AGxKANSAI 2022 Panel: ANOTHER KIND OF KNOWING

ALAN PROHM – Title: ON PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE AND EFFICACY in the Work of Arakawa
and Gins

Alan Prohm:

GREETING

Hello, Welcome. Thank you for joining this conference and taking the time to
view this talk – one of 3 in the panel, Another Kind of Knowing – on Arakawa
and Gins

I want to again thank the organizers of the conference, Prof. Mimura and the
Studies Program at Kansai University and Prof. Ono of the Kyoto University of
the Arts, who also curated the exhibition. Also, of course, Momoyo Homma of
the Reversible Destiny Foundation, as well as ST Luk and the team at the
archives in New York for help in our research. As I said in my introductory
words, this event is a great contribution to the study of Arakawa and Gins, and
to the realisation of the potential of their work in the 21st Century, so we’re very pleased to be invited and it’s great to be part.

INTRO

The title of my talk is: ON PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE AND EFFICACY in
the work of Arakawa and Gins

The Context, as I said, is the Book Project w/ Don Byrd and Jondi Keane,
Another Way of Knowing: on Arakawa and Gins

My Focus will be on Procedural Architecture, as a/their unique proposition in
the history of art, architecture and philosophy.

The Question I will be asking is the question of Efficacy – how can we
approach the question of efficacy in the work of Arakawa and Gins, the
question of how it could or does work?

Note: my talk can be taken as an overview or fractal miniature of the chapter I
am researching and writing for the book.

It is structured in 4 parts:
1 – A+G’s TURN to Architecture
2 – The CLAIM of Procedural Architecture
3 – The EFFICACY of procedurality
4 – On Measure and METHOD for use-testing procedural architecture

TURN

Motivated to counteract any possible trend to reductionism in the reception of
Arakawa and Gins’ work, it is helpful to “enter” their work at a or as a TURN
roughly, a turn “to architecture” – though as we will see there is more to the
story when we get into it.

In relation to their career, it is a turn in mediality, from a painting and poetry
(roughly) to structurally conceived and actually built architecture.
Behind this turn, because behind their thinking on mediality, lies a critique of
the modality and mediality of Western logocentric rationalism since the 17th
century. This is a longer footnote, – instead I would point you to Don Byrd’s
presentation, where he goes into this in greater depth. Suffice it to say, A+G’s
orientation towards their choice of media and mediality, as artists/thinkers, is
one carrying a critique of western Rationalism, a structure of knowledge that
excludes the body, its key informant and variable, from all its equations.
Important to note: not for a style or a genre the turn in fact brought on a loss of understanding and support in the artworld, as appreciators were not always able to follow them through these turns/this
turning rather for an efficacy! – an efficacy they identified in architecture and sought
to realize and actualize

This efficacy is embedded for them in energetic potentials inherent between
personing bodies (organisms that person) and the physical surround
(Bioscleave, in their terms). Viewed in this way, it’s an obvious move to want to
employ as much physical surround as possible, as intensively as feasible, in an
enunciation aiming at addressing the user/participant/person body-wide.
Western aesthetics sets its claims primarily, traditionally, on an efficacy of the
aesthetic, enshrining a basically unidirectional, perception-centered model of
the aesthetic exchange in modern art movements. The procedural position of
Arakawa and Gins’ new aesthetics recognizes this (perception) is just one leg of the relay. Viewed in the terminology of perception-action cycles, which re-integrates these two legs, both in the game of procedural efficacy in architecture. This new, doubled horizon of aesthetic events is an obvious
attractor for an art aiming at impact! Even just from a calculation of the available surface area – architecture offers more access to/interaction with readers/viewers/participants. This multiplied by the possibile materialities and affordances for use and movement that architecture can bring to bear, shows
that no “medium” or “genre” can do more in terms of these potentials for activation and inter-activation with persons, becoming through the having and using of bodies, what Arakawa and Gins also call “organisms that person in action”.

