynamic kinesthetic interactions of material and environment through technology. As with the Oval Hanging Construction No. 12, CYSP 1 accomplishes movement through an interaction with its surroundings, but this process is based on the ability to make decisions as part of chance encounters, rather than simply reacting to them physically. In this manner, the tectonic principles guide not only the material form of the sculpture, but its cognitive actions as well. Directional movement is initiated by the reception of, and reaction to, a particular color rather than simply a shifting breeze in the air. The role of light is no longer limited to illuminating a surface at random, but becomes an instructive impulse. Materials are comprised not only of light and sound, but of the electrons coursing through the device as well.

In the work of Arakawa + Gins, plywood and electrons as medium have given way to the body itself as it interacts within a crafted environment towards its own amelioration. According to their concept of the “Architectural Body,” the body as such becomes a subject split from within, comprised of both the physical being and the architecture that surrounds it. It is neither static nor bounded, but rather, is defined by the interaction of one’s awareness with the occupation of place. This interaction is formed from a mutual exchange as awareness becomes part of the environment, and likewise, the environment informs awareness. Within this exchange, a space of interaction manifests, yet is undefined. A questioning of it harkens back to the tangibility/intangibility of atmosphere as a medium of communication.

In a series of work entitled “Architecturally Induced Effusions Studies” (1996-97), Arakawa + Gins map areas of the body called “Landing Sites” that are sensitive to architectural interaction, and therefore the locus of the “Architectural Body.” Two categories are identified as markers of these sites of interaction: “tactile-perceptual” and “kinesthetic-perceptual.” These sites re-ascribe onto the body the mechanism that drives the “cognition” of CYSP 1. Specific sites on the body itself replace the use of electronically programmed sensors to translate light and sound into directed movement. Crucial to this development is the conflation of both kinesthesia and tactility with perception. Rather than following a computed chain of commands in which a particular color equals a particular movement, movement and perception are bound together inextricably and simultaneously. The mapping of the kinesthetic-perceptual sites includes not only areas of the body that drive locomotion such as joints, but the brain as well, thus uniting both in a cohesive unit. Yet while the site of interaction is specified, the space of interaction remains undefined, and thus relegated to the atmospheric.

Similar to the Constructivists’ use of mathematics and the programming that gives consciousness to the perceptive “brain” of CYSP 1 in order to draw out kinesthetic relationships, the theory of Architectural Body contains within it resonances of logic-driven concepts. Arakawa + Gins seem to draw on the laws of quantum mechanics, embodied by Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, a theory which posits that the more precisely one is able to fix the position of a particle through observation, the greater the possibility of change to the object, due in part to the act of observation. The object enters into a state of instability, and therefore, uncertainty. Essentially, the act of observation fundamentally alters the observed object.

In the Reversible Destiny Questionnaire, Arakawa + Gins pose the following maxim: “Every architectural surround augments the body proper to some degree.  In order to become nonmortal, the body proper needs a new degree of augmentation.  The body proper in combination with an architectural surround constitutes an “architectural body.” If one adheres to the intertwined theory of Reversible Destiny and the concept of Architectural Body, augmentation of the body proper is accomplished through the observation of, and therefore interaction with, the architectural surround. In the act of observing one’s immediate environmental context, one cannot help but taking something from it, and conversely, adding something to it through the process of augmentation. Several phrases from the group of “Reversible Destiny Sayings” further underscore a connection to the principle: “Accuracy of existence.” “Accuracy of existences.” “Interpenetrating scales of action.” In both theories, uncertainty is achieved precisely through an attempt to measure accuracy. As the body proper approaches greater self-awareness through an interaction with its architectural surround, it enters a state of re-evaluation with regard to its own mortality. Ultimately, Arakawa + Gins challenge the certainty of death by casting its perceived inevitability into a state of uncertainty as it becomes reversible rather than proscribed: “We have decided not to die.”