Sense Acts: Interfacing with Nonconscious Cognition
Keynote by Ksenia Fedorova
Sat., 25.5.2024
16:00
Haunani-Kay Trask Hall
In English with German translation
Free entry
The increasing prevalence of various sensing and interface technologies in recent decades creates productive ground for rethinking cognitive capacities and the 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 are extremely diverse in their modality. What kind of selfhoods, individual or collective, do they represent? When interfacing with disembodied agents, such as chatbots, it is often human projection that dominantly contributes to the sense produced (the so-called ELIZA effect). Conversely, 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-compositions of our social connections and technologies to accommodate them. The keynote by Ksenia Fedorova addresses artistic approaches to the potential of analog computing, human-machine interaction, and the effects of embracing nonhuman sensorium.