Along with the efficacy promised in the architecture they end up pursuing,
there is a philosophical prioty at work, seeing the “more” mediality and “more”
materiality of architecture as a corrective to miopic, logo- and ocular-centric
biases that have defined much of Western cultural history since at least the 17th
Century.

1990 Up until now, the difficulty has been that IN A WORLD
DOMINATED BY VERBAL DISCOURSE, BODY, THE BODY OF THE
SPEAKER AND THAT OF THE LISTENER, so narrowly addressed, if
addressed at all, was kept forever hidden behind the procession of
words being spoken. Similarly, with primarily visual discourse the
viewer (or maker) together with his/her viewing (forming) process,
WAS OFF TO ONE SIDE, beside the fact, obscured by a series of
successive views. – Press release Building Sensoriums Exhibition Feldman Gallery 1990

Their turn was to put the body front and center – because it is more effective,
and because they are asking philosophical questions which they believed
need to be asked this way.

__

The TURN they make with their work can and must also be viewed in a relation
to art history, especially avant-garde and experimental art history, as a history
of turns – a complex striation/sequence, defined by moves, claims and
positionings made in relation to other or prior movements, projects, styles,
schools, genres etc.

With their movement into architecture Arakawa and Gins make an event in the
disciplinary art history of painting and poetry by leaving, or superceding the
genre and discipline confines. With their claim to and development of
procedural architecture – as a field (meadow) and new horizon of practice –
they propose something “New to the 21st Century”, promising a turn even over
and beyond architecture in its cutting-edge form (cf. Anywhere 1992)

So, to do best justice to the complexity/multiplicity and committed extra-
disciplinarity of Arakawa and Gins’ work, it is helpful/important to approach it as turning, as a turning in the genre and media disciplinarities they practiced and as a turning in the epoch of artistic endeavor, art-(beyond-art) historically, architecture, “but in a new way”. (cf. Anywhere article, 1992)
To begin plotting this out on a timeline, we can say the turn to architecture
takes up the 1980’s, “building” on impulses and insights from the Mechanism
of Meaning, published in three editions 1971, 1979 and 1988. It is the period
in the background of, and then after, the Mechanism of Meaning, crystallizing in the space of
their project for a bridge to be built over the Moselle river at Epinal, France,
entitled “The Process in Question”.

If we want to deep-dive on this point of the turning in their work, even as we
acknowledge again that it is neither linear nor sequential, we can look at one
chapter, added to the 3rd reedition of Mechanism of Meaning in 1988 as “Ch. 16 Review and Self
Criticism”, as a uniquely informative text. This document contains as
suggestively as any other the active germ culture of Arakawa and Gins’
procedural architecture, expressing at the moment of its emergence into the
body of their published and exhibited work. It caps this crowning
documentation of their major work so far with a declaration that they are going
further, and with a taste of what that beyond will entail. Hingeing their career
between the grafical / literary and the architectural, the text describes and
presages what was to come as procedural architecture and the reversible
destiny project in terms that could not be understood at that time, before the concrete design and building that came in the 90’s and 2000’s to give it form.

This chapter, added to be the final/anti-final chapter of Mechanism of Meaning,
enacts for readers the emergence of architecture as the point and potential of
their work. It does so in a language and sketches that still stay shy of a solid
concreteness, relying on suggestive, in places resonantly metaphoric, writing,
finely balanced and interwoven with the drawings, dominated by grids and fine
mesh in a pencil graphite line.

The visual poetics of this text, while strikingly new and distinct in its published
context, carries on with a writing practice (largely Madeline’s) previously seen
in the books Word Rain (1969), the long poem “Intend” (1973), What the
President will Says and Do (1984), her piece for Boundary 2 “…from Essay on
Multi-Dimensional Architecture” in 1985 and the co-authored To Not to Die
(1987) to which it is stylistically and thematically a close continuation. Similarly,
the chapter draws on geometrical researches and devices from
Arakawa’s paintings, and from the Mechanism of Meaning panels, to fuel the
conceptual production behind the drawings in this new chapter and this new
and unique in their work style of drawing. The near-lyrical writing and the
conceptual drawing, however, are here together in service to a concrete
project, which the reader would not necessarily know was concrete (i.e.
planned to be really built), at least until a few pages in where a drawing of the
proposed bridge fills one two-page spread – and even there, with the witty,
suggestive lyricism in the names of details, for much of the text, the project
could easily seem more poetry than building plan.

