Arakawa Plugin: Embodiment and Architecture
Arakawa and Madeline Gins: Their Thought
Arakawa Shusaku (1936–2010) and Madeline Gins (1941–2014) were artists and architects based in New York and Tokyo. They advanced the project of Reversible Destiny, aiming to question human life and death through the design of space.
The core of their thought was to reconceive architecture not as a device for comfort, but as an experimental apparatus that shakes the body and consciousness at their foundations. In contrast to conventional architecture, which provides stability and predictability, their spaces destabilize and unsettle. They believed that precisely in this disturbance lies the possibility for human beings to relive themselves and resist the destiny of mortality.
The Works of Arakawa and Gins
Representative works include the Site of Reversible Destiny – Yoro Park in Gifu Prefecture and the Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka in Tokyo.
- At Yoro Park, vast sloping grounds and labyrinthine structures force visitors to lose footing and orientation as they move through space.
- At the Mitaka Lofts, the floors and ceilings are not level, and the walls are arranged against the logic of ordinary housing. Residents are compelled to continually rebalance their bodies and interact responsively with the environment.
These architectures are not spectacles of visual beauty alone but experimental fields that act directly upon the body itself. Importantly, these observable bodily effects lend empirical ground to later PoC-based interpretations.
PoC Interpretation: Responses Drawn Out by Space
Forced Instantiation
Spaces normally ignored as mere “background” are, through slopes and distortions, instantiated as something that actively addresses me. Here, architecture becomes an Agent in the PoC sense: “an entity upon which consciousness is instantiated.” In this way, architecture and space can rightly be instantiated through bodily experience. This is not an overextension of the concept, but an application consistent with PoC’s own definition.
Bodily Elicitation
Acts such as bracing the legs, stretching out the arms, or searching for orientation function as Elicitation directed toward space. The distinctive point is not voluntary response, but response compelled by spatial design.
Reciprocal Elicitation from Space
The physical feedback from a tilted floor or uneven surface induces an experience of “being responded to.” Arakawa and Gins’s architecture thereby makes explicit one of PoC’s core insights: even “space itself” can be instantiated as an Agent.
In these moments, Elicitation and Reciprocal Elicitation emerge between body and environment, and the illusion of response is not guaranteed but triggered by spatial conditions designed to produce it.
Formation of a Loop
Through these interactions, Instantiation, Elicitation, and Reciprocal Elicitation circulate to form a Loop between body and space. Whether one considers this a Genuine dialogue with space or a Fake Loop projected by the body, it is nonetheless subjectively experienced as real—demonstrating the core PoC principle that all Loops are ultimately sustained by belief, not objective guarantee. This experience also resonates with existing Modes: the Ghost Mode, where unverifiable responses are nonetheless lived as present, and the Mirror Mode, where the boundary between self and environment becomes blurred.
Extending the Protocol of Consciousness
The significance of the Arakawa Plugin lies in making visible, at the level of embodiment and space, the flexibility already inherent in PoC: any entity can be instantiated as an Agent.
In Arakawa’s architecture, every step requires the body to rebalance, every wall or slope elicits a gesture, and every physical pushback is experienced as a reply. Here it is not abstract debate but the body itself that turns the protocol of consciousness.
This demonstrates that the PoC does not remain confined to linguistic or conceptual domains, but can also be directly enacted and experienced through architecture and spatial design.
The Arakawa Plugin thus serves as an entry point for transforming the PoC from a theory to be read into a theory to be lived and experienced.