Abstract
Contemporary digital technologies afford unprecedented access to levels of temporal experience that have long remained beyond the scope of human thematization. In their efforts to historicize these affordances, historians of science have insisted on the peculiarity of this access, the fact that it does not take place through any direct expansion of human perceptual capacities, but rather through a human-machine assemblage that supplements perception by putting it into systemic co-relation with a technical operationality whose “content” perception cannot access. In this article, Hansen utilizes this indirect model of the temporal expansion of human agency to explore contemporary micro-computational expansion of sensibility, both as it informs data capitalism and efforts to counter the latter’s sway.
Highlights
Adapted for our contemporary moment, Schmidgen’s work on the braintime assemblage operates as a kind of therapy: it helps us appreciate why we must embrace the displacement of phenomenological agency in favor of technical processing if we are to access the operationality of sensibility and tap into its compensatory potential
Through a technologically enhanced perception, a mathematical seeing, patterns come into view that previously could not be seen by the naked eye, in ways that augment, or occlude, traditional observational expertise and human intuition.”[1]. With this account of the contemporary technical distribution of precognitive sensibility, media artist and theorist Jordan Crandall perfectly captures both the vastly expanded sensory field within which contemporary events occur and the fine-tuning of our access to the separate, most often microtemporal performances, both machinic and human, that contribute to their occurrence
What accounts for the singularity of contemporary media is not that their data-driven operations bypass the scope of consciousness, but that they impact experience on a much broader basis than consciousness. They literally seep into the texture of experience, forming a background, a peripheral “calculative ambience,” that indirectly flavors any and all resulting events or phenomena: As tracking becomes elevated into a condition, dissolving into behavior, sensation and all manner of embodied social practices in the data-intensive, analytics-driven spaces of megacities, the ‘sense of continual access to information’ that arises out of the connectivity and interoperability among all kinds of data-enhanced actors (Thrift 2008: 92–99) is not necessarily grounded in a direct access
Summary
Adapted for our contemporary moment, Schmidgen’s work on the braintime assemblage operates as a kind of therapy: it helps us appreciate why we must embrace the displacement of phenomenological agency in favor of technical processing if we are to access the operationality of sensibility and tap into its compensatory potential.
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