Experiments with Body Agent Architecture

Front matter

f (J ( d e i one

; A Alessaĵdro Ayuso

Experiments Agent Arc

Contents

List of figures Acknowledgements Prologue: Who is P_1435?

1. Our Narrator’s Present Circumstance; Excerpts from the Journal of P_1435

2. Situating P_1435’s Predicament; an Outline of the Topic and Structure of this Book 3. Memories of an Awakening at a Great Height; Excerpts from the Journal of P_1435

Chapter 1 Our Narrator’s Present

Circumstance

Acollection of excerpts of entries from the journal of P_1435 in which P_1435 describes his predicament at Wates House and his present corporeal state.

25 Dicembre Anno Domini MMX 02:34! | am a 5/5-year-old spiritello. You can just call me P_1435. | recall little from my formative years, millennia ago in Roma. My first clear Memories | can relate to you begin when | was awakened by Signor Donato? in the quattrocento era in Firenze. | was reincarnated many times by Artists and Architects far and wide, and | mischievously thrived on the margins and pediments of European Architecture up until the XX Secolo Starting then, my rhetorical and narrative presence was no longer needed in the design of Edifices, and so | lay dormant for many years, leaving facades and structures unadorned. | plan to recount this history to you through the writing of this Journal.

First though, | must explain my current State. Recently, | have undergone a resurrection due to activities on the ground floor of Wates House. | now type this Journal Entry while sitting in the building’s stairway. The bewildering physicality of my reborn Body is emphasised by the fact that my Flesh materialises and dematerialises sporadically. Often, my most dematerialised condition occurs not when | am exploring Wates House but when | am in the new setting where design takes place. Here, everything is dematerialised, or simply absent. Even the Ground itself is nearly non-existent. In its place is something that reminds me of those Grids carefully drawn by

Signor da Vinci, receding infinitely into the distance. My Skin often has a similar appearance to this Grid, as if it had been overlaid onto my Body. When this dematerialisation occurs, | can be seen through and through my Carapace. It is nothing more than a fleeting net outlining my shape.° And alarmingly enough, from this Vantage point, one can easily see that | am reborn as a Baby Without Organs.*

Aside from my Gridded Shell, | possess only three interior Articulations. One is my mouth; it contains a tongue which allows me to lick and thirst for vino, but lacks teeth, and thus gives me teething pains and causes me to bite, gnaw and slurp on every surface | find. The others are my eyes; those two globes are laden with lines of latitude and longitude float within their gridded sockets.

Although one can see through me, the periodic absence of my Skin is not the most shocking omissions of my Anatomy. The primary loss | have suffered is that | have found myself Neutered. My amorous Libido has been dealt a stifling blow due to this carnal exemption from my prepubescent erogenous zone. And obviously, this has decimated my physical ability to create parabolic jetties of angelic urine, which was one of my favourite pastimes both for its pleasurable aesthetic and ludic effect. Another form of castration | have suffered is that | have been stripped of my wings, causing me to resort to literally pedantic means of transport.

If you cannot tell by now, it is true, dear Reader -| am dealing with a deep depression on this Christmas Day. It stems from my own aforementioned physical

1.1

1.1 Ornamental putto ‘holding up’ a cornice, Church of San Domenico Maggiore, Naples. Photograph by Mimmo Jodice. © Mimmo Jodice.

state and my new dwelling, this Wates House. And yes, | find this Wates House an entirely depressing Edifice in every respect.

You may expect me not to dwell on Architettura as a subject matter, thinking me a carefree Sprite, but Reader, | assure you, my newfound home is causing me to recognise just how much Architecture has mattered and continues to matter to me. | have been part of some of the most grand and important Architettura — and | mean | have really been part of it! | have helped to design it, and | have appeared on it and within it, so intimately and closely connected with it that you could even say my entire existence is tied up with Architettura. Reader, | can appear pious at times —| have spent many centuries inhabiting various ecclesiastic structures, and this has affected my outward disposition — but ultimately, | am a hedonist, and my aiding in the construction of Buildings, my caress of their surfaces, gentle support of their protrusions and their envelopment of my Body by their niches and crevices are for me indispensable opportunities for sensual Pleasure.

