Irreducible Vagueness: Mixed Worlding in Diller & Scofidio’s Blur Building

Before the End of the World

 
American artist-architects Diller & Scofidio and Team Extasia presented their Blur Building as a media pavilion for the World Fair or Expo in 2002, on Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Its participation in this kind of event situates the Blur Building in the modern world, as belonging to the modern epoch. But after three and a half years of extensive preparations, constructions, and tests, this project managed to interrogate any environment–built, controlled, artifactual–including the climate, as well as the predominantly visual, cognitively mapped, and perceptually oriented culture that surrounds us today. The Blur Building produces different spacing and temporality from those of the modern world, hovering uncertainly at the limit or at the end of the world (as we know it). Doubtlessly, this renewed questioning of the limits of our world and time is intimately related to the fact that Diller & Scofidio were quick, among architects, to embrace the potential for alternative productions of presence found in 21^st century information technology and new forms of electronic mediation. Notably, in opening a blurred, mixed world in the era of globalization, Diller & Scofidio both affirm and develop Fredric Jameson’s earlier diagnosis of postmodernism as predominantly synchronic and spatial. It is perhaps in the realm of architecture qua living space that modifications of cultural and aesthetic production make themselves felt most dramatically–not least by problematizing modernist distinctions between high and low culture, as well as by a more populist shaping and sharing of the multiplicitous surfaces of our milieu or world (Jameson 189, 200). As an open-ended becoming of mixed reality, the Blur Building takes on “the new machine” of a hyperspatial postmodernism of surfaces, along with the imperative from new architecture “to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium and our body to some new, as yet unimaginable, perhaps ultimately impossible, dimensions” (Jameson 219).
 
However, the Blur Building also leaps forward to overtake more recent developments in architecture, as well as in IT and new media, including those pertaining to the thoroughly distributed, networked, and embedded multitudes of computational entities in ubiquitous computing. In this way, the installation project approaches a ubiquity of what I am calling mixed presencing (new modes of technological and mediatory production of our life form) as an informative principle of work that leads to a certain displacement and deferral of the existing demarcations of our world. The Blur Building embraces a virtual and computational architecture for ubiquity and seeks its actualization in various combinations or mixes, so that architecture, along with life itself, mediates and negotiates habitable spaces, each unfolding as very provisional “solutions” to the problem of how to inhabit space bodily with others. Diller & Scofidio’s architecture attempts to further negotiate the problem of spatialization that life poses to bodies, a negotiation that opens itself to “the movements of time and becoming” (see Grosz 148). The Blur Building thus places itself experimentally and virtuactually among current research and artistic productions involving IT and new media. If the Blur Building moves towards “the end of the world,” this is because it follows the strong interest in virtuality in the 1990s and the exploration of more radically actual modes of tele-presence beginning in the mid-90s. Diller & Scofidio’s project bespeaks a slow reontologizing of these fields today, which one might call an immanentizing physical turn or a movement towards the encounter of bits and atoms, as Hiroshi Ishii and Brygg Ullmer would have it.¹ This project might well be described as a turn towards mixed worlding, understood as a dynamic ecotechnics liable to sense. Alternately, one might call it a turn towards technologized worlding qua a virtualization of the physical, but this would emphatically concern those whose actualization of technics facilitates embodied relations and interactions of the end of the world.
 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

BLUR, Yverdon-les-Bains. 4 Mar. 2002. Image © Yves André (www.yves-andre.ch). Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

1. Of the End of the World I – Mixed Reality and the Embeddedness of Ubiquitous Computing

… we are not intending to make a volume of space covered with fog. We intend to make a building of fog with integrated media. –Diller and Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing 39.

 
Diller & Scofidio and their team oversaw years of projective planning and invention while working on the Blur Building, which had a nebulous impact on its visitor-inhabitants, – not least because of the complexity and dynamics of its vast, artifactual mist-cloud.² Only after the initial design period were the architects confronted with the many obstacles involved in the actual construction and installation of this contribution to the Swiss Expo. In between inventive projection and actualization, several creative initiatives were abandoned. Unfortunately, then, the final building included neither an LED text forest of vertical panels with scrolling text (from Internet feeds or from artist Jenny Holzer), nor a Hole in the Water restaurant made of submerged twin glass cylinders with an aquarium layer in between, in which diners would sit at eye level with the lake and eat sushi. Nor did we get an open air Angel Bar on top of the building’s mist cloud (to be served: a great variety of water beverages, from glacial tappings to municipal waters from around the world) (Diller and Scofidio, Blur 100-111, 146-155, 163, 324). Nevertheless, the opening of the Blur Building in 2002 was provocative and transformative enough to present us with the end of the world, to put it pointedly. But why should one approach the Blur Building as a question of the end of the world?³
 

 

 

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Fig. 2.

Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

 
Blur is of the end of the world because, as an exemplary artistic-architectural project, it involves new media and information technology in ways various and extensive enough so as to begin to problematize any strict distinction between a given sense of the world and what one might call contemporary ecotechnics. Ecotechnics here designates the almost sovereign capacity of current information technology to perform calculative operations by the quantifiable means that pervade globalized culture, cosmopolitan democratic values, a sociocultural sense of community, and embodied attempts to delineate the world as an already meaningful environment.⁴ For any one visitor-inhabitant of the Blur Building, then, the body as the spacing or sharing out of sense emerges as the place of that originary relation of technicity, at work both in the presencing of bodies and in the way we disclose a world. The relation of bodily sense to the ecotechnical apparatus informs the way the world of Blur may come to seem meaningful to us. It is pervasive and originary technicity, the manner in which you are connected, which delineates your mode of existence and your experience or constitution of world-hood. If Blur affirms this originary technicity at stake in the world-hood of the world, it is without positing technology as a substantial fixed origin or a projected finality. Rather, it is a matter of worlding in radical finitude, that is, the event of the emergence of the world in the absence of a solid ground or a determinable end.⁵ As Jean-Luc Nancy formulates it, “[e]cotechnics … substitutes projections of linear history and of final goals with local differences and multiple bifurcations. Ecotechnics deconstructs the system of ends, it renders them nonsystematizable and nonorganic” (Corpus 78; my translation). To experience Blur as an event of worlding, we depend upon that sharing out of embodied sense that takes place as a technical-mechanical relation between material bodies, partes extra partes, or as a delineation of material bodies in a contact-separation, a touching-letting go, of sense and matter. When inhabiting Blur one would have to concede, with Nancy, that our world is of the ecotechnical that marks out our bodies, lets them proliferate, and plugs us in a multitude of directions:
 

Our world is the world of “technical,” the world whose cosmos, nature, gods, whose system, complete in its intimate jointure, are exposed as “technical”: the world of an ecotechnics. Ecotechnics functions with technical apparatus, with which it connects us in all directions. But what it makes is our bodies, which it puts into the world and connects to its system, our bodies, which in this way it creates as more visible, more proliferating, more polymorphous, more pressed together, more in “masses” and “zones” than they have ever been.
 

(Corpus 77-78; my translation)

 
Diller & Scofidio’s building project, its pursuit of ecotechnics, and its polymorphous zoning of bodies participate in a time when the third main wave of computing is emerging, a movement which both partly sidesteps and goes beyond the earlier developments of mainframes, desktops, laptops, and their stable networked infrastructure. Their work does not so much reflect what is currently happening on the large infrastructural scale (where the speed and data-capacity of grid computing promises to enhance and gradually replace the Internet),⁶ nor the scale of supercomputing (where quantum computing is still under development),⁷ nor the microscale of biomedia and nanotechnology.⁸ Rather, the Blur Building inserts itself in the middle, into a context marked by research in and the actual installation of pervasive or ubiquitous computing. This kind of computing–marked by the deployment of multitudes of relatively inexpensive, mobile, wireless, and relatively intelligent machines–is flexible, complex, and massive enough to warrant speaking of a technicity whose sensors and actants not only pervade the human life world, but become almost indistinguishable from the environment or the world as such (Umwelt).⁹ Whether in terms of spacing or of temporal unfolding, Diller & Scofidio’s project presents a mutual overlaying of the world and technics that arise from a transductive relation, that is, when both the world and technics appear in their co-implication on the basis of their more primary individuating relation.¹⁰
 
Consequently, the Blur Building is of the end of the world to the extent that here “the world” does not have or display a pregiven sense. Rather, a sense of the world emerges as it undergoes a vague transformation via the movement of this project, whose overlaying and combination of ubiquitous computing and existential worlding paves the way for a mixed reality.¹¹ For Diller & Scofidio, an augmented and mixed reality emerges as our problematic of temporalization and spacing in the first decade of a young millennium. Here ubiquitous computing poses as the concrete technical way to approach a decidedly mixed reality where virtuality and actuality are combined to such a degree that one is not readily separable or distinguishable from the other. It should be pointed out, then, that upon encountering the Blur Building we sense a complex set of relations between a real physical world and the potential generated via virtualizations, something that compels us to wonder whether their mutual overlays and interlacing interfaces constitute and transform our experiential reality. The world of the Blur Building does not display a given sense precisely because it comes into presence as a mixed worlding where actuality and virtuality (of phusis and techné both) are superimposed upon and mixed with each other. In Blur the physical and the virtual cannot immediately be distinguished or even made into objects of awareness. Thus we must consider the question of an invisible, vague, unnoticeable, and typically pre-conscious combinatoire of interminglings in real time and in a three-dimensional world space.
 
This mixing of world and ubiquitous computing, actuality and virtuality, constitutes the enigma of Diller & Scofidio’s project insofar as virtuality is largely embedded before awareness and to the point of invisibility. A chief characteristic of ubiquitous computing is its efforts to proceed towards pure immanence or strict embeddedness in the world. Approached from that angle, one might say that the vagueness, apparent invisibility, enigma, or secrecy of Blur as mixed worlding increases alongside the inhabitants’ inability to become aware of these characteristics, to the degree that it pursues the ideal goal of embeddedness that Mark Weiser and others at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) set up for “calm computing”:
 

We wanted to put computing back in its place, to reposition it into the environmental background, to concentrate on human-to-human interfaces and less on human-to-computer ones …. In the end, ubi-comp created a new field of computer science, one that speculated on a physical world richly and invisibly interwoven with sensors, actuators, displays, and computational elements, embedded seamlessly in the everyday objects of our lives and connected through a continuous network …. [We] have begun to speak of calm computing as the goal, describing the desired state of mind of the user, as opposed to the hardware configuration of the computer. Just as a good, well-balanced hammer “disappears” in the hands of a carpenter and allows him or her to concentrate on the big picture, we hope that computers can participate in a similar magic disappearing act.
 

