After an extended time, the levitating saint screamed, to stop such extremely intense listening, and fell to the floor. Rilke, ´"The First Elegy," Duino Elegies
Keywords: perceptual shift / abjection / sensors / objects / proprioception / inertia / interiority / machine/ physiological / abject / threshold / event horizon / visceral /
I break open my sealed-off flesh.
I want to live in my veins, in
the marrow of my bones,
in the labyrinth of my skull.
I withdraw
my intestines.
I take refuge in my shit my blood.
Somewhere
bodies are being broken, so that I can live in my shit.
Somewhere
bodies are being carved open, so that I can be alone with my blood.
My thoughts are wounds in my brain.
My brain is a wound.
I want
to be a machine.
Arms to grasp legs to walk no pain no thoughts.
- Heiner Mueller The Hamletmachine by (1979)
0.1 Introduction
a type of out of joint situation for the subject. We
find ourselves within all medias, in all bodies, in all possible spaces
at once.
This puts into question some fundamental arguments
concerning art and culture. Operating in a new mode, the positions of
identity are also showing us other internal media and social processes.
We are faced with leaving a historically defined position, which
imitates the natural world of our senses.
With new media and
technology we have the possibility of an artificial interface, which is
dominated by non-identity or difference (Peter Weibel).
Instead of
producing a new identity, something more radical is produced: the total
loss of identity.
The subject is forced to assume that he or she is
not what he thought himself to be, but somebody-something else.
Marina Grzinic 1996/7
As part of the Media Design Thematic Project with Kristina Anderson at the Pete Zwart Institute, I have been researching various software applications that make use of electronics, sensors, external input; output controls for use in a live performance or installation space, that is, not virtual reality or screen space. Using the philosophic traditions of semiotic and phenomenological perspectives this paper aims to discuss the dimentionality of sensory perception how this interacts with human engagement and embedded sensory technologies in contemporary settings. To fully comprehend the possibilities of how and why to integrate emerging sensory technologies and embedded devices, I feel it is necessary to ground and combine the context of my discussion in my encounters of working with and observing different responses by couching my analysis in two case studies. No doubt, when asking people to experience vicariously the body they otherwise deny themselves, profound issues of embodiment transpire on observation, and once again the body is confirmed as a field of struggle. Historical sources may differ but according to van Dijck we are a part of an evolutionary process that profoundly blurs the boundaries between humans and machines. She proposes that ´The interlinking of body and machine may render any distinction between the organistic and the mechanical obsolete1´. Apart from obvious augmented devices for medical and purposes that enable those disabled. Shouldn´t we know a little more about our own visceral make up, (beyond text book anatomical images) before we start slipping in with the machines? I am not quite sure about how I stand in relation to Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology genetic engineering. I am not an organ donor and I do not give blood.2 Since my body (I am) a complex sensory interface may indeed be a variant of others already, and in itself hold different shifting modes and modulations of sensitivity; nevertheless, although I can tune in, still I cannot as a human precisely experience the living sensations of another living form. I do not know with full clarity their desires or motivations and to an extent even my own (at times); I cannot know, or can never be sure that I know what they know or if ones imagination similar to (or even as, perverse or violent) as mine. I am constantly negotiating this since I do not always know where ´I´ end and another living entity begins. To be sure, among other things, my computer holds documentations of my memories, does this mean I am embedded with it?
I take on board van Dijcks advice that ´To study technoscience requires
an immersion in worldly material-semiotic practice: we have to look
concurrently at the technology and the signs it produces...do we first
need to transcend our current concepts of reality in order to fully
indulge in the material pleasures of interfacing?´ Some illuminating
perspectives about often assumed motives of
instrumentality,3non-teleological existence and irrational residues,
apart from the incomprehensible life of a beer punk, Alfonso Lingis also
awakens us to some ways of being which often serve no obvious,
functionality in their design;
The feminine form, which lacks the
sense of heaviness that suggests the instrumental use of the limbs and
the skeletal mechanics, whose ethereal shape is disconnected from
physiological functions, is a vision of the woman disconnected from the
biological female, the human animal there. But the designs of coral
fish, the color-patterns of Himalayan pheasants, the spots of giraffes,
and the stripes of zebras likewise do not outline muscle systems and
internal organs (2000: 146).