What the deeper continuities of this apparently disruptive, disjunctive work
show, is that the architecture that they turn to is in fact something prior to
architecture, something they were already able to actively engage in as
painter/poets, but which they were now to approach also concretely as
architects. Arakawa was already doing architecture in his painting, and not
incidentally, and Madeline was already from early on constructing theory for
architecture in her writing (see esp. Word Rain). This is an important point,
because it is what will also lead them to supercede the architecture of their
time once they get into it, going beyond it because the disciplinary confines
were never the consideration, only the fundamental questioning they now feel
can only be done as architecture. Architecture as built practice became the
means of doing the architecture that was already underway in the wall-sized
canvases, tilted floor-panels, occasional attached objects, and a literary
practice unrivaled in its discernment, performance and description of the mental-bodily processes that constitute space and architecture for the individual – an architecture here still only at the conceptual level.

The step to built architecture is made, I would say, with the first constructed
installation structures from the Epinal bridge project (e.g. Perceptual Landing
Sites (1)). What at this early juncture, and in the first exhibitions where this work
was shown, (e.g. Tokyo/Kyoto in 1991) was just a step, a possibly momentary
shift of focus in the practice of dynamic and medially experimental artists, and
could just as easily have been mistaken for poetry, is legitimated beyond all
doubt in its seriousness and longevity with the constructions at Yoro, Nagi,
Mitaka and East Hampton. As we can see in this useful and beautiful text
devoted to their turning to architecuture, however, architecture emerges in the
work of Arakawa and Gins as the ostentation of a subtler, more infinitessimal
mode of architectural investigation already at the core of their practice before.
This is perhaps the point behind one cryptic sentence in this text on p.103:
“Can we have a new level of “ostensivity” at last?!”

CLAIMS

A+G’s work, as a movement within/across/through medial and genre fields,
can be discerned and mapped in a series of claims they make in and with it.
Claims to certain terrains and positions within the art field (what I’ll call
positional claims), but also propositional claims, claims about the
architecture, their architecture in particular, and what it can do.

The claiming they made that makes us today talk about their work in terms of
the architecture can be found through the 1980’s and into the 1990’s – in a few
different degrees of explication (I would say) or ostentation. For example, …
There are places where we can see them claiming what they are doing and
interested in as architecture

Claim: ARCHITECTURE
e.g.

1988 We want to form a container that will serve as Proving Ground—a proving ground
for all that which constitutes a person as s/he perceives. … We cannot yet predict how
complex the structure of that container, or those containers, which could accomplish this will have to be. In any event, the perceiver must become her/himself as if soft wax, pushing easily past any grid of rationality, … – “Preface” to 3rd re-edition of The Mechanism of Meaning, Abbeyville Press 1988

1990 …there shall be constructed places that will afford to perceiving, to the projected
array, a set of matching (to it) contact points of potential landing sites for the moulding
or containing of it (the act of perceiving) as a whole. – Press release from exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery Building Sensoriums 1990

1992 … Constructions that are architectural, but architectural in a new way, must be
worked out for surrounding and containing in noticeable ways what, until now, only
implied or suggested the site of a person. – ”Person as Site with Respect to a Tentative Constructed Plan” in Anywhere journal, New York: Anyone Corporation 1992

Then, in certain places we see them coming to specify this “other kind” of
architecture as “procedural”, by way of “process” and other formulations:

Claim: PROCEDURAL ARCHITECTURE
e.g.

1994 Tentative constructed plans will provide the species with a process architecture
by which it may exceed its limits. – Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny, London: Academy Editions 1994 p.23

Then, at another level we can see them formulating claiming of a propositional sort – about this architecture – what is is and can do.

Claim: Architecture answers philosophical questions
e.g.