(Weiser, Gold, and Brown)

 
The Blur Building, as a mix of the world involving calm, ubiquitous computing, performs a series of more or less complete disappearing acts, a whole flock of moves towards a more or less pure immanence which our modes of embodiment and sense encounter as so many variants of a vagueness that comes to seem irreducible.¹²
 

2. Of the End of the World II – Blurring the Given Worldview

The complete critique is perhaps not one that aims at totality (as does le regard surplombant) nor that which aims at intimacy (as does identifying intuition); it is the look that knows how to demand, in their turn, distance and intimacy, knowing in advance that the truth lies not in one or the other attempt, but in the movement that passes indefatigably from one to the other. One must desire that double excess where the look is always near to losing all its powers. –Starobinski 52 (my translation)
 
… Diller & Scofidio have concentrated on the undefined. It is almost as if they are reacting against their own desire to control and produce recognizable images, places, and objects by creating works in which one is never quite certain what one is seeing. –Betsky, “Display Engineers” 35.

 
Of the several immanentizing moves at stake in the mixed worlding of the Blur Building, perhaps the most noticeable one is the disturbance, blurring, or bringing down of world-vision. The mist-cloud, the biogenetic pumping system at the Expo site lakeshore, and the smart weather system embedded in the building are the most obvious generators of a new immanentism because they disrupt the obvious: they impinge on and disturb our cultural and bodily habits of privileging the obvious, most notably our continuous foregrounding of vision and its alleged clarity of sense. Extremely aware that their project found itself inserted in the context of a World Fair, information technology, and cosmopolitanism, Diller & Scofidio intended for their building to become a counter-strategy to the predominant access to the world via visual appropriation and an assured world-view.
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Image © 2002 Beat Widmer. (www.beatwidmer.ch). Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

 
One might say that in its immanentizing problematization of an assured, meaningful Weltbild, the Blur Building engages in a wider exploration of the phenomenology of the senses, an exploration that circumvents what Hans Jonas has calls “the nobility of sight.” Therefore what is at stake here is not so much another hailing of vision as the most excellent sense, nor the pursuit of theoria as the noblest activity of the mind, which is also traditionally described primarily in visual metaphors. Rather, the building involves a certain experimentation with the supports or supplements of vision, i.e., with the other senses, sensation in general, as well as “the more vulgar modes of commerce with the importunity of things” (Jonas 136). To that extent, mixed worlding cannot but blur the three main characteristics of the image-performance unique to sight. The Blur Building resists having its presentation of a sensate manifold yield to simultaneity; the causality of sense-affection insists on its non-neutrality; and it will remain difficult, if not impossible, to achieve a proper, objectifying distance in the spatial and cognitive mental senses. In other words, Diller & Scofidio’s counter-strategy very much brings a different sort of attention to vision, while in the process making felt the otherwise forgotten or suppressed, but all the more originary, need for complementation from the other senses and from the motility of our bodies (Jonas 152). Thus, blurring here implies a movement towards an embodiment of the forces at play within differentiated and distributed sensation.¹³
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

 
More specifically, the Blur Building is of the end of the world on any general, grand scale of viewing, because of its trans-immanent resistance to becoming part of a tourism dominated by spectacular sights and attractions, an official set of scenic views, image expectations as “good” photo opportunities, and a certain scopic control granted to the “sightseer” (Diller and Scofidio, “SuitCase Studies” 42-44). This artifactual architectural installation refuses to be primarily a visual cultural object for consumption in the experience-economy of today, just as it problematizes in quite ironic ways any God’s- or eagle-eye view of the world from above. As the architects themselves state in an interview:
 

We knew right away that we wanted to use the touristic setting as a foil. We realized we could use the lake water to problematize vision, to get in the way of the lake view. We also wanted to produce an anti-heroic architecture in the form of a special effect, an atmosphere. It was a reaction to the new orthodoxy of high-definition and simulation technologies. We wanted to create a low-definition space, a blur.
 

(Anderson 147)