Who knows, perhaps their patterns are secret codes we are yet to discover are in need of decryption? We might even end up thanking fashion and textiles for appreciating them and responding so appropriately in their exhibitionist events. Either way it is self-sabotaging, non-functional, extra sensory fun practices that the human encompasses also with our ability for conduction and mediation via bones, tissue, fat, flesh, and bodily fluids and interstitial cavities. By couching my attempt to understand two differing instances of visitors to the work my point is to glean insight into a possible direction for the developments of sensory technology in metropolitan society.4 While I investigate how interactive object/installation encourages the spectator to experience phenomena in a more immediate mode of embodied self hood, I offer to state the terrain in order for future explorations. The miniature of the landscape, I admit, the little gullies around Artificial Intelligence and nanotechnology are yet to be encountered. Hence, this paper contains accounts and anecdotes, which I hope to provide us a direction for the emancipation of the realm of anecdotal,
0.2 Definitely not smokin in the boys room
Yeah, It´s really horrible. It´s like the way Shakespeare is put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company. They know fuck all about Shakespeare. He was a true punk. We have to remember that in his day, they put on these plays in the village square, when everyone was pissed on flagons of ale, everybody was fucking shouting and screaming, and throwing mud at the performers. Look at Hamlet. Even Romeo and Juliet for fuck´s sake. They´ve been homogenised and sterilised out of all existence, but they´re not what people believe they are. People believe that Shakespeare´s some sort of saint. Shakespeare was the most fucking subversive writer who ever lived. Irvine Welsh (2006)
Struggling with the infinite amount of possibilities that unfold when coming into contact with expandable software and hardware, not withstanding the creative process around their actual meaningfulness. I had vague unformed ideas; first I wanted to make an object for manipulating voice (I called it a magic stick to be precise). Very possibly in order to quench my latent urge and possible addiction for punk rock Karaoke. Following this one through I would be ultimately surrendering to a less-confident model of myself. The part still entrenched in 1983. My second idea, a little more developed and an attempt to have some kind of integrity I began to focus on issues around society, the machine and the individual. I became caught up in moralistic questions about ´if´ and ´how´ my device could encourage more joy, improve health and living conditions, also bio-technology seemed to want fit in somewhere or at least a critique the medical and military system. How to make I was to make such an interface? A strange urge, not usually my first point of concern, but somehow the object needed to be more than a gimmick, or at the very least a gesture to encouraging more autonomous thinking and action on the viewer´s part. How can I use the technology possibilities provided in a way that allow one to view human being as a variable organization of flows, of matter and energy, instead of the forced process of identity?
Practically the reality was a bit different, I decided that I would animate a doll, which would over time build a memory database during the event of the exhibition, different users could describe their first epiphany, that is, sudden deep acquiring of comprehension in the moment (not the religious definition) to the object. These collective memories would replay and slowly become more fragmented and decay as time progresses providing an evolving memory scape. The doll seemed an appropriate device, since children, innocent and spontaneous talk to their toys and therefore the toys become actors in the great drama of life. I even found at the market a Holly Hobby doll, a symbolic relation being one of my possessions as a child. Although still I had lingering doubts, but mesmerised by a familiar sense of joy I almost skipped to class to show her off. On arrival I was swiftly given the thumbs down. But instead handed to me was a very strange dark brown object that resembled a figure of a human shadow; it held a certain mysterious and enchanting indeterminacy and considerably more dimensionality. . .