This is why | find Wates House's planar enclosures impoverished. They are far from the voluptuous rigonfiamenti Barocchi? and curves whose idiosyncratic folds | am accustomed to supporting, its shadowy tympanum and frieze scenes | am accustomed to illuminating and celebrating within, its complex, festooned Decorations that | am accustomed to dancing and playing my pan, and its cornices that | have supported through (my now lost) powers of flight, flute amongst (Figure 1.1). The painted board, planes of glass and cold surfaces of its floors lack the olfactory, sonic, textural and gustatory graciousness of my preferred environment.

Tonight, | type from my hacked iPhone (yes, | have obtained one of these ingenious Devices and, after reviewing the YouTube tutorials, have succeeded in ‘jailbreaking’ it), and lam perched in one of Wates House’s most horrible locations — the staircase. The scale and materiality of the place are completely oppositional to my Nature. The scale® treads are out of proportion for the long climbs upward and downward, and they are fashioned from a frigid material | must traverse upon now with my bare feet. There is no sunlight and no moonlight to speak of penetrating into this Dreary place, save from some stingy windows at the very top. For the most part, the only sounds | hear now are my own grumblings and the occasional rustling of a scurrying mouse, ricocheting from the drab walls. Even my ears derive no Pleasure from this place.

The predominant use of the building by its Inhabitants seems extremely staid. | have adorned structures where those who visited were even more reserved, even solemn, but at least I was able to play. In this Wates House there is no opportunity to frolic with other spiritelli, let alone Cherubs and Satyrs. How could such a ghastly Edifice be

1.2 Joseph Highmore, Seated Putto, eighteenth century. Ink and watercolour on paper,

56 mmx52 mm. © Tate. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 (Unported). https:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks /highmore-seated-putto-verso -fragment-of-a-figure-holding-a -staff-t04198.

3 Our narrator’s present circumstance conceived? What gruesome bedevilled band of

Architetti could create such a punishing assembly of materials? Were there no modelli made? Surely if there were, such a catastrophe could have been averted. Since the Architetti were clearly not able, why did they not consult craftspeople or sculptors to help them consider intagli or Figure to bring some dignity and beauty to their design?’ | suspect that the Architetti who were responsible for this horrid Structure had no idea that such Figures could help them.

As you can see, l am still a bit sore that Architetti no longer have need for fashioning Characters such as myself, and that they let me languish for so many years. And now, here | am, surrounded by Architects! Considering the scenario, | prefer to go unnoticed, only emerging under cover of night after they have all left for the day.

lam a creature that is conjured by a fertile union of material and imagination. Before | continue with my story, | realise that | should further clarify this aspect of my nature. In the past, when I have been evoked, there is always some physical aspect that gives rise to a new manifestation of my Body — whether it was gestural strokes of chalk residue on a sheet of paper or the carved subtractions from a marble Monolith. My physical Frame has had many Incarnations, but the alterations in my physical composition were minor, from my formative Roman past, which was revived again and again, from the Rinascimento® onwards.

The physical characteristics of my depiction always endow me with particular abilities and dispositions. If | am, say, drawn with gestural flourish, athletically, and in the midst of windsailing, | am endowed with great strength and feel the need to run or sail insatiably about.” If |I am modelled phlegmatically in clay or am sketched with spattered ink, appearing brooding and corpulent, | will be much more subdued and possibly in a foul or brooding mood until | am evoked again (Figure 1.2). And now | am created as a Gridded Shell-being, with Flesh as intermittently existent as the clouds that | observe overhead. When my Flesh materialises, | feel sensations — pain, pleasure, heat, cold — but if | am at that moment manifest as the hollow Net, | do not.

| am an idea, passed through generations, and | appear when called upon to take part in a design. This provisory condition is the reason why my physical attributes can change so drastically, and my life has endured through the ages. Typically, my Body changes with each of my incarnations, and sometimes if | am built into the fabric of a building, my Body merges with the material. | am part of a greater pool of Figures that appear ina similar way over the epochs, such as Griffins, Gargoyles, Saints, Gods and Ignudi.

Altro che, you would like to ask, ‘Why, then, do you suffer from such a depression in your current

1.3 John Donnelly, Detail of West Pediment, Parkway Central Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1925-7. In the narrative, P_1435 would have been unaware of the neoclassical revival in the United States and this instance of putti with paper and typewriter, and he explains that ‘Signor Alessandro’ has informed him of it. Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of user takomabibelot.

A W S

PC eons SN |

State when you claim that you are used to this shape shifting, when you have accommodated and aided in the initiation of so many diverse designs and works so readily in the Past?’