If there is any view of the world involved in this lo-fi world-spacing, or that participates in a clear vision of the sense of the world, this view is minimized place-wise and remains a delayed and deferred epiphenomenon, such as the one that takes place on the Angel Deck, which hovers uncertainly above the more primary, extensive, and chaotically dynamic mistclouds down here, and which all inhabitants of this fuzzy mixed world must traverse first and last. Diller & Scofidio’s alternative engagement with the commodification of vision by globalized tourism might well lead one to suspect that the Blur Building concretizes a version of that “profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era” which Martin Jay traces, with a certain disapproval, in recent French thought, only to counter such antiocularcentrism with an unrepentant enlightened clarity.¹⁴ From this perspective, the Blur Building would be of the end of the world to the extent that it simply and strictly refuses any certain, stable, and visual domestication of world space as both inherently meaningful and as clarifiable to the point of having light or enlightenment eradicate all remnants of its obscure metaphorical texture. However, identifying in this project only a pure “suspicion of vision” remains too reductive, as does an inverse movement towards an altogether live metaphor of the sun, i.e., what Jacques Derrida retraces as the circle of the heliotrope whose pervasive, dazzling light (whether ideal or a question of lumen naturale) allegedly illuminates everything (“White Mythology” 266-267). Here the blurring of Weltbild and vision is a matter of neither a fall into strict blindness, nor an unwarranted celebration of an accidental obscurity that will be removed by the return of or to radiant enlightenment. Rather, Diller & Scofidio’s project pursues what moves differently within vision and its illuminating image-performance–what makes presencing disappear in its own radiance, or the indefinite selferasure of light that permits it to come as light. Blur is after another self-erasure or withdrawal of the visible, one whose different and deferred textures of light touch its worldinhabitants in practice.¹⁵ Perhaps in this way it approximates an archi-texture within an architectural project, drawing on supplementary haptic practices so as to transform a visible building into an unfolding of the inhabitants’ critical debate of and interactive engagement with vision. Diller & Scofidio’s Blur Building is thus a gentle and affirmative critique of tourism from within.¹⁶ It makes itself felt as an ongoing questioning of the very fabrication of the aura and authenticity of tourist sites, the gaze, and the meaningful imaging of memorial or memorable places in the world of today (Zavatta 12-14).

3. Before an Announced or Desired World-Construction: Practicing Haptic World-Vision

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. –Diller and Scofidio, Blur: The Making of Nothing 44.

 
The Blur Building questions built, controlled, and artifactual environments, including climate, alongside the hegemony of visual culture in the western tradition. By leaping through more recent developments in architecture as well as in IT and new media, it approaches an open-ended becoming of mixed reality. As such, this large-scale installation project takes up mixed presencing qua new modes of technological and mediatory production of our life form so as to displace at least two architectural trends. First, it displaces the more traditional view of digital technology and electronic mediation as inherently foreign to any architecture of durability, utility, and beauty. Second, it counters the tendency over the last 10 years for a contemporary generation of architects who do embrace virtual architecture to remain stuck with fascinatingly innovative, but very abstract computer models that seldom become actual buildings.¹⁷ The blobs of Greg Lynn and others, Marcos Novak’s liquid architectures, the work of NOX and Lars Spuybroek, Neil Leach’s swarm tectonics, Asymptote’s NYSE trading floor, and Peter Eisenman’s rethinking of his notion of the interiority of architecture via the diagram would perhaps serve as a first set of indices tracing the development of virtual hypersurface architecture.¹⁸ Although Diller & Scofidio make a different move towards actualization, there is no small echo here–in their obsession with the fluid flock, the cloud, and the movement in time of water–of the virtual architects’ efforts to embrace the computer as an instrument for viewing form as generated in time in order to stop modeling from the outside and to undertake a shift, as Lars Spuybroek writes, “from Euclidian geometry to topology, from tectonics to textile, from object to process, from crystalline space to the undulating field or medium” (20).
 
The Blur Building thus embraces a virtual architecture for ubiquity and goes on seeking its actualizations so that architecture, and life itself, develop in a mediatory negotiation of habitable spaces, each unfolding as very provisional “solutions” to the problem of how to inhabit space bodily with others and the other. Diller & Scofidio’s architecture negotiates certain experiments with spatialization as a question life poses to bodies, opening them to what Elizabeth Grosz calls “the movements of time and becoming” (148). In this way, the Blur Building presents itself as a matter of a slow re-ontologizing of mediatory architectures and life forms. It involves virtuality, tele-presence, and the mixed realities of ubiquitous computing. Its immanentizing, physical turn moves towards a mixed worlding, understood as a dynamic ecotechnics liable to sense, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it.
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

 
As part of such a turn, the Blur Building relinquishes the earlier emphasis on first generation virtual reality, head-mounted displays, immersion in perfect simulations of 3-D scenery, and a long line of formal, abstract, or metaphysical idealizations, perhaps best recognized in William Gibson’s literary evocation of cyberspace and the engagement with virtuality in the Wachowski brothers’ Matrix movies. Accordingly, the Blur Building turns physical in order to newly emphasize corporeality and actualization of the virtual. This turn situates its architecture in a context of developments that we also see in today’s art world. Broadly speaking, the current coupling of artistic cultural production, IT, and new media leads to the emergence of a multiplicity of large, complex, intermedial, and interactive installations, sometimes spanning the planet network-wise. This context has made the installation something like a paradigmatic art form–momentarily parenthesizing traditional mass-media frames for visual information-culture (images, advertising, mainstream movies, TV). Blur relates to the world of installation art found in museums and art institutions, but also to the installation art found in all the public spaces of globalized culture. Via networks, computers, cell phones, and a host of new types of interfaces, actants, and sensors, these installations find their way across traditional distinctions between bodily intimacy and distance, the private and the public, interiority and exteriority, making them extraordinarily porous. In “The Poetics of Augmented Space,” Lev Manovich historicizes this physical turn and concisely articulates its media-specific and technological tendencies:
 

The 1990s were about the virtual. We were fascinated by new virtual spaces made possible by computer technologies. The images of an escape into a virtual space that leaves the physical space useless and of cyberspace–a virtual world that exists in parallel to our world–dominated the decade. It started with the media obsession with Virtual Reality (VR) …. At the beginning of the 21^st century, the research agendas, media attention, and practical applications have come to focus on a new agenda–the physical–that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual information …. While the technologies imagined by [current] research paradigms accomplish this in a number of different ways, the end result is the same: overlaying layers of data over the physical space.
 