1985 An event must be enlarged upon until it becomes correctly recorded in
relation to all the rest – neither over- nor under-emphasized. To enlarge an
event and properly record its occurrence, and, in so doing, keep texture
thoroughly afloat at large, there must be extensive re-incisions into the
skin/scaffolding of the understanding. So much for not just standing idly about.
An agile scaffolding made of ratchets…. – Madeline Gins, “from Essay on Multi-Dimensional Architecture”, Boundary 2 Fall 85/ Winter 86 p.97

1992 These constructions will be tentative constructed plans in respect to
which a person will know herself as site. – ”Person as Site with Respect to a Tentative Constructed Plan” in Anywhere journal, New York: Anyone Corporation 1992

1988 To make the usual architectural anonymity of domestic life as an
extension of body become diagrammatically perceivable. – “Ch. 16 – Review and Self-Criticism” in 3rd re-edition of The Mechanism of Meaning, Abbeyville Press 1988

Claim: Architecture activates/extends/creates body
e.g.

1994 – The proper function of these dwellings will be to augment the bodies of
their inhabitants. – Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Architecture: Sites of Reversible Destiny,
London: Academy Editions 1994 p.23

1994? – No more passive architecture! – from one of the texts between 1988 and 1994

1988 – After a while, out of a continuing dissymetry that, as s/he moves, the
observer inserts into the context of a supersymmetry, and out, as well, of that
set of unmet anticipations resulting from one’s having continually not found oneself where one might automatically expect oneself to be, a body or a field, an artificial Doppelgänger, may take shape. – “Ch.16 – Review and Self-Criticism” in 3rd re-edition of The Mechanism of Meaning, Abbeyville Press 1988 p.145

1988 – The corrugations and indents suggest to the viewer numerous, possible
landing strips upon which the viewing could come to rest … Jagged, raised
planes jutting out at oblique angles from brightly painted dips and hollows
cause there to be in the viewer, through an accelerating of the accumulating
and compounding of his/her viewing, frequent déjà-vus. – “Ch. 16 – Review and Self-Criticism” in 3rd re-edition of The Mechanism of Meaning, Abbeyville Press 1988 p.106

Claim: Architecture can reverse destiny – mortality
e.g.

1990 … These places have the potential to act as reversible sites of
phenomena. – Press release from exhibition at the Feldman Gallery Building Sensoriums 1990

1994 … Here is a way of reversing the seemingly irreversible destiny of the
modern subject. The structures through which we create worlds are not our
eternal destiny. Though we are thrown into existence in such a way that
conformity to a previously constituted symbolic order is unavoidable, the
codes that condition perception and cognition are open to deliberate
transformation.
The limits of perception are not absolute but are a function of an historically
determined code that can be changed. To reform perception is to transform
the architecture of the I. Since the world is not merely given but is constructed
by the activity of the subject, the recoding of the I is the recreation of the
world. – Helen Keller or Arakawa – Chapter: “Brave Light, subtitled: “Form and
Function for the Deafblind or An Introduction to a Projective-Envelope
Architecture of Light”

The apogee (but not end) of Arakawa and Gins’ claim-staking, was of course in
1997 with their Guggenheim exhibition and their large format catalogue with
the title, We Have Decided Not to Die. By this point, their claim to be doing
architecture, and the claim to have a particular, more powerful approach,
“procedural architecture”, are established. With this event, the claim in its third
degree, the claim of reversibility through architecture, gets established.
Everything still only implicitly and emergently architectural in the graphic and
literary production of the 1980’s is here now explicitly and fully architectural up
to the urban scale, with Nagi (1992-94) and Yoro (1995) presented as built
works; and Sensorium City (Tokyo Bay) as a project in planning that, like The
Process and Question, was never built yet informed and gave the frame for a
longer creative period.