Allora, dear Reader, this is not difficult to answer. As you shall see from my story, | have certainly undergone Mutations, and dare | say, | have been crucial to revolutionary changes in the shaping of Architecture! And yes, as the Architetti and their aims have changed, my Form has changed with them. But there has always been continuity amongst these changes, which | have helped to provide. For instance, my rebirth in the revolutionary age of the quattrocento was part of an attempt to connect with cose della storia passata? -a past that was Dionysian, Roman and Pagan -and, at the same time, to show something completely new, as | will explain in later entries. So, you might say that each reincarnation was a modification of the Past, not a complete overturning. The overturning of certainty and continuity occurred more recently.

| am familiar with pens, brushes and chisels, but keyboards and typing are new to me. Signor Alessandro assures me that other spiritelli have endeavoured to master such equipment, and this gives me faith to continue this Journal writing (Figure 1.3). | plan to recount my activities in the Centuries before | arrived here. | will also describe what | am doing now in Wates House. Fortuitously, | have discovered a few things about myself and my new Environment which are allowing me to make the situation tolerable.

Buon Natale, e buonanotte.

1. Asa hybrid character caught between eras, P_1435’s consideration of time combines temporal metrics. In the case of his diary dates, this is evident from the use of both Roman and Arabic numerals.

2. Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi was the full name of the renowned quattrocento era sculptor known as Donatello. Dempsey discusses

Our narrator’s present circumstance

Donatello’s role in the ‘invention’ of the spiritello, also discussed further in Chapter 3. 7. Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 47.

P_1435 is referring to the mesh shell that defines

his body in the animation software that helped

to conceive him initially.

P_1435 makes an accidental reference to Deleuze’s ‘body without organs’. Following Artaud, Deleuze describes the body without organs as ‘opposed 8. less to organs than to that organization of organs Pn we call an organism’ and ‘sensation is not qualitative and qualified but has only intensive reality’. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 44, 45.

Italian translation =‘baroque bulges’.

Q:

Italian translation =‘stairs’.

P_1435 uses terminology here relating to the division of labour involved in constructing a building in Renaissance Tuscany which entailed three categories: quadro (architecture), intaglio (ornament) and figure (figurative sculpture). Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture, 108.

Italian translation = ‘Renaissance’.

An example of a putto figure windsailing can

be found in the apse mosaic of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, by Jacopo Torrito, ca. 1295.

10. Italian translation=‘things from past history’.

Chapter 2 | Situating P_1435’s Predicament

A discourse by Alessandro Ayuso, in which the impetus for the research in this book is explained and situated, and the structure of the book and its argument are outlined.

Body Agents’ Antecedents

Delving into the topic of the figure in architecture, it became clear that many of the most urgent questions tied up in the figure defied pragmatic solutions. Bolstering this approach, as I examined examples from the past, I realised that many of the most well known lacked many of the qualities that I sought. I noticed that often, in an effort to enter the human into the equation of design, architects often overly instrumentalised their figures. In these cases, when architects represented humans in optimistic and uncritical terms dictated by technological promise, they also often tended to overly idealise or overly reduce the human subject. In short, they fellinto a one-size-fits-all trap in spite of the consideration they would give to the figure. To my contemporary eye, these examples seemed to avoid the very humanity of the figure they meant to capture.

However reductive these figures appeared, they were often distinctive in that they clearly came from a time and place. These figures, as allimages of bodies are inevitably, are products of their authors and of their authors’ epistemes. As such, they enact an ontology, to paraphrase philosopher Judith Butler, that declares which ‘bodies matter’! Antiquated representations of bodies, with their antiquated ontology informing an implicit declaration of which bodies matter and which do not, can make past examples jarring in their implication of ‘what is “human” about humanity’.’ As Braidotti has pointed out, in a case such as Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man drawing of 1490 - probably the most famous and resonant figurative representation to inform design - placing a white European male at the centre of his universe makes an implicit declaration of who is considered a subject and who is considered a specular other’ (Figure 2.1). In architectural design, such image making does not only alter architects’ conception of subjects. Since image making gives rise to building designs, image making amplifies the construction of subjectivity by imparting it in buildings which people inhabit and use.*

I knew immediately that scalies of the present and the idealised emblems of the past would be what body agents were decisively not. So, which figurative ‘relatives’ from architectural history were most like body agents? I saw that the notion of

2.1

2.1 Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, 1492. Pen, ink, watercolour and metal point on paper,