(220-223)

 
The Blur Building is a singular fragment of the installed world that does not have a pre-existing sense. It takes place as an intersection of contemporary architecture, art, and cybernetics. It installs mixed worlding to the extent that it opens not only an augmented space, with physical and information dimensions overlaid, but also an augmented temporality insofar as the temporal object is layered with digital eventualization of experience. This project towards mixed worlding may not have a sense. However, the ingenuity and the innovations involved on artistic, architectural, and cybernetic planes may well lead one to claim that the Blur Building is all about an already announced or desired construction or creation of the sense of the mixed world, relying on what goes on in practice or in performance. Such a claim would then be in alignment with a number of efforts in more or less radical versions of socio-cultural constructivism and with certain implications of ideas of unfolding parallel worlds (possible and/or actual).¹⁹ On this score, Diller & Scofidio’s work and our involvement with this work supposedly demonstrate that contemporary worldmaking makes sense of the mixed world through cultural and technological inventions that mix virtuality and actuality functionally, given various contextual constraints for us and the architects. The Blur Building would thus be of interest because it makes a double enactive and constructive effort: not only towards virtualizing an otherwise stable architecture to the point of “losing the building” in any traditional (visual) sense (see Wolfe), but also an effort towards actualizing an otherwise transcendentally inclined technology so as to affect embodiment and the inhabitants’ relation to sense and to the sensible. This double effort will lead away from a transcendent worldview and an image of Blur as having a pregiven sense to be revealed or disclosed. It will likewise dispel notions of an external, pre-existing, independent world, and attendant ideas of resemblance and representation. It should lead one past thinking that this project is meaningful by way of an adequate resemblance to the world that we as visitor-inhabitants may uncover. Rather, as a mixed world it becomes meaningful through a more difficult or complex practice of worldmaking that occurs through the architects’ ingenious creation and construction, as well as through our experiences in Blur that surely construct the sense of this world in many ways. It engages in an adaptive, functional symbolism of the world that we might come to share, through a long, perhaps infinite pragmatic conversation concerned with a worlding blurred in various ways.²⁰
 
Certainly, constructive worldmaking accounts for much of what is at stake in Blur as inventive mixing. The relevance of this approach makes critics consider the possibility of characterizing Diller & Scofidio as “engineers of experience,”²¹ and it seemingly allows a treatment of their work as part and parcel of constructing a “technological sublime” for a mixed world–one that makes landscape, climate, and technology intersect with its inhabitants.²² From this perspective, Blur is essentially a manufactured cloud with an embedded viewing deck, the Angel Deck, hovering over Lake Neuchatel in Switzerland. Significantly, the exterior “skin” of the building is based on reactualizing the tensegrity concept developed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1950s. The entire building (100 meters wide, 65 meters deep, and 25 meters in height), including all the decks, can thus be seen as a structure that is, in principle, omnidirectional, non-linear, and yet able to distribute all the local loads because the combinations of tension and integrity allow for coupling a number of continuous cables (in tension) and discontinuous members (in compression) so as to enclose a volume (Schafer 93). Access to the building is secured by tunnels and bridges across the water, along with walkways and stairs that start and end at the surface of the lake, so as to allow passages through the Blur Building as a made environment.
 
A constructivist approach also informs us that the artifactual mist-cloud is generated from the lake through a hidden, complex system that pumps and filters the water. Visitorinhabitants meet this system primarily at the end-interface, in the form of more than 31,000 small, high-pressure fog nozzles passing through the building, a design invented by Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya for the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Fair in Osaka.
 

 

 

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Fig. 6.

Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

The pumps are operated via a computerized climate control. This smart weather system reads temperature, humidity, as well as the speed and direction of the wind in order to regulate water pressure and continuously adjust to changing climate conditions. This weather system keeps the spread of the mist-cloud largely within range (a 300 meter radius from the lakeshore entry) and also controls the intensity of the fog, while limiting the amount of chlorine, bacteria, and toxins in the water and fog, in accordance with the values decreed by the Swiss authorities (Diller and Scofidio, Blur 362-363). One might observe that this weather system is the aspect of the Blur Building that goes furthest in stressing the porosity of the distinction between architecture and the environment, and in commenting, somewhat silently, on the remarkable development of environmentally sustainable architecture.²³