To cap the historical portion of this overview, I can point to the last page of the
catalogue they published with the Guggenheim exhibition in 1997. This page
establishes and positions Arakawa and Gins’ claim relative to the claims made
by two dominant figures of architectural modernism LeCorbusier and Mies van
der Rohe:

Claims compared

Forms of Function
• LeCorbusier – Villa Savoie – For (Super-Human) Comfort
• van der Rohe – Farnsworth House – For the Sake of a Universal
Spacetime
• Arakawa&Gins – Critical Resemblances House – For the Sake of
Determining the Extent of the Site of a Person

To slightly elucidate this complete reframing of the notion of function in procedural architecture, I can point to a short text appearing elsewhere in the catalogue, in relation to the Tokyo Bay project, Sensorium City. It can well serve as a manifesto on procedural architecture:

Comfort is no longer a factor. That it might take several hours to go from one room to another in a reversible destiny house is of no mportance so long as the sensibility of the person traversing the room flowers and catches onto itself in transit. – Arakawa and Madeline Gins, We Have Decided Not to Die, Catalogue from the Guggenheim exhibition 1997

EFFICACY

1994 – Here is a way of reversing the seemingly irreversible destiny of the
modern subject. The structures through which we create worlds are not our
eternal destiny. Though we are thrown into existence in such a way that conformity to
a previously constituted symbolic order is unavoidable, the codes that condition
perception and cognition are open to deliberate transformation. – Madeline Gins, Ch. XXV “Brave Light”; an essay on architecture for the deafblind in Helen Keller or Arakawa 1994; p. 250-251)

But the rhetorical confrontation of variant claims is not the point of staking out
territory (and new territory) in architecture for Arakawa and Gins. As I said of
the medial turn/turning in their work in general, it wasn’t for the sake of
achieving a style or participating in a genre – it was in pursuit and for the sake
of an efficacy, an efficacy they sought in architecture, an efficacy they ended up
discovering viz. inventing, in/as procedural architecture.

What is this efficacy? Procedural efficacy, or the efficacy of procedures? On
what grounds can they claim the effects the architecture could have or should
have? How can claims to efficacy be evaluated?

What is the chain/vector of explanation behind this paradigm of efficacy – what
forces, mechanisms, conditions etc are aligned, implicitly or explicitly, to
explain the projected effects? What plausibility can an explanation like this give
to a claim of effect or impact?

These are central questions of my research and writing in our book project, the
challenge I’m taking on there and hopefully, what I’ll have something new to
say about in the book. Here of course, I can only fly over the discussion. I am
also eager to learn from others who have thoughts on these topics, so please
do be in touch.

One answer, to the question of efficacy in the work of Arakawa and Gins – the
compactest I know of is: landing sites

1994 – In the final count, it is the landing sites that, in conjunction with
constructions specifically made to augment them, will lead the way
to a constructed (artificial?) eternity.

Fundamental change will not come about by chance meetings with
unusual landing site configurations; instead what is required is constant
contact with configurations capable of spinning one about in one’s
tracks. … Not knowing what it is that lives makes determining what it is
that dies impossible.

To rephrase that in our own words, I would venture:

landing sites, multiplied, multiply the surface of reentry in events
(eventning) – increasing the chances of reversing becomings

Or, one step compacter, we could try to lay out the sequence:

landing (perceptual or/and imaging; dimensionalizing): configuring:
coordinating: performance of procedures: eventning: personing: repeat

To explore this proposition – the core proposition of procedural architecture –
approximately adequately needs more space. But there is a thought
experiment that can gives us, I think, an order of magnitude.

Landing sites

Simple multiplication
1994 – Number and complexity of landing site configurations are directly
proportional to intricacy and extent of path or terrain.
p. 77 Academy Editions 1994

1988 – The corrugations and indents suggest to the viewer numerous, possible landing
strips upon which the viewing could come to rest … Jagged, raised planes jutting out
at oblique angles from brightly painted dips and hollows cause there to be in the
viewer, through an accelerating of the accumulating and compounding of his/her
viewing, frequent déjà-vus. – “Ch. 16 Review and Self-Criticism” in Mechanism of Meaning 3rd
Edition 1988 p.106

Exponential potentiation
1994 – Each turn in the path and each rounding of a bend in an ellipse has the
TRIPLE EFFECT of prompting a particular sequence of kinaesthetic
landing site configurations coincidental with an arising of that
sequence in memory and a replay of the sequence in bodily
memory. – p. 76 Academy Editions 1994

METHOD

How can we approach this question of efficacy – which Arakawa and Gins
suggest comes down to landing sites?