At this moment I was ricochet into another dimension. I thought of /dev/null a special UNIX file where you can output your unwanted data flow, where on my first viewing of data disappearing into it I had visions of how theories around the black hole might function in an every day context. Since ´The null device is typically used for disposing of unwanted output streams of a process,´5 I made a connection to Julia Kristeva´s (1982) theory of abjection, where expressions of abjection are social taboos commonly censored in the public sphere. Notwithstanding the consequences, the victims that comes with this sour reality of censorship laws.6 Abjection is trangressive and grotesque, it is extreme human sensory desires, drug-induced states, madness, visceral excesses, incest and other aberrant sexual practices, mutilation, urban violence, addiction and highly dysfunctional family relationships. These all that they occupy a vestibular space and they continue to slide in and out of fixed readings and are redirected by society to a type of collective /dev/null/. Thus, I made a /dev/null doll. But also what came to my mind was a strong sensual memory from the time when I was in Fez, Morocco my first experience in a women´s Hammam. This is a place for ablations and steam-induced states of cleaning, rest and relaxing. On entering I attempted to copy the women who sat on mats on the cement floor. They were washing, shampooing and scrubbing in vigorous abandon. I found my place on the floor jostled to fill my bucket with water, then pour it over my head, joining in the cleaning frenzy. A large older woman started shouting at me repeatedly, I was a bit freaked out because I didn´t understand at all what she was saying. The women, scattered around the room, whispered among themselves and grinned through the mist in my direction. Until a young woman, (who after I discovered was fluent in French, English, Spanish, Arabic and Berber) spoke in English, ´I think she wants to brush your hair.´ I moved towards this grandmother figure, she grabbed me with one hand sheathed in a cloth mitt and pulled me toward her lap. Then set to work diligently brushing my very knotted hair, scouring my skin, turning around my limbs, as she stripped a black layer of dirt and dead skin cells and when a pristine pink revealed itself and she let me loose. Tingling with replenishment in the heat lulled torpid sweat. I splashed cool water on my face and felt caressed by the murmur of the environment. I felt dissolved, light, I had experienced something like exultation, for a moment the present future and the past had fallen from me, and I was buoyant with all my energies intensified.
Abjection rests on the premise that knowledge is to be found at the edge of experience (the event horizon)7of our understanding, and the body is this site for gaining knowledge. But what does this anecdote have to do working with sensor based technologies and human interactive devices, bio technology and the neural system?
At a simple glimpse of a small toy, I trace a genealogy to three different institutions; an indexical relation, this /dev/null command to a specific UNIX technical discourse and a symbolic one to a woman´s Hamman, an extreme sensory place of cleansing, reflection and women´s health care; and an iconic representative for things that are characteristically dreamlike where also at times they can be quite abject and confronting, explained in great detail by Kristeva (1982) and her theory of abjection. To make my act of drawing together these strands a little more salient, I will recite Weber, who writes in regard to Peircean semiotics, For the thrust of Peirce´s entire argumentation here (against the derivation of thought from the object) as elsewhere (in his theory of pragmatism), indicates the importance of a certain indeterminacy. Sign, for Peirce, names the necessary determination of thought by something other than itself: another thought, an other-than-thought, but also an other-than-itself...(i.e. other than an object present-to-itself). And perhaps above all, other than the other itself (1987:11).
By retaining their stubborn unintelligibility expressions of abjection leave behind traces of their form of unassimilated, remainders cut off from their epistimelogical paradigm. When everything has been translated, the residue that refuses to be translated is the abject, it will itself always elude that moment to be recorded and fixed as data, because there are so many dimentions, interpretations and layers to peel off. I wonder how is the abject might be assimilated with technologies which go beyond our knowledge ie. Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology.8
Eventually after all my basic conceptual musings I made a larger than live size version of the small figure, for me it was a symbol of a larger than life Grandmother similar to whom I had such a sensory experience with in Moroccan bath house and I am yet to experience the everyday event of cleaning in quite the same way. I was not out to recreate this even but in a very small way I wanted the audience to be enclosed by this dark figure and explore their interiority and experience or share something of this excess. In a simplest way I wanted ´the /dev/null Doll´ to exist a site where excess is articulated and contravened, such as: unwanted thoughts, violence and emotions. This figure also reminded some people of a Voodoo doll, which was not such a far out interpretation, considering tribulations I was enduring at the time so the project also served me as a good redirection opportunity which is apparently what /dev/null function is meant for.
0.3 When everything has been said, what remains to be said is the disaster: Custom, that obscure crossroads where the constructed and the habitual coalesce, is indeed mysterious. -Michael Taussig, (1993).
This particular work for the Instrumental: Thematic Project asks the
audience to make a perceptual shift in the act of perceiving the work.
The Operation Manual is on the door states:
Sit on the right upper thigh of the doll get comfortable. Put your hand
on the heart (indicated by the PINK BEADS) listen to the pulse. Cup your
hand and talk or Whisper into the area of the heart. ENJOY
Due to the kinesthetic nature of interactivity ´the /dev/null doll´ was
made to be perceived through use. I want to invite another type of
other contemplation in such a context of an art exhibition, not only
because I am attempting to open out the confinement of knowledge but I
am often ashamed by the reductive and skeptical ways of thinking I am
constantly surrounded by, and which Derrida tells me, I have no choice
over, as it ´precisely the function of structural or structuralist
thought - to reduce or to suspect...and that their roots thrust deep
into the soil of ordinary language (1978; 278) the dominant
´interpretive possibilit[y] already existing (Weber, 1987,12)´. My acts
of resistance to this rigid way of thinking, according to Weber is a
´sensibility for the intrinsic and violent instability of both
institution and interpretation and for the struggle they inevitably
entail (1987:17)´. Also Peirce informs me that this is ´a state of mind
from which you can ´set out,´ namely, the very state of mind in which
you actually find yourself at the time you do ´set out´- as a state in
which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of
which you cannot divest yourself (cited in Weber 1987: 12). ´ A
bystander can imagine and judge how it would be like by watching others
being engaged, but it is only through actual use that interactivity is
fully experienced and felt. By placing the hand on the fabricated
heart, via a microphone placed in this specific area, a pulse is heard
and if you talk into the heart of the doll, this action of covering the
heart of the doll triggers a light sensor to record. This indicates an
intimate process of exchange begins between the human and another
elemental nexus. Via a Centrual Processing Unit, Lisa and JunXion
software process the voice of the participant, which amplifies through
the space.9 Since the audible resonance of beings and objects varies
with their material makeup, the vocal calls of different people vary
with the size and shape of their interior cavities and hollows. The
latent potential in these simple instructions I have given interconnects
to the idea of how one might begin to re-programme their perceptual
positions in order to gain sensitivity to their environment in the light
of day.
1# case study: 2 women, when a perceptual shift entails violence: Fingers touch the letters and words on security alarm pads, microwaves, phonographs, television sets, computers, and cellular phones. The posture in the torso and neck responds to words - attention; the boss is looking; the highway cop is checking the radar screen; the father, teacherÉis looking over there; the judge, foreman, council member, coach, star has arrived; the face is appearing on the screen. Attention. At ease. Attention. At ease. The citizens do not lean against, entwine, fondle and smell one another´s bodies, feeling the streams and cascades and waters pulsing within; they deal with the blank walls of faces extended over their own heads. They have to face one another and question one another. (Lingis, 2000:46)
Two woman enter the room one stands there with her hands on her hips, as if on guard, while the other moves toward the doll. I explain to experience the work she needs to relax into it, instead she sits forward on the doll her eyes are wide open and she is talking about everything she is seeing in the space. I explain the instructions written on the door and that I am asking people to release their upper cerebral brain and move into the lower brain (specifically the cerebellum) Another way of understanding experiential anatomy and physiology is how frequencies correspond to the Alpha, Beta and Theta brain rhythms are used in similar manners to influence neural activity. The ´/dev/null doll´ operates with the assumption that we often distort our experience by amplifying and diminishing parts of it so it fits better our ideas of the world. It works both with touch and proprioception (inner-body sensations monitor the force of how we react or act with the weight or texture of an object), which regularly place us in contact with things, and in contrast to the chemical senses of seeing and hearing we can hear events unfolding at a substantial distance from our own visible and audible body. But in fact, I am unable to fully this to her, since she is having what I understand to be panic reaction, avoids all eye contact and my obvious abounding to respond to her need to be guided and accommodated.10 After her unwillingness to make a sensory shift, she justifies her presence by explaining she is an art teacher and cannot experience a ´beta´ state with the object, as an ´arbiter of taste´ she cannot think other way than in an analytical manner. She suggests it might help if I have darkness, and cushions everywhere with the light out.
I find we often experience sensory awareness in the dark and I want
these sensitising practices to extend more into to an everyday
environment. The illuminations one has during oceanic excersises that
encourage solipsism is soon lost on returning to a vertical manner
amongst other humans. Excessive states are also seen as something
hidden and shameful. I have made the object in this particular setting
as a way of exploring ideas of how things might be different. This
panic reaction of the observer could also be articulated as a mode of
secondness, or constraint. Lewis writes in reference to, Peircean
phenomenology in which all experience has a mode of secondness, which
appears to the self as struggle, as shock, as resistance. It is this
form of experience that prevents people from constructing the world just
as they might want or imagine it to be (1995: 225).
Lewis continues to inscribes the modern notion of psychological
interiority on a ritual form not necessarily grounded in personal
feelings. Furthermore, in an essay on emotion Arjun Appadurai invokes
the Hindi dramaturgic theory of rasa to highlight a different regime of
feeling and expression. He characterizes Rasa as an impersonal feeling
expressed in dramatic performance, in a set of codified gestures, to
create a chain of communication in feeling. Crucially, this chain is
forged ´not by unmediated empathy between the emotional ´interiors´ of
specific individuals but by recourse to a shared, and relatively fixed,
set of public gestures´ (1990:106Ð9). The same delinking of shared
feeling and the emotional authenticity of individual visitors might also
inform relatively stylised and semi scripted performances of letting go.
Steven Feld points out that the expressive or cathartic model is based
on the modern, largely Eurocentric assumption that ´when emotions ´build
up´ to a ´boiling point´ they must be released (1990; 257)´. In this
model, excessive behavior is taken in a functionalist sense to represent
´a bursting of the social seam, an overflow, a chaotic falling apart
(1990; 257)´, Feld suggests that we put aside such assumptions. For
instance, in his view the key quality of traditional Kaluli ritual
wailing is a creative ´pulling together´ of affect rather than its
´falling apart.´ This socially organized and positively evaluated form
of emotional articulation expresses identities as ´deeply felt.´ Since
in the catharsis model, extreme reactions can arouse a sense of unease
and ambivalence in those around them, who may see crying as a salutary
discharge of emotion on the one hand and also is apprehensive of ´the
chaotic indication of personal aggressive impulses´ on the person
present (Feld, 1990; 257). This tiny moment described above indicates
that in sensor technology there is a huge amount of Eurocentric cultural
inertia one must move through if in order for them to be stretched in
different ways. Of this reproachment perhaps I did need to fully direct
the experience close the door, turn the lights of and make a dark space
for a solitary experience, in order for the person needed to give
themselves a chance to let other self come ´into the flow of time
(1987:14)´, Weber also describes this resistance to be a tendency that
occurs before and during a change, ´because such fixed habits become, by
virtue of their very fixity and hence inflexibility, incapable of
dealing with changing and infinitely variable circumstances (1987: 14)´.
Then my point would have been lost and the experience unintegrated.
I was trying to bring common cathartic model to bear onto the excesses
of energy outpour into the /dev/null, in order to shift the habitual
perception from public displays of emotion to indicate not ´a falling
apart´ but, rather, an expression of deeply felt identities through a
series of socially organised and positively evaluated performances where
confrontation and the reintegration of excess is emancipatory. Rather
than being about a particular experience the ´/dev/null Doll´ or more to
the point my intention was about the notion of experience and our
ability (or lack of) to be present in an experience, in a more immediate
mode of embodiment. Reading a book or seeing someone else do something
never changes your patterns of inertia. The only real thing is when you
experience something physically for yourself and that´s what permits the
really profound mental and physical changes. The essence of this
experience which transforms the self cannot linguistically be adequately
contextualised, Jackson´s observations are worth rehearsing, ´... there
are significant differences between the way the world appears to our
consciousness when we are fully engaged in activity and the way it
appears to us when we subject it to reflection and retrospective
analysis.´ (1996:42). When nuancing attention towards ones present
embodiment; about this relatively immediate mode of embodied experience,
I believe it´s important to create strong images, so that the public
cannot escape into the past or into the future. My emphasis is upon a
´proto-linguistic´ understanding and absorption in which I make an
attempt to encourage. Furthermore, the tradition of phenomenology
likewise reflects this concern; Jackson is particularly cohesive to the
notion,
Phenomenology is the scientific study of experience. It is an attempt to
describe human consciousness in its lived immediacy...In the world of
Paul Ricoeur, phenomenology is ´an investigation into the structures of
experience which precede connected expression in language´ (Jackson,
1996: 3).
Connecting to the proto-linguistic state, that is, the electrical
neuro-physiological processes of the participant, potentially this could
trigger sound from an encephalogram sensor. This particular
computer-human interaction might be programmed to have the ability to
scan and profoundly influence individual´s brain waves, respiratory
cycles, nervous system, muscle function, heart rate and glandular
function. Not only is this where the expressivity of human movement
resides but here the machine could help to trigger and influence the
organs activity and may possible be used to avoid organ replacement etc.
2# Case Study, 2 children one womans trash is another kids treasure. This upsurge of force that affirms itself unrestrictedly is joy. -Alfonso Lingis (2000)
Two children enter into the space, they are a bit wary of the spooky looking doll. After a bit of guidance from their mother who instructs them how to operate the doll, they slowly get absorbed and integrate themselves with the mechanics of its expression. Their bodies beat with energy; they are fields of force and radiation. As they fully experiment in responsive intuitive way will all the possibilities of the object. Their limbs and torso push, pull, yield with the object, their muscles also register the changes in their affective and emotional state, affective charge bring with it a modification however imperceptible, in their posture. They slap its heart to start recording their voice, and test the limits of this reaction by stopping and starting the sound, seeking the audible resonance resounding in the dolls chest, they sound into it hear it reverberate, echoing their sonorous qualities. By a simple analysis of their facial reactions they are enchanted about how this resonates through the space with their own materiality, and thus are learning of this elemental and inward difference of the object from themselves and in the vibration and from the sounds being processes as an extension of their initial sound.
By drawing upon the work of Peircean semiotics, symbolic language of
such an object can never fully justify the semantic meaning and dynamics
of interpretation, Lewis writes The implication is that signs do not
´have´ meanings, intrinsically, but they are taken to have certain
meanings by interpreters: signs determine meanings to someone or
something. Therefore one expects that the ´same´ sign vehicle will
actually be different for different interpreters, since it will
constitute different interpretants; this is also true for a given
interpreter at different times... (1992: 226).
The children´s previous looking and wonderment joined now with this
simultaneous sounding and listening, brings them into contact,
respectively with the outward surfaces of the doll and with the interior
voluminosity of it. Hence, when these senses come together, in their
sounding, they experience the complex interplay of inside and outside
that is characteristic of the experience. It is like they have through
their sounding given a soul or animate quality to the doll, this new way
for it to be and them to be with it. It is thus at this juncture in the
surrounding landscape of the doll as they hold their bodies close to it
that one can most readily see this digestion process of someone
confronted by another power irreconcilable to their human nature. The
sound of this ebbs and flows in and out of the space collection speak of
the fears, frustrations, and miseries that a woman experienced in her
everyday life world. Sound can be a language infinitely beyond my
capabilities to speak, but eerily accessible to hear. Wordless and
profound, (some) sound speaks out of a ´visceral and neurological
alignment´11 with its subject. The children´s fresh approach thus cut
through a web of invisible protocols and significations and just simply
related to the doll meaningfully in its immediate context.