 
However, although both the mist-cloud itself and the smart weather system controlling it can be said to make good constructive sense of this world, they are also hinges around which turn all practically constructive strategies for redeeming a clear vision of and insight into this world. For they simultaneously introduce a perpetual blurring of any horizon and imprint registers of sensation other than those open to the clear and appropriative sense of sight. In fact, the delimiting exploration in the Blur Building of visual modalities of sense and sensation might well lead one to rather strong statements regarding epistemological and ontological aspects of the mixed world in play. To be sure, in this project there is very little world in the visual sense of an exterior, transcendent mundus, that is, the cosmos as a well composed, complete order in which one might find a place, a dwelling, and identifiable elements of orientation. Thus, this is not of a world down here that one could pass through to a télos outside this world, just as there is no longer any spirit of the world, nor a History before whose tribunal one could stand. The blur as “the vague open” of the building, as the fuzzy sense of a mixed world, suggests that there is no longer any assignable signification of “world.” Alternatively, that the “world” is withdrawing, bit by bit, from the entire order of clear signification available to us as its living, traversing, desiring inhabitants. Except, perhaps, the non-assured cosmic signification of world as universe–announced or called up as an infinite, misty expansion. A mixed world, the Blur Building is not a matter of meaning that is either revealed or disclosed, announced or desired.
 

Consideration of the Blur Building as mixed world has led Mark B. Hansen to claim, rather pointedly, that Diller & Scofidio’s project is a consequence of today’s “historically unprecedented interpenetration of body and media,” following up on the necessity to develop “a post-visual, affective phenomenology”: “what is at stake in the Blur Building is not simply a ‘seeing that can no longer interpret,’ but a wholesale short-circuiting of the role of vision, such that the affective body is literally compelled to ‘space the void'” (“Wearable Space” 369-370). The strongest confirmation of such a claim for the Blur Building qua “a wholesale short-circuiting of the role of vision,” whose literal forces operate before or beyond insight, is perhaps found rather deeply embedded within the constructions mentioned above: the system of wearable computing as yet another cluster of computers and an extensive wireless network with tracking capacity, distributed across the building. Visitor-inhabitants meet this system at the lakeshore in a two-fold manner. First, there is a personal preferences questionnaire that is filled out at the log-in station. This is scanned and sent to a (hidden) central computer that interprets the information supplied and creates a social profile. These profiles are then downloaded into wireless devices in waterproof “braincoats,” wearable computing raincoats that are handed out to all visitors-inhabitants and that constitute the second component of the wireless system. Once inside the wet mist-cloud of the Blur Building, the wireless network functions as an embedded surveillance system which is, both as a back-end system and as a front-end multitude of micro-scale device-components, largely on the order of the invisible as far as visitor-inhabitants or wearers of its mixed spacing are concerned.

 
Nevertheless, one would want to move at a slower pace here and relinquish, at least for a moment, the emphasis on the historically unprecedented, the strictly post-visual, as well as the literally compelling, non-hermeneutic, and extra-significatory force of the Blur Building qua mixed worlding. To begin, the dematerialization of architecture takes place alongside and inside a revitalization of existing, concrete architectural traditions (e.g., Buckminster Fuller). There is, moreover, no shortage of visual presencing when approaching the Blur Building from a distance, just as a certain modicum of visibility is retained when one can see from the more or less foggy decks, when the numerous LED posts and their colored displays installed as part of the system of wearables send off their blinking signals, and when the braincoats operate their visual interface in red and green colors. Finally, the experiential passage through linguistic or discursive signification towards the literal force of mixing with alterity seems continually complex, to the point of being infinitely extendable. Generally speaking, then, the “post-visuality” at stake, if there is any, seems to solicit a different internal working-through of image-performance and the visible by way of the various immanent modes of blurring vision encountered in this project. Moving carefully along this path, one could begin to approach blurring both by means of the visible and of the auditory spheres of haptics so as to trace how the Blur Building is perhaps not immediately of a literal force beyond sense, but rather remains liable to sense. It touches us both via haptic vision and via an auditory ambience or atmosphere (Stimmung) before or beyond a worldview qua definite cognitive map (Leitbild).
 
Insofar as it touches us from the outside inside global visual culture and its image-world, the Blur Building is not forcing us outside sense without further ado but remains liable to sense as it exposes us to worlding as (our) infinite finitude, letting us ex-ist on the contours, at the sensate limit of the world of sense. It keeps leading us to this limit. By integrating a set of originally or surprisingly inventive cultural-technological experiments in interactive practice, it attracts us towards that which draws the contours of the world as sense. These experiments undertake an immanent transformation of visuality, displacing clarity of sight and sense–here towards a haptic vision in the first place. The LED displays in the mist-cloud and the vaguely graded spectrum of red and green emissions from the braincoats worn in Blur give rise to a kind of new Egypt in Diller & Scofidio’s project: haptic spaces composed in unique ways, of color and by color, juxtapose so many pure tones on flat surfaces (see Deleuze, Francis Bacon 107-113). These haptic spaces solicit a properly haptic functioning of the eye capable of dealing with the “sense” of colors, not primarily in the representational manner related to depth, contour, or relief in an ideal tactile-optical space, nor in a purely manual space where touch is strictly superordinate to the eye. Rather, the sense of the Blur Building qua haptic space implies an in-between seeing, a non-optical close-up rhythm of viewing whose sense of sight behaves just like the sense of touch and generates an inventive experience where figure and ground are perceived to be on the same plane.
 