343 mmx245 mm. Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of Galleria dell’Accademia, Vitruvian.jpg.

the user - possibly dynamic, personal and situated - clearly held potential for what I thought body agents could be. However, the notion of the user also could be problematic when viewed through a historical lens. While the term is almost taken for granted by most contemporary architects, Adrian Forty observes that the notion of the ‘user’ as such was a relatively recent phenomenon that hada fraught history of phases in modern and contemporary architecture.” Jonathan Hill acknowledges that architects since the modernist era established an ambivalent relationship with the notion of the user, but often hubristically anticipated a specific proper use, relegating the user toa minimal, prescribed role that ultimately valorised the architects’ own agendas and, in many cases, prevented the agency of actual users in built works.° Both see a tendency by modern architects to conceive of the user as a generalised abstraction. Kenny Cupers’ edited volume Use Matters shows how the notion of the user was a product and a generator of constructing subjectivity in the modern era-—for instance, the scale figures appearing in Ernst Neufert’s Architect’s Data of 1936, performing normative, socially prescribed roles as part of amass subjectivity.’ The figures present an ontological frame that excludes many potential users, be that spontaneous, unscripted individual actors, with their unpredictable nuances or, simply put, non-normative others. Neufert sought instrumentalisation of his figures to sucha degree that his figures may seem to us (as they do to P_1435 in Chapter 9) like robots.

On the other hand, I was reminded of many of the other examples I had come across while studying abroad in Florence, Italy, where representations of figures flourished in Renaissance architecture. While the Vitruvian Man was not the antidote I sought, I found the Renaissance figures described in architectural historian Robin Evans’ essay ‘Figures, passages, and doors’ offered a promising avenue for such rich versions of subjects. In his essay, Evans finds an increasingly eviscerated notion of embodiment in architecture that coincided with the rise of rationalism and functionalism. He contrasts functionalist representations of the body with

2.2 Raphael, Madonna dell’Impannata, 1513. Oil on panel, 1,580 mmx1,250 mm. Evans featured this painting in his essay, writing ‘It was only in the sixteenth century that bodies were attenuated into the graceful or magnified into the sublime, then brought together in peculiarly intense, carnal, even lascivious poses’. Wikimedia Commons, courtesy of Pitti Palace, Madonna Impannata.jpg.

representations in Renaissance paintings and architecture. While the former was pared down, diagrammatic and deterministic, the latter comprised a rich entangled notion of embodiment (Figure 2.2).

Scale figures in architectural drawings often did more than simply indicate scale or even use. Anderson has pointed out the specific ability of scale figures to project the perceived presence of immeasurable qualities of human experience into drawings.’ The more recent compendium of scale figures without architecture by MOS Architects shows the figures’ ability to impart the signature presence of their author’

These ideas of the potentialities of scale figures as distinct active presences in design process are discussed in my former teacher Marco Frascari’s 1987 essay ‘The body and architecture in the drawings of Carlo Scarpa’. Frascariis critical of the ‘biped balloons with pointed feet and floating heads’ - the scalies of the time, which he saw in postmodern architects’ drawings - and wrote his essay with the hope that it would initiate ‘a new practice of body/building topology’. Frascari focuses on Scarpa’s design for the Brion Vega Cemetery, completed in 1978, and in particular Scarpa’s use of what Frascari called ‘metonymic’ figures that were enmeshed with design and enacted aspects of lived embodiment through the imaginations they catalysed. Following Scarpa’s comment that he had ‘a powerful desire to work within tradition, but without making capitals and columns’, Frascari distinguishes between Scarpa’s figures and the metaphoric models of the Renaissance such as those in drawings by Francesco di Giorgio Martini" (Figure 2.3).

While di Giorgio’s ‘metaphoric’ figures are meant to guide the composition of a design through isomorphism, metonymic figures enabled a mode of operation that is more specific and steeped in tactile qualities and material imagination: ‘metonymy works through the privileged status of perception... drawing a handle results from a mould in the form of a hand that grasps, rather than a formal representation of the hand itself’. Frascari’s analysis shows that Scarpa’s fragmented images of figures, including nude female dancers and comical self-portraits, contrasted with the bipeds: Scarpa’s figures were entwined in the designs they help to shape, entering

2.3 Francesco di Giorgio Martini,

Church Diagram, from Trattati di architettura, ca. 1478-81.

