The Mystery of Nagi’s Ryoanji: Arakawa and Gins and Autopoiesis

One of the outstanding masterpieces of the Arakawa and Gins’s oeuvre is “Ubiquitous Site — Nagi’s Ryoanji — Architectural Body.” Located in Nagi, which is situated in Okayama Prefecture in Western Japan, Na¬ gi’s Ryoanji intricately and playfully reconstructs the architecture of an original stroll garden in Kyoto. The Kyoto garden, built in the fifteenth century under the influence of Zen Buddhism, stands as one of the most famous tem¬ ple gardens in Japan. Nagi’s Ryoanji recreates the Kyoto garden twice on the two inner walls of a huge inclined cylinder, producing unexpected perceptual and bodily experiences in the visitor. This work continues to harbor riddles, despite the many attempts that have been made to decipher it. Because a work of any kind often trans¬ cends the intentions of those who produce it, these are riddles that perhaps even its architects could not solve. In fact, perhaps Nagi’s Ryoanji far exceeds the expectations of its producers by creating in the visitor an experience of self-organization. In this paper, I will address the emergence of self-organization in Arakawa and Gins’s Nagi’s Ryoanji.

Section One of this paper discusses several works of Arakawa and Gins prior to their creation of Nagi’s Ryoanji (8. Reassembling, panel 2 of the research project/book The Mechanism of Meaning', the book. To Not To Die ; and the seven-acre park, Site of Reversible Destiny — Yoro). Section Two sets forth a reformulated autopoi-etic systems theory, one that substantially differs from the incomplete and at times vague autopoietic systems theory of neurophysiologists Maturana and Varela. This reformulation, which makes the body primary to autopoi¬ etic thinking, suggests new possibilities for self-generated meaning. Finally, section Three returns to Nagi’s Ryoanji but now with a reformulated autopoietic systems theory in place, declaring what transpires in Nagi’s Ryoanji to be more than what Arakawa and Gins believed would occur within it.

What Arakawa and Gins’s creative process altered

Arakawa and Gins’s working method gives all appearances of including from the start phenomenological reduction, a bracketing of all reality. Their philosophical outlook strongly resembles that of quantum theorist Niels H. D. Bohr, who insisted that reality is essentially indeterminate. In so far as all facts and perceived phenomena can and do become reduced under the logical possibility that another reality exists, it readily becomes apparent that when consciousness is so reduced no guide whatsoever remains by which to determine what reality is. In principle, once a phenomenological reduction has been performed, reality has been excluded. This, however, leads to a nasty paradox. On one hand, consciousness can drastically reduce reality by judging it to be of an entirely other order, that is, not at all reality as first presented. On the other hand, if the reality that consciousness origina¬ tes as is not the one first presenting itself, but rather the result of a phenomenological reduction, then clearly un-