Thus, Diller & Scofidio’s experiments link cultural conventions and contemporary technics so as to facilitate and even necessitate a haptic exploration of ways to transform the sense of the world. This exploration involves haptic vision but also comprises, sometimes alongside and at other times internal to, several more planes and events in what one would call the multisensory dimension and process of the Blur Building. To the extent that even haptic vision blurs, converting the haptic in the direction of manual space, the sense of this mixed world draws increasingly on other modes of sensation, notably the hearing involved in delineating minimal rhythms and refrains, not only within the large scale ambience of the environment as such, but also, and perhaps especially, within the more intimate data space laid out via the auditory sonar pulsing interface integrated into the braincoats (Diller and Scofidio, Blur 209-223). This pulse undergoes continuous variation, but never ceases to indicate whether other visitor-inhabitants are far away (a decelerated or steady sonar pinging pulse) or close by (an accelerated sonar pinging pulse) and so touches one aurally, providing pressures that are vaguely dispersed but retain a certain regularity that makes possible an outline of semi-distinct dot-lines or sensible navigational horizons in the auditory atmosphere, in the soundscape that forms a rather indeterminate ambient socio-cultural environment.²⁴
 

4. Blurred to Blindness: From Haptic World-Spacing to Originary Tactility

… salut, obscurity! Salut to this erasure of figures and schemas! And salut to the blind whom we become … salut to the vision that did not cling to forms and ideas but that let itself be touched by forces. –Nancy, “Salut” 313.

 
Constructivist paths, even ones of haptic vision and hearing, provide us with a sensible image of the Blur Building as a world that mixes virtuality and actuality, just as they facilitate an interpretation of the building as a functionalist symbol of the world at large. Such approaches may vary considerably, may be open to dispute, meet constraints, and go on to reconstruct themselves in the face of a complex environment like this one. Nonetheless, precisely by being too sensible, by making too much sense constructively, and by providing too much of a world-image, be it only one of lo-fi ambient tones, they may be missing the point. They do not address what remains the most difficult question: how is it that Diller & Scofidio’s mixed worlding never ceases to elude the desire for clear sight and its productive, efficient, making and announcement of sense? We cannot answer this question if we presumes that we operate primarily, or even just largely, as demiurges, semi-transcendent creators of the sense of the world.²⁵ We can hardly consider mixed worlding as what touches us, in a blur radical enough to blind, if we hold to the notion that we, or Diller & Scofidio, are the creative enactors at the genesis of the sense of the world, if not of the world as such. Rather, this project shows that the architect is not a traditional manager, bringing order to social space by designing and fashioning the world. Perhaps this argument parenthesizes form, style, and signature in favor of the processual opening of a situation, relinquishes control in favor of a lived experience of indefiniteness and chance, and downplays order and the permanence of inclusion in favor of a more flexible, plastic, and fragmentary potential for transductive individuation. Along these lines, the Blur Building is less a demiurgic, semisublime construction of a meaningful world than an opening formation felt through the ongoing arrangements and modular elements that it proposes in reciprocal cooperation with its visitor-inhabitants. It moves as a uniquely mediating ecotechnical assemblage (of landscape, air, water, steel, and a host of actual architectural vectors alongside networks, computers, databases, sensors and actants, and software code) that proposes to reweave a strong affective bond with and between people, liable in its mixes to unfold towards yet another territory without being constructed as one.²⁶ The charge that a kind of collaborative appropriation of the situation is at stake here should perhaps be tempered by an awareness of the degree to which the Blur Building remains variable, presents possibilities for meaning that cannot be foreseen, and offers an architectural spacing of the moment that involves timeeffects and installs a movement rather like a developing organism.²⁷
 
The Blur Building is, as Hansen has observed, an installation involving wearable space, understood as our experience of phenomenalizing embodiment (our mediatory relation to a now highly technologized life world).²⁸ However, it is perhaps not primarily as an experience of wearable space that it touches us. The Blur Building is also, as Cary Wolfe has argued, an artful system of social communication that uses a perceptual blur to perturb the normativity of mass-mediated global communication. Diller & Scofidio’s project is clearly both, and Hansen and Wolfe respond to important traits: embodiment, wearable computing, and media intimacy in Hansen’s case; perception, communication, and artistic perturbation of massmedia constructions of reality in Wolfe’s. Nevertheless, they are also too eager to enact semantic sense, via strict foci on embodied experience (although this is open to affective sensation) and on social communication (although this is undergoing perturbations of perception). They tend to marginalize or leave out the fact that the Blur Building is not just of a world on meaningful display: it is a problematization of making clear, visual, imaged, productive, consumptive sense of the world.
 