One thing that can help is a good comparison.

Like their “Forms of Function” board, we could imagine a provocative
juxtaposition with renowned architects of postmodernism, their
contemporaries. This reveals their positioning relative to a forefront of their
age – and in fact there is a particularly opportune comparison to make with two
representatives of “deconstructivism”, Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind.
Each presents an examples with striking superficial similarities but that reveal
equally the chasm in commitment to the body in their productions of space.
The comparison shows how much further procedural architecture goes than
deconstruction in theorizing and building for the effects it claims, in knowing
what its building is doing with the body. The juxtaposition shows a significant
asymmetry between modernist/postmodernist architecture and procedural
architecture in their theorizing and building for the body, and still today it is
difficult to find a treatment of space or architecture that captures a percentile
what procedural architecture, thinking space in service of the architectural
body, can capture. (cf. Architectural Body 2002).

Our board claiming a position for procedural architecture up against
deconstruction, its contemporary, would look like this:

FORMS OF EFFECT
Peter Eisenmann – Holocaust Memorial – to signify anxiety and disorientation

Daniel Libeskind – Garden of Exile/Jewish Museum Berlin – to signify disorientation and
dislocation
Arakawa and Gins – Critical Resemblances House – to reverse the destiny to be mortal

Methodologically we can conduct the comparison on progressive levels.

1 – We can start by comparing forms in the different works.

They each use similar, even strikingly similar, formal devices:
Eisenmann: Forest of Stelae; Libeskind: Tilted Labyrinth, Elevated
Planters; A+G: terrain; colliding walls; entrances upon entrances;
superimposed labyrinths, multiple horizons …

2 – Then we can compare claims made for the effects of these forms.

Eisenmann – source: – claim: … – regime of efficacy: semiotics/anti-semiotics

Libeskind – source: – claim: … – regime of efficacy: hermeneutics/phenomenology

Arakawa and Gins – source: – claim: … – regime of efficacy: architectural embodiment/procedurality/landing sites

3 – Then, and this is where it gets interesting, we can compare the Experience (use/reception) of these forms in BIOTOPOLOGICAL terms, i.e. in terms of landing sites and procedurality.

What is the Metric for this? How can we measure/count/confirm claims of effect or impact based on
landing/landing sites/landing site configurations?

Step 1 – Diagramming and recording

2002 – We believe that the resolving of these matters requires the construction
of complex measuring and tracking devices, constructions by which to
gain perspective on human functioning and separate out its component
factors. – Madeline Gins and Arakawa Architectural Body 2002

3 main resources
1 – their diagramming (what they tried)
2 – layering of/thinking with their diagramming
3 – developing/applying other diagrammings:
phase-space (cf. Martin Rosenberg)
life space topology (Kurt Lewin)
and new tools for diagramming (what we can do beyond it)

That, as I said, is where we can start. From there we can hope to move to a
fruitful analysis and reporting on the basis of this data. This is where I am
starting/continuing to start, now with this book project, but also with proposals
I’m developing for an immersive architectural body tracking project – using
3D-Video and body-mounted motion-capture in a VR modelling environment –
a methodology that could allow us to observe, quantify and qualitatively
analyse the landing site activity of organisms that person in action in tactically
posed (i.e. procedural) surrounds. I would love to work together with others
interested in this research, and look forward to meeting in the live session on
Sunday March 13 at 2pm Japanese time.

CONCLUSION

Thank you for listening and watching. I hope you also see the videos by Don
Byrd and Jondi Keane that together make up the panel “Another Kind of
Knowing”, based on our book project together Another Kind of Knowing – on
Arakawa and Gins.

I look forward to questions and to a lively discussion on Sunday.

Bye for now!

END

View also: Don Byrd Presentation – Jondi Keane Presentation