Abstract

Keywords: Interaction Design, Media Art, Activism, Gilbert Simondon, Politics of Affect, Pure Experience, Counterpower, More-than-Human

This paper explores the concept of fields of experience as a way to engage with the conditions of emergence of what we might call sentience. As a process of fielding, sensation and processes of sense-making are of an emergent and entangled quality in the overall ecology of experience. We specifically wish to emphasize the dynamics of the closely interrelated conditions for sensing and sense-making – what we conceptualize as ‘shifting immedations’ – and its affective politics. Rather than transgression, ‘shifting’ foregrounds the sometimes almost imperceptible reorientations of fields of experience that are lived immediately as tendencies and vectors for change (feeling the non-sensuous). In particular, we wish to zoom in on specific practices and technologies that might modulate and reorient such experiential fields. We do so by analyzing two cases that emphasize the emergent relations between digital and interactive technologies and their fielding potential; BERMUDA is an interactive installation that attempts to relay affective intensity into tendencies for collective action, whereas the interventions of etcetera emphasize time-sensitive modulations of experience. Exploring these cases, we ask how experiential fields and shifting immediations might allow us to think and act towards new forms of engaging in a politics of sentience beyond the human subject.

• Christoph Brunner, Assistant Professor In Cultural Theory, Director, ArchipelagoLab for Transversal Practices, Leuphana University Luneburg, Germany. My research revolvoes around mediated forms of activism and their affective politics. I draw on pragmatist philosophies of experience, posthumanist conceptions of relational media ecologies and currently engage in a decolonial reworking of aisthesis. leuphana.de/en/institutes/ipk/members/christoph-brunner.html
• Jonas Fritsch, Associate Professor, Affective Interactions & Relations (AIR) Lab, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Jonas Fritsch, PhD, is Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the IT University of Copenhagen in the Department of Digital Design. He is head of the Affective Interaction & Relations (AIR) Lab and Research Group at ITU and Head of Study Programme for the MSc in Digital Design and Interactive Technologies. His work revolves around a creative thinking of interaction design, design processes, experience philosophy and affect theory through practical design experiments with e.g. interactive sound and physical interfaces.