Blurring the divide between the digital and the rest

“If the idea is to yield to virtuality and bring it out, where is the virtuality the final product? Precisely what trace of it is left in the concrete form it deposits as it residues? What of the emergence is left in the emerged?”
B. Massumi Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible

Architecture as a process is no longer the same animal it once was. The computer and digital tools at hand for a designer allow for explorations into realms previously untouched. The architect’s job is now catalytic, where previously it was one of orchestrating. Using various means of provoking and abstracting in comparison to explorations via linear methods yield differing trajectories within the design process.
Current discourse is obviously an altered agenda now, how can the trajectory of architecture respond with tangible form? Massumi offers that standing form is a sign: of the passing and implementation of process. Although “process” has been an integral part of architecture forever, the rendered form is now dynamic. The output of this is both the form and the designer. Both are placed in a moment of transition where the instance of a catalyst occurs. No longer is form conceived, it is coaxed out of this process, flushed from is virtuality. The computer has aided in this chemistry like experiment, able to catalyze newness and emergence as opposed to articulating fixation. One similar aspect however remains the moment of chance. True change can only occur through mutation, be it purposeful or not. Degrees of mutation have changed however, now the gaps between moments widen as the prefigurative transforms into the active.
Does this offer a sort of impurity to the process? What if this argument has nothing to do with impurity, that everything is mixed together at the beginning and comes out just as mixed up, impure all the way. The freedom for input is the variable here, extracting difference from the variation. Everything depends on the middle, what it is that occurs in process.

“Virtuality cannot be seen in the form that emerges from it. The virtual gives form, but itself has none. The virtual is imperceptible. It is insensible. A building is anything but that. A building is concrete.”
B. Massumi Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible

A dichotomy between process and product within the discussion of form and architecture poses metaphorical questions about the formless providing form. The digital providing means to physical is a powerful conceptual tool. What if the virtual and the physical could rejoin? What if architecture and the virtual both took into account experience? This would be aspiring to build the “insensible.” What if part of a buildings uniform program was to deform?

“A new physically uncompromising, metaphysical initiative of unbiased integrity could unify the world. It could and probably will be provided by the utterly impersonal problem solutions of the computers. Only to their superhuman range of calculative capabilities can and may all political, scientific, and religious leaders face-savingly acquiesce.”
B. Fuller Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth