Sense Acts: Interfacing with Nonconscious Cognition in Technological Art

Increasing application of various sensing and interface technologies in recent decades creates productive ground for rethinking cognitive capacities and epistemic status of the more-than-human world. Living and non-living systems (from viruses and fungi to autonomous robots and AI-driven chatbots) demonstrate plenty of agency and can be seen as articulate entities, with their own interpretive and expressive abilities. Their expressions, or ‘stories’ – observed as movement, growth, or electrochemical activity – can be treated as information and is extremely diverse in its modality. What kind of selfhoods – individual or collective – do they represent? Whereas in interfacing with disembodied agents, such as chatbots, it is often the human projections that contribute the most to the resulting sense (the so-called Eliza effect), the wide variety of organic and nonorganic embodiments teach us about radically new forms of self-organization and relationality. Expressivity and cognitive abilities of living and nonliving matter thus can inform potential re-composition of our social connections and technologies to accommodate them. The talk will address artistic approaches to the potential of analog computing, human-machine interaction, and effects of embracing nonhuman sensorium.

 Fedorova’s talk will be followed by a response from Dr. Christoph Brunner and an open discussion.