1st Edition
Distributed Perception Resonances and Axiologies
Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions, and axiologies of animal, human, and machinic perception/s? What are their perceptibilities? Deleuze uses the word ‘visibilities’ to indicate that visual perception isn’t just a physiological given but cues operations productive of new assemblages. Perceptibilities are, by analogy, spatio-temporal, geolocative, kinaesthetic, audio-visual, and haptic operations that are always already memory. In the case of strong inscriptions, they are also epigenetic events.
In physics, resonance is the tendency of a system to vibrate with increasing amplitudes at certain frequencies of excitation. In cybernetics and in theories of technology, it refers to systems’ feedback. In Native science, resonance denotes the axiology of positions and events. It’s a form of multi-species perception that emphasises emergent directionality and protean mnemonics.
This transdisciplinary volume brings together key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art his- tory, and design informatics to examine: a) the becoming-technique of animal– human–machinic perceptibilities; and b) micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. The volume shows distributed perception to be a key notion in addressing the emergence and peristence of plant, animal, human, and machine relations.
Natasha Lushetich & Iain Campbell: Introduction Part I: Entanglement 1. Gregory A. Cajete: Relational Philosophy: The Stars are Our Relatives 2. Kuai Shen: Turning Around and Upside Down: The Nomadic Rhythms of Rain Ants in Sarayaku 3. Wolfgang Ernst: Do Media Have a Sense of Time? Chrono-technical Interoception 4. Adrian MacKenzie & Anna Munster: Oscilloscopes, Slide Rules and Nematodes: Towards Heterogenetic Perception in/of AI 5. Suzanne Thorpe: Composing with Resonance, Sounding the Inaudible and Listening for More-than-One 6. Wolfgang Muench: The Discrete Charm of Systems Theories: Cybernetic Intelligence and Posthuman Art Environments Part II: Plasticity 7. David W. Bates: Unstable Brains and Ordered Societies: On the Conceptual Origins of Plasticity, ca 1900 8. Guillaume Collett: The Human and Nonhuman in the Capitalist production of Subjectivity 9. Ian James: Resonance Between Sense, Plasticity and Biosemiosis 10. Daniel Nemenyi: How We Never Became Posthuman: Homeostasis as Conflict from Claude Bernard to Norbert Wiener 11. Chris Speed & Martin Disley: Intra-Action in Data-Driven Systems: A Case Study in Creative Praxis Part III: Organology 12. Barbara Glowczewski (in collaboration with Iain Campbell): Becoming-Distributed Matter: Dreaming and Extended Relationality Among Indigenous Australians 13. Undine Sellbach: Two Painted Flies: Improvised Arts of Perception in Uexküll’s Picture Book of Invisible Worlds 14. Stephen Zepke: From Physiological Aesthetics to Anthropological Poetics: Activating the Pictographs of Cerro Azul 15. Paul Atkinson: The Relativity of Life: Cinema as Time Microscope 16. Yuji Sone: Battlebots, Machine Surrogates and the Organology of Violence Televisual Entertainment 17. Conor McKeown: Autobiographing our Computing Organs: Rereading Pastw Uses of Intel CPUs as Xenotransplantation Natasha Lushetich and Iain Campbell: Concluding Thoughts
Biography
Natasha Lushetich is Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Dundee and AHRC Fellow (2020 – 2021). Her research is interdisciplinary and focuses on intermedia; biopolitics and performativity; the status of sensory experience in cultural knowledge; hegemony and complexity. Her books include Fluxus: The Practice of Non-Duality (Rodopi 2014), Interdisciplinary Performance (Pagrave 2016), The Aesthetics of Necropolitics (Rowman and Littlefield 2018), Beyond Mind, a special issue of Symbolism (De Gruyter 2019) and Big Data – A New Medium? (Routledge 2020).
Iain Campbell is an interdisciplinary researcher based in Edinburgh. He is Postdoctoral Rsearch Associate on the AHRC project The Future of Indeterminacy: Datification, Memory, Bio-Politics at the University of Dundee. He has written on topics across philosophy, music, sound studies, and art theory for publications including parallax, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Sound Studies, and Contemporary Music Review. He is an associate member of the Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy, and is part of the editorial board of Evental Aesthetics.
"What is perception? A presentation, as Husserl said? A bodily shaping, as Merleau-Ponty defined it? Or the mere illusion of reality, as Derrida affirmed? Neither, Lushetich and Campbell answer. Delocalising perception from the scene of the human world, they show, through this extraordinary set of essays, that perception does not focus on objects but navigates between thresholds. Trans-materiality, trans-temporality, natural artificiality or biological mechanisms are currently deconstructing the deconstruction of presence itself. A major achievement."---Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, London
"Distributed Perception arrives just in time. Confusion is at a fever pitch about the technological qualities of perception and how natural and machine intelligence are inextricable from its cuts and continuities. This diverse collection provides multifaceted perspectives on what is at stake, what we know, what we don't know and what may have been forgotten."---Benjamin Bratton, University of California San Diego
"Distributed Perception is a truly imaginative and novel intervention into media studies of perception. A collection of some of the most innovative thinkers in digital media studies, the book creatively avoids reductive discourses concerning planetary scale computing and the denaturalization of human perception to ask a new set of questions. At stake in these many accounts is a fundamental investigation about how we produce and "feel" difference—in scales, in species, in social systems--and ultimately how we hope to construct our relationship to others and the world in the future."---Orit Halpern, Concordia University, Montreal
