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.Soft Immortality
Author: Tobias Klein

‘The body occupies space [...], where do the confines of the body run? Where does the body end?’
Heidegger

Traditionally, architectural space is defined by boundaries and territory. The concept of ‘inside-outside’ is a prime concern in modern architecture. It tends to give rise to a surface-driven boundary discussion that has led to an obsession with facade, the ‘wrapping’ of structures and the modulation of these surfaces. The architect is able to create space dividing mechanisms of illusive complexity that establish a fluid transition between the inside and outside of a building, grounding it in a given landscape. One could argue that this has been done to perfection with the simple paravon and, of course, by great Modernists such as Frank Lloyd Wright (Falling Water) and Mies van der Rohe (Barcelona Pavilion).

The conceptual background of this approach elevates the surface or skin of a building. By parametrically responding to environmental vectors, mimicking the intelligent properties of, for instance human skin, we are today able to create fantastic complex semi-permeable membranes and other equally interesting structures to generate a diffuse, responsive surface design.

But by analyzing the skin condition of the body using non invasive diagnostic methods such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) the conditions of outer and inner space begin to fall apart in favor of a density-driven state of space that does not allow the definition of boundary and ontologically replaces boundary with gradient, density and field.

This research project explores the human body as a new ecology of densities in which the dissolution of its anatomical boundaries allows rethinking and recreating it as a new physical/representational territory in constant flux and change. It questions the common representations of the body in the digital realm as a series of surfaces and layers, and creates a potential new status where the modulation of the body’s inner and outer surface becomes irrelevant. By using advanced medical visualisation techniques as both method and tool to redesign the body with variable intensities of matter, the obsolete notion of a finite body is exposed in favour of new type of body-space that is, above all, a viscous field of variable concentrations of mass and matter.

‘Soft Immortality’ thus argues that the surface/skin modulating approach fundamentally disregards complexity and suggests a new paradigm for our understanding of space based on densities rather than on linear boundaries or surface. What I am suggesting in Soft Immortality is a reverse-engineering of this boundary by the means of altering our understanding of space. Instead of searching for new methods to perforate a skin, I propose working with the integral ways in which skin amalgamates with bone, their structures and ultimately with wrapped space itself.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a vital tool in diagnosis, research and visualization in medicine. This non-invasive investigation of the body, its organs and diseases, yields a digital reproduction by measuring the relative densities of the body. Rather than the 2-D pixel representing pictorial space, the ‘voxel’ is used to visualize and inform space in three dimensions adding properties allowing the fusion of densities with space. The densities may be inferred from this; organs, tumors and tissues can be investigated.

Voxels enable the surgeon to perform a procedure from another continent on a screen attached to a robotic arm is a projection of the surgeon’s own, its real-time feedback providing a visceral, yet digital, method of operating with the voxel density parameters. The robotic arm provides resistance appropriate to the density of the bone, muscle or organ. In one sense, this surgeon, like the architect, can be seen as sculpting space. The projected body is generated through fields of density and viscosity that imply the merging of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space disregarding boundaries and hence allowing for a surgeon or architect to interface between actual/virtual and densities of matter/space.

The conditions of inner and outer space thus begin to fall apart as boundaries, such as skin, become meaningless: boundaries are replaced by gradients, densities and fields. The installation ‘Soft Immortality’, takes slices of a full-body human MRI scan and uses them to invest a newly created structure with viscous properties. Space, here, is generated as an inherited property of density; it dissolves boundaries in favor of a state of flux. Objects of varying densities are allowed to interact with each-other: solid, semi-opaque, organ-like ‘syncretic transplants’ are suspended amongst transparent slices, themselves both single objects and part of a greater whole. The choreography of light through the subtly kinetic installation creates permutations determined by density, translucency and reflection. The body’s densities are imaged, digitized, manipulated, projected and re-imagined. There is tentative four-dimensional representation: a simulacrum.

‘Soft Immortality’ argues that the predefined perceptive boundary of the body is no longer relevant: space requires a far more fluid gradient. It advocates a conceptual shift from a closed system to a ‘gradient field’; from confined territories to density-driven viscous states. Losing the boundary in favour of densities, the idea of territory and defined space itself needs to be re-thought and adjusted, modified to allow a broader spectrum of spatial properties to emerge.