Wikimedia Commons, FGMartini2.jpg.

directly into the design process and operating in the drawing as a varied cast of generative devices which raised playful questions about architectural possibilities, directly affecting the shaping of the architectural design” (Figures 2.4 and 2.5).

Writing of observing a Giacometti portrait, James Elkins describes a ‘first seeing’ and ‘second seeing’, where an observer oscillates between a ‘relaxed and languorous’ pleasure in seeing a figure and ‘a restless nomadic way of looking’ that often results from distorted, grotesque or extreme presentations of bodies common in contemporary art. Elkins’ idea of multiple ‘seeings’ suggests that a property of portrayals of the human body is that they are uniquely prone to provoke wonder and fascination with the portrayed subject. In this sense, the figure inherently becomes an object of fascination, and Scarpa’s figures likely were that for him. Yet, Scarpa’s figures do not exist only for contemplation; they do things in the drawing. As the metonymic figures interact with their world in the virtual construction of the drawing, the figure is not simply a particularly alluring object amidst objects. The inherent fascination of portrayals of the body likely gives way to a seeing and feeling through the figure. Depicted moving through and touching the designs, they become proxy sensors, devices that catalyse design ideas and alterations. Scarpa’s figures appear throughout the design process as if they are old friends returning to inhabit and inspect the design -a process that reinforces their particular situatedness. In this way, the figures could arguably be thought to enact ‘subject positions’ - a term coined by Bronwyn Davis and Rom Herré, where a perspective or position is intentionally taken within a discursive practice or scenario to provide a particular vantage point.” Intersubjectivity entails an intercorporeal relationality between embodied subjects and other embodied subjects.’° Given Scarpa’s palimpsestic drawing technique, which engaged his own tactile sensations and which created palpable physical artifacts, and his careful rendering of the particularities of the bodies of his figures, the intercorporeal dimension inherent to his figures is intensified.” Scarpa’s

2.4 Carlo Scarpa, detail section drawing of Brion Cemetery island pavilion, ca. 1968-78. Heliographic copy, pencil and coloured pencils on paper, 470 mmx475 mm. The three dancers are examples of what Frascari would call ‘metonymic’ figures. Courtesy of Maxxi Museo Nazionale Delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Roma. Collezione Maxxi Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa.

drawings suggest that the presence of subject positions in design drawings via the depiction of the figure opens up the potentiality for virtual intersubjective exchange — between the architect and the depicted figures, the depicted figures themselves and the metaphoric body of the building. Given the operativity of the metonymic figure to impact the design,

I asked: could body agents’ simulated actions in design representations embed opportunities for intersubjectivity into the architecture?

The Problems Presented by II Regno

Yet, only two decades after Frascari’s essay, the prevailing design process in a digitally permeated climate imposed obsolescence

2.5 View through the ‘binoculars’ integrated into the soffit of the Brion Cemetery island pavilion ca. 1968-78, by Carlo Scarpa, San Vito d’Altivole, Italy. The location corresponds to the position, height and sight line of one of the metonymic dancers in Figure 2.4, framing the view of the tombs and church.

Photograph by William Haskas.

on the applicability of the metonymic figure — as the figures which arose from hand-drawn and often handcrafted techniques were being eclipsed by digital media. The ‘methodological crisis’ of the design image brought forth by the proliferation of digital media spurred many of the broader questions at the heart of this research! At the start of the 2010s, digital media in certain privileged and innovative contexts (such as cutting-edge practices and universities in the United States and Europe) had diversified with an array of manifestations that would be difficult to generalise, from hyper-real graphics to virtual realitydriven environments to processes that completely avoid representation in lieu of scripting. Although my own design work shown throughout this book is a product of hybrid processes, where work was produced through the interplay of various types of traditional and digitally based media, amore or less typical PC-based software-driven virtual design environment was a constant, and in the narrative, P_1435 is thrust into it. This transposition was meant to initiate a problematisation of the design regime that many architects in practices in much of the world spend an inordinate amount of time immersed within. In the narrative, P_1435 spends so much time in this virtual space that he develops a nickname for it: Il Regno Digitale (and he finds himself so often immersed in it, he even begins calling it I] Regno for short). This term echoes literary critic N. Katherine Hayles’ term ‘Regime of Computation’, by which she means a contemporary fourth order of cybernetics ora ‘penetration of computational processes not only into every aspect of biological, social, economic and political realms but also into the construction of reality itself’.

