Postphenomenology

Offering a radical re-evaluation of current approaches to performer training, this is a text that equips readers with a set of new ways of thinking about and ultimately 'doing' training. Stemming from his extensive practice and incorporating a review of prevailing methods and theories, Frank Camilleri focuses on how material circumstances shape and affect processes of training, devising, rehearsing and performing. Frank Camilleri puts forward the 'post-psychophysical' as a more extended form of psychophysical discussion and practice that emerged and dominated in the 20th century. The 'post-psychophysical' updates the concept of an integrated bodymind in various ways, such as the notion of a performer's bodyworld that incorporates technology and the material world. Offering invaluable introductions to a wide range of theories around which the book is structured-including postphenomenological, sociomaterial, affect and situated cognition-this volume provides readers with an enticing array of approaches to training and creative processes.

This essay proposes an approach to the disposable characteristic of some modern technologies from the perspective of Don Ihde's postphenonenology. The main idea revolves around the concept of "disposability" as an intentional feature of these technologies, on an "existential" level, not as a commercial or design strategy. "Disposability" as an active feature of these technologies puts us in front of some questions that involve what kind of constructions of reality and/or consequences of our relationships with the world mediated by technologies that have this specific intentionality exist or can arise. This is a work in progress, and here there are no answers, just the phenomenological perspective in development.

En este artículo intentaré reflexionar acerca de la categoría de barbarie enmarcada en nuestro ahora. Para ello será necesario hacer, previamente, una génesis del término e iluminar los puntos por los cuales siempre ha estado relacionada con la idea de mal. Luego, daré paso a la exposición de algunos criterios respecto a cómo y desde dónde se debe pensar dicha categoría en tiempos hiperreales, donde ya requerimos hablar de tecno-individualismo, tecno-alteridad, tecno-ascetismo. Finalmente, me gustaría resaltar la ineludible relación existente entre la barbarie y el progreso científicotecnológico. La palabra ahora, incluida en el título, la utilizaré como forma de englobar nuestro presente, divisándolo como inmerso en un continuum sometido por el pasado y un futuro preelaborado.

Do people really care about their privacy? Surveys show that privacy is a primary concern for citizens in the digital age. On the other hand, if we look at the way those people behave behave - they reveal personal information for relatively small rewards, often just for drawing the attention of peers in an online social network. This inconsistency between privacy attitudes and privacy behavior is what we referred to as the “privacy paradox”. In this presentation I argue that the concept of the Google Self help us to untangle the privacy paradox.
You can watch the recorded lecture at : https://vimeo.com/474690648/85df5b1037

Technology is increasingly being used for development but its impacts are interpreted in diverse ways. It is more common among development theorists and practitioners to hold on to technological instrumentalism which views technology as neutral entity. This paper examines the assumptions of
technological instrumentalism and, based on technological mediation, argues for a different view of the role of technology for development. The assumptions of technological instrumentalism are examined against the assumptions of technological mediation and the result of a case study of the Mechanized Water System in Sanguli is used to elaborate the role of technology for development from a technological mediation perspective. The paper concludes that, contrary to the assumptions of technological instrumentalism, technology for development has intentionality, has agency and is not
merely a means to achieving the goals of development. The paper also suggests that by re-shaping the theory and practice of technology for development from an instrumentalist perspective to a mediation perspective, we can understand the role of technology for development better and improve its design, implementation and management.

When we move past the hype surrounding fourth generation industrial technology (4gIT) and attend to its nature, we should expect 4gIT to exacerbate, rather than alleviate, conditions that tend to ensnare us in dukkha. Here I probe the nature of 4gIT with brief case studies about the Eyeborg, the DIY pancreas system, Google's Pixel Buds, and their role in exacerbating experiences of inherent separation from others. I examine how cravings for self-continuity (bhavana) and self-discontinuity (vibhana) connect experiences of separation from others with dukkha. I also contrast my techno-pessimism with David Loy's Buddhism-inspired value-neutrality, and with an increasingly popular pessimism grounded upon observations about the so-called attention economy.

(Comments much appreciated by October 22 2017. Thank you!)

This article aims to explore and expand the notion of Don Ihde's technological view. With his reflections on the music production and recording practice, this article constitutes analysis of phonograph in different historical and cultural context. In the later part of this article, we will address two more recording technology in the discussion of how technology shaping our mediation of the world when we are perceiving sound and music. This article also tries to explore different level of the discussions in the production of recording practice with the theoretical framework of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as well. With these analysis and reflections, this article aims at constituting the expansion of Ihde's technological discussion on music and its production.

Heidegger, Marcuse, and Ellul warned against the rise of a technological mass culture. Philosophy of technology has since turned away from such dystopic views, promoting instead the view that we shape technologies just as technologies shape us. Yet the rise of Big Data has exceeded our worst fears about Big Brother, leading us to again question whether technologies are empowering us or enslaving us.

Rather than engage in endless debates about whether technologies are making us better or making us worse, Nolen Gertz investigates what we think “better” and “worse” mean, and what role this thinking has played in the creation of our technological world. This investigation is carried out by using Nietzsche’s philosophy of nihilism in order to explore the ways in which our values mediate how we design technologies and how we use technologies. Examining our technological practices—practices ranging from Netflix and Chill to Fitbit and Move to Twitter and Rage—reveals how our nihilism and our technologies have become intertwined, creating a world of techno-hypnosis, data-driven activity, pleasure economics, herd networking, and orgies of clicking.

The famed Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan had an ambivalent relationship with the academia during his lifetime. Despite the renewed interest in his work prompted by the rise of the internet and digital technology, his media theory, due to the aphoristic or “mosaic” style of his prose and interdisciplinary focus, has been controversial in media theory and virtually excluded from philosophy of technology. Critics argue that McLuhan does not offer a comprehensive media theory and McLuhan himself agreed. Instead, he prefered to describe his work as probes and toolkit for studying the effects of media on our senzory perception and society. As the chapter shows, however, McLuhan’s body of work does consist of a coherent media theory that is analysed as two modes of McLuhan’s thinking and based on the assumption that all media extend human bodily and psychic features causing profound changes in humans at the personal and sociocultural level. The chapter analyses the phenomenologically inspired core concepts of “McLuhanite” media theory with the emphasis on his Tetrad, followed by a comparative analysis of his ties to postphenomenology as well as other contemporary theorists. The chapter argues that we should see beyond superficial aphorism and regard McLuhan as a (post)phenomenologically-minded theorist of effects of technology on humans. Following the postphenomenological emphasis on case studies, the chapter finishes with an analysis of an obstetric ultrasound where a possible synthesis of the Tetrad and postphenomenological concepts are applied.

This paper aims to define a theoretical framework for conceptualizing on the placemaking potential of urban spatial experiences, mediated by pervasive and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. For this purpose, it discusses the relation of human subjects with things and objects as well as with the spaces and places that they produce, while taking into consideration the latest technological advancements. The ultimate goal is to evaluate the hypothesis that the emergence of places in the aforementioned contexts is not necessarily an anthropocentric process but can largely be the outcome of material agency of non-living things and objects. To this end, the paper presents a public space, site-specific installation titled “Pollen” and discusses the manner in which this mediated environment interacted with the physical environment and with animate and inanimate actors within it.

Technical design can produce exclusionary and even discriminatory effects for users. A lack of discriminatory intent is insufficient to avoid discriminatory design, since implicit assumptions about users rarely include all relevant user demographics, and in some cases, designing for all relevant users is actually impossible. To minimize discriminatory effects of technical design, an actively anti-discriminatory design perspective must be adopted. This article provides examples of discriminatory user exclusion, then defining exclusionary design in terms of disaffordances and dysaffordances. Once these definitions are in place, principles of anti-discriminatory design are advanced, drawing upon a method of phenomenological variation employed in the context of standpoint epistemology.

