Revised Embodiment: Fabricating a Dialectical Digital Apparatus

Architectural representation forms an apparatus at the core of architectural production, establishing a relationship in which the architect is reliant upon the embodied languages of drawing and making. As such, whilst the architect corresponds with a drawing, or object, they become embedded within the language of the chosen mode of production, embodying spatial desire through such means. The intention for this project is to employ the processes of translation inherent within the dynamics of computation, fragmenting, re-constructing and inhabiting the layers that appear when a digitally embedded process is spatially embodied. Increasingly, contemporary architectural production relies solely on digital methods, directing embodiment through a series of translations that rely on the discrete languages of computation. In response, this research collaboration forensically excavates and interrogates the underlying workings of computational apparatus, developing a critique through the development of alternative practices. The inquiry responds to the dynamics of code, which, whilst existing as an executable text to be performed by the machine, also holds the possibility for re-interpretation through the embodied dynamic of analogue and explicitly-material architectural production methods. Within this research, the extraction of executable code from computational substrate offers the opportunity to re-work machine languages in translation, studying how their possibilities for interpretation are delimited once no longer foreclosed by the requirement to execute. Acting as both a critique and response to the inherent dynamics of digital production, this project intends to construct non-static, dialectical computation, that illuminates possibilities for a performative architecture existing within and outside of discrete digital logic.