In part, the narrative in the book is meant to immerse the reader in a defamiliarised viewpoint of this virtual space, and the design work itself explores different ways of approaching it, bringing many of its innate properties to light. Operating within virtual regimes is nothing new for architects. Paper and orthographic drawing are themselves technologies enabling virtual immersion. However, when set against traditional methods, specific aspects of the software-driven virtual design environment’s properties that break with traditional design could be considered as obstacles for both figures and subject positions to play a significant role in design.

One such aspect is that the digital image redefines the relationship between the image and material at a basic level. The nature of this technology changes the physical corollary with the virtual. For instance, as William J. Mitchell recognised, digital media prevents the physical traces inherent in past drawing methods.”° Along with the loss of the physical trace, the engagement of the physically active body of the architect is diminished: although the interface options are expanding through touch screens and stylus, for the most part, the software-driven design environment remains accessed through the passive mode of staring at the monitor and clicking mouse buttons.” The loss of the interplay between physicality, bodily awareness and imagination in the image-making process reduces the potential for the image to be a locus of what Frascari, following Henry Corbin, calls a ‘mundus imaginalis’ or an ‘imaginal world of construction and construing’.

At the same time, in significant ways, the software-driven three-dimensional digital design environment is not necessarily a break from historical regimes but rather a distillation. For instance, the environment is based on deep-seated legacies of visual regimes privileging perspectival projection. While this Cartesian perspectivalism is nearly ubiquitous in contemporary Western visual culture, the image ofa grid at the origin point of an infinite Cartesian space that meets software users when they open nearly any three-dimensional modelling application has implications for the subjective mode it engenders. Speaking of the impact of perspective on art history, historian Martin Jay writes:

‘The abstract coldness of the perspectival gaze meant the withdrawal of the painter's emotional entanglement with the objects depicted in geometricalized space. The participatory involvement of more absorptive visual modes was diminished, if not entirely suppressed as the gap between spectator and spectacle widened. The moment of erotic projection in vision... was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye’.”°

Taking this argument into account but going a step further with respect to digital media, in her book Abstract Space, architectural theorist Therese Tierney describes how abstraction is built into digital media, not only because it is underwritten by code, but also because it is predicated on assumptions and visual regimes that privilege abstraction. She charts this instillation of abstraction from Cartesian perspectivalism to the influential discourse surrounding modern art. While the medium arguably privileges abstraction, in everyday practice, the design image presented via the software is schizophrenic. On the screen during the manipulation of geometry, the image is schematic and abstract, but when it is rendered, the image becomes hyperreal. At this point, the images are arguably evidence of a ‘pathological’ aim for verisimilitude and accuracy, resulting in what architect Marjan Colletti calls ‘hyper-fake hyper-realism’.“ Another schizophrenic aspect of digital media is that, as discussed above, aspects of it are physically disembodied, yet it can also be somatically immersive. The software-driven design environment, while in many ways disembodied, allows for an intense spatial immersion through the cinematic effects of zooming, panning and moving through spatial environments.” While in many ways immersion has undoubted benefits, social psychologist Sherry Turkle has recognised several potential ‘vulnerabilities’ in simulations such as those offered by virtual reality systems.

Observing the effects of virtual reality style simulations, she notes that immersion in a digital design simulation can lead to a loss of reference points, which in turn engenders misleading perceptions and unwanted outcomes.”° While the aspects of the software-driven design environment cited above can be taken asa critique ofa technology whose impact is to alienate the subject, bringing the contemporary subject further into focus amidst this scenario shows a more complicated set of relationships. As suggested above, technology in the digital age is changing embodied subjectivity, as a co-construction of embodied subjectivity and technology is taking place. Architects spending the majority of their waking hours immersed in digital environments are a case in point, but for large numbers of non-architects whose lives are also saturated by digital technology, subjective experience and, with it, the definition of the body and self are being subtly redefined. For instance, the sense of the body’s interface with the world is arguably changing as kinaesthetic sense undergoes a transformation.” Even something as commonplace as the use of touch-screen interfaces on mobile phones and tablets affects the sense of the physicality of the body, through changed sensorimotor schema, where one’s sense of touch and its causal effect vis-a-vis the world becomes gradually accustomed to swiping and zooming on the surface of screens, and of seeing the actions’ effects on virtual layers in conjunction with the actual.” In this sense, the swiping, panning and zooming which enable virtual immersion are not only vehicles for simulations of embodied experience but also part of what constitutes bodily experience.