These case studies were a tremendous learning experience. I was incredibly challenged by some of people´s customs and attitudes to the work presented to them in the exhibition, but by experiencing and then analysing my extreme (but mostly internalised) emotional reactions and feelings of discontentment about missed chance for communication, I ultimately learnt the value in maintaining the capacity to keep a critical distance. Nevertheless, my conviction of the necessity of maintaining an empathetic distance is one that is very distinct from apathy or ignorance. I have previously perceived that distance and impartialness; (a common trait of people that collapse these two frames together in the name of open-mindedness), can also be as equally harmful as having prejudice.
Conclusion: Beyond Our Ken?
These are solemn, excessively solemn individuals, who have made no study of nature, and who generally make everyone around them miserable. I do not know why I think of them as reeking of Protestantism. They can neither understand nor allow such poetic ways and means of passing the time. They are the same individuals who will gladly give a shilling to a poor man on the condition that he stuff himself with bread, but refuse him a farthing to go and slake his thirst in the nearest tavern. When I think of a certain class of ultra-reasonable and anti-poetic people at whose hands I have suffered so much, I always feel hatred pinching and gnawing at my nervous system. -Charles Baudelaire, 17th April, 1853.
On the outset of this paper I wanted to get much deeper into an understanding of current debates and possibilities of the inner microworlds of the body, by drawing on and linking sololuminecence, Hawking Radiaton and encephalogram technology. I only hope that new sensory technologies can help make these more transparent for those who have a more absent relationship with their embodiment and its potential. With respect to the movement research of Rudolf Laban who developed ´the conviction that the body holds truths which through sensitising practices, can be reached and should be sought´ (Preston-Dunlop, 1998:11). I am interested in generating new, more flexible settings, that draw lines of escape from narratives we have been given, ones that break us out from the desire for absolutes, but give another idea of humanity but one that is still tangible and accessible for the people in order to open out holding patterns of inertia, that are most resilient to change. I wanted to impart to the reader not just the politics of my encounters with such work but also the poetry of such observations. By choosing to two case studies in my set up these polar opposition reactions I hopefully disclose some an insight into these very distinctive modes of sensory perception and the telling strategies that they use to transpire their understanding. It was a period in which many of my assumed values were confronted and made noticeable to me. I have now also identified and made salient for future situations. The preservation of critical distance (most of the time) gave me a chance to work through and understand other people´s customs, unraveling and liberating me to look past these differences and learn from what these extreme cases of embodiment expressions had to offer. Fundamentally, I have come to understand that testing and critical practice does not deny uncertainty but instead it embraces this and understands meaning as dynamic, volatile and open ended. To stretch sensor technology in this way into the realm of dream and the imagination, before they become a commonplace commodity or military tool, has allowed a rare opportunity of reflection and critical intelligent play with something as yet largely inaccessible.
My basic point of departure is to encourage an interpretation of the world in an experiential way, for some this is a mode that asks of people to express their autonomy against the manifolds of inertia around ones sensing organs that is involves entire mechanisms of translationÑacross localities, temporalities, physical inscriptions, languages, social milieus, moral orders, and epistemological paradigms. People must be active in taking heed of how their cellular structure is being rearranged by their surrounding public sphere, and the physiological effects of this on the body, on the imagination. These are especially vivid aspects I would like to hold up in conclusion at this juncture in time when we are confronted by integrating other powers irreconcilable to our human nature. I hope my rethinking of embodiment is worlds away from an outdated Luddite, Thoreau-ean mythology that only conceives of technology as hostile to nature. I believe we must understand ourselves as mechanistic expressions of coded (and therefore editable) matter. However, the actual shifting of inertia that is entailed in asking people to make perceptual shift is first something we have to come to fully understand and work through before we can go to the next level of understanding. But what happens when entire structures i.e., A.I, nano-technology continues to process even though basic human understanding has broken down? I place a final emphasis upon sensory technologies and advocate that they perhaps they should be shaped to encode joy within this dark moment in history.
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