Sensory Vantage Points: Examining Habitual addresses to Digital Media in NYC Public Spaces

Abstract

When media technologies are introduced into public spaces, the human habitually address technology through visual and/or auditory interfaces. A brief genealogy of how digital media interfaces are designed, and ways that 'interface' is defined, poises a provocation for how humans may engage with such technologies in different ways. I bring a sensory probe kit to consider multiple conceptual and empirical "vantage points" of the body in order to examine sensorial information exchanged between human bodies and digital media technologies. This perceptual bias roots human experience of technology within the regime of the visual, neglecting the ways that digital technologies compose continuous relations with the complex sensorial human body. The challenge is to study the formation of human and technology bonds in the making. To reframe exchanges as always being in motion shifts the conversation from received notions of public space to a proposed sense of publicness as eventful and marked by disruptions of routinized addresses of technology. I will lean into the notion of ‘expressions’ as integral to producing ongoing, qualitatively different formations of sensory environments in public spaces. The sensory probe exercises developed for this project evoke potential diversifications of human and technology relationships.