As the subtitle of the artist-architects’ book indicates, the Blur Building attests to a certain care for “the making of nothing.” They, along with the Blur Building, can problematize making sense because the remnants of transcendence in an announced or desired sense, inherent in constructivist making, have already been abandoned in favor of affirming haptic world–spacing as the transimmanence of the world.²⁹ In favor of a practico-tactile sense as existence and techné (Nancy, Sense 45). The world is not the sense we make of it, but rather what we transform transimmanently during our approach to it as a presencing liable to sense. The Blur Building comes into presence not only as a dynamic set of informational affordances liable to sense, but also, and earlier on, as flows of matter and energy affecting us, letting us feel anew that architectural mediation qua territorial spacing was always already intimately connected with providing a protected set of food sources, and that it is the flow of energy that creates stabilizations of worlding in the first place.³⁰ Using this approach, we would be towards the Blur Building when we touch it; touching it is an eventual process of mixed worlding that comes before and surprises current versions of experiencing the life world. It is, then, of an a-visual architexture, a matter of tactile relations opening onto a different existential contact and reaching out energetically at the blurred limit of sight and hearing.³¹ As Diller & Scofidio have it, Blur is “decidedly low definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself” (Blur 162). Blurring world-vision and imaging, beyond, or rather inside-below, haptic vision and Stimmung, to the point of contacting what affects and animates us, is structurally earlier than or ahead of any commonsensical hermeneutic horizon of meaning, as Husserl’s thought of the life world would have it. When the tactile interface of your braincoat, located at the lower and rather intimate bodily region, is activated during the encounter with another world-inhabitant whose scanned profile matches yours with 100% affinity, its tactile vibrancy is hardly a matter of sensible interpretation of an experience.³² Rather, this coming to presence of the touch of the other’s life form, and of other forces and energeia, takes you to the limit of Erlebnis qua a sensation of originary tactility. The ongoing specific differentiation of the Blur Building offers up to us a mixed medium, that is, a dynamic environment for a life in transduction between technology and live culture or, in other words, a mixed medium qua an epiphylogenetic processing of culture, biology, and technics that also lets us live on through means other than life.³³
 

5. At Our Discretion: Among the Almost Immanent … and Untouchable Embeddedness

… the there is nothing other than the Wittgensteinian “That” of the world, while at the same time being the world’s original “how”…. It is not a place of places, or a sensorium Dei, or an a priori form. More likely, it would be a priori matter–but here the a priori, in its act of birth, would be the sensible entelechy itself: the unity, opened within itself, of the touched/touching … the worldliness of the world, qua absolute existential condition, exhausts its finite sense–exhausts it, that is, opens it infinitely. Mundus patet. –Nancy, The Sense of the World 159-160.

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 7.

Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.

 

 
As mixed worlding, the Blur Building directly engages the way in which information and communication technologies today move towards becoming indiscernible from any ontological exterior inside (nature, the environment, the milieu, embodiment, organs, bodies, the body). Participating in the emergent movement of pervasive computing, Diller & Scofidio’s project pursues both the disappearance of the computer and the pervasive embedding of computing, and so places us among the invisibly integrated world-spacings of ubicomp, as described by the Intel Corporation around 2001:
 

Computing, not computers will characterize the next era of the computer age. The critical focus in the very near future will be on ubiquitous access to pervasive and largely invisible computing resources. A continuum of information processing devices ranging from microscopic embedded devices to giant server farms will be woven together with a communication fabric that integrates all of today’s networks with networks of the future. Adaptive software will be self-organizing, self-configuring, robust, and renewable. At every level and in every conceivable environment, computing will be fully integrated with our daily lives. (qtd. in McCullough 7)³⁴

Here and now, the Blur world and its events are not that of which we make sense. Rather, blurred worlding invisibly overlaid with the pervasively embedded and calm computing of mixed reality (in the widest “sense”) is ecotechnics as how we exist. The world is not what we make or manipulate, but how we exist with a cultural and technological sentiment or affect.³⁵ The sensible entelechy of the Blur Building, its originary opening of the touching/touched in uniquely vague artifactual dynamics and movements, calls for and allows transformation of the sense of our existence in an interactive and performative practice at the edge of the world. It attracts and leads us most when and where it approaches an infinitely finite world delimiting sense, sentiments, and affect. An impersonal, inoperative, disorganized, scattered, and discrete world of tactility prior to rhythmic pulse, image, and clear vision. Structurally earlier than or evading haptic vision, hearing, and manual spacing. Withdrawing even from the distinction between self- and other-reference, which it allows. A world of relational existential tangens which remains fuzzily vague, because liable to sense, whether originally or as a world to come. One whose traits are perhaps not just being-in-theworld or being-towards, but just as much being-with, being-between, being-among … other existents and things. An irreducibly vague world of ecotechnics, because discretely different. One whose touches are delightful or terrifying, beautiful or technologically sublime, depending on the character of the exposition to becoming other elsewhere, in singularly plural contact-among. Perhaps the tangens of this mixed worlding in a place and an era of ubiquitous computing is at its most difficult when its demand is exorbitant, when the embeddedness of the pervasive altogether smoothes space and time and thus demands an impossible tact. At this level of tactful giving/withdrawal, the mixing of the world, which may be all, cannot be struck, grasped, stroked, caressed, kissed, licked, or tasted on any one plane. Of necessity, it can only be mourned, with a certain respect for what exceeds the smallest fragment of erotic light or Eros qua texture, at the limit where touch cannot remain within the confines of the tactile but learns and is learning anew what it feels like to touch without touching. Blur with its blurring goes and comes as it invents the world as an affinity of disjunction and conjunction (do not touch, but touch). As an inventive building of the world, it brings into contiguity, partes extra partes, contact and non-contact where all it touches is the other.³⁶

 

 

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Fig. 8.

Photo courtesy of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Used by permission.