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 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.