Mark Hansen: Techno-Aesthesis and Drone Vision

With the aim of sketching out an aesthetics that links humans and machines, Mark Hansen’s talk will explore aesthesis (or “worldly sensibility“) as a relationality that crosses the divide(s) separating the living and the technical. Theoretically, Hansen will mobilize French philosopher Gilbert Simondon’s conception of information as receptivity without a pregiven receiver to explore the operation of environmental individuation and the double role that technical media play in it — as intensifier of human sensitivity to the environment and as surrogate “presentifier“ of the causal lineages informing both human and environmental individuations. By thinking with some selected artworks that engage the problem of “drone vision“ — the paradoxical invisibility to humans of a machinic domain of sense — Hansen will unpack how humans share worldly sensibility with machines. Ultimately, the question he asks is: can and how can a neo-Simondonian “techno-aesthetics“ mediate a