השאלה מי אני? מעסיקה את הפילוסופים מאז ראשית ההיסטוריה המתועדת של הפילוסופיה )פרכט, 2011 p. 14, ). האדם אשר מנסה למצוא את מקומו בעולם מלא התהפוכות נאלץ להתמודד עם גורם נוסף אשר משתנה בקצבים הולכים ומתגברים, הטכנולוגיה. קסטל (2010) טוען כי בעקבות שינויים שונים שהתרחשו בעולם, מהפיכת המידע והטכנולוגיה שבאה בעקבותיה מהוות את הגורם המשפיע ביותר על תפיסת העצמי שלנו.
התוסף הקוגניטיבי שגוגל מאפשרת לנו על ידי שירותיה נרחב ומקיף יותר מכל טכנולוגיה קודמת. בנוסף לכך, המידע ותהליכי הניתוח שלו הם אינם לגמרי שלנו אלא נשלטים על ידי גוגל. מחקר זה שם לו למטרה לבחון כיצד שירותי טכנולוגיות המידע וריכוזן בידי קונגלומרטים טכנולוגיים משפיעים על תפיסת העצמי שלנו.
שיטת המחקר מתבססת על מתודולוגיות ותיקות בתחום המדע-טכנולוגיה-חברה (STS): ניתוח יחסי שחקן-רשת של לאטור (actor-network) (Latour, 2005); המתודה הפוסט פנומנולוגית  לבחינת היחס שבין האדם לטכנולוגיה והעולם (Ihde, 2009). בשונה ממחקרים אחרים בתחום, מחקר זה יבחן מצד אחד את מגוון השירותים הטכנולוגיים שגוגל מציעה לנו ומצד שני יביא בחשבון את האופן שבו הטכנולוגיות משתלבות זו בזו ומייצרות מצרף של שינויים הן עבור המשתמש והן עבור הקונגלומרט הטכנולוגי הנבחר לטובת מקרה הבוחן, חברת גוגל.
בהתאם למקובל בשיטת המחקר, אעשה שימוש בתיאורים וביקורות של הטכנולוגיות עצמן, הצהרות רשמיות של החברה, מדריכים, סקירות מקצועיות, ביקורות משתמשים, ומחקרים אמפיריים ואתנוגרפיים אשר עסקו בתחומים רלוונטיים של טכנולוגיות המידע. אני מאמין שמחקר זה יכול לאפשר לנו לבחון בעיניים רעננות את מערכת היחסים שלנו עם טכנולוגיית המידע והצורה שבה היא מבנה את האופן שבו אנו תופסים את עצמנו. בנוסף, המחקר יאפשר לפתח המשגות חדשות שיוכלו לתרום לחקר מושג העצמי בעידן המודרני על שלל היישומים האפשריים לכך: בטיפול, בחינוך, בפיתוח תיאוריה חברתית וביקורתיות משוכללות יותר.

FRENCH - Comme le dit Pierre Lévy dans sa préface et comme le montre ce livre, « la révolution numérique ne concerne pas tant les apparences, ou l’observable, que le système organisateur de nos perceptions, de nos pensées et de nos relations, leur nouveau mode d’apparition ». La révolution numérique n’est pas seulement un événement technique, mais un événement philosophique majeur, qui modifie nos structures perceptives et reconfigure notre sens du réel. Les techniques, en effet, ne sont pas seulement des outils, ce sont des structures de la perception. Elles conditionnent la manière dont le monde nous apparaît et dont les phénomènes nous sont donnés. Depuis près d’un demi-siècle, les technologies numériques nous apportent des perceptions d’un monde inconnu. Ces êtres qui émergent de nos écrans et de nos interfaces bouleversent l’idée que nous nous faisons de ce qui est réel et nous réapprennent à percevoir. Quel est l’être des êtres numériques ? Que se cache-t-il derrière le terme trompeur de “virtuel" ? Que devient notre être-dans-le-monde à l’heure des êtres numériques ? Le temps est venu d’analyser « l’ontophanie numérique » dans toute sa complexité. La prétendue différence entre le réel et le virtuel n’existe pas et n’a jamais existé. Nous vivons dans un environnement hybride, à la fois numérique et non-numérique, en ligne et hors ligne, qu’il appartient aux designers de rendre habitable.

ENGLISH - The techniques are not just tools, they are structures of perception. They determine the way in which the world appears to us and in which phenomena are given to us. For nearly half a century, the digital technologies provide us with perceptions coming from an unknown world. These beings that emerge from our screens and our interfaces disrupt the idea that we have of what is real and lead us to re-learn how to perceive. The digital revolution is a new ‘ontophanic’ revolution, i.e. an alteration of the process by which the being (ontos) appears to us (phaino) and, consequently, an adjustment of our very idea of reality. What is the being of digital beings ? What happens to our being-in-the-world in an age of digital beings ? It is time to analyze the “digital ontophany” in all its complexity. The so-called difference between the real and the virtual does not exist and never has. We are living in a hybrid environment, which is both digital and non-digital, online and offline. And it belongs to designers to make it habitable.

Ph.D.-thesis accounting for mediated modes of visiting at the museum of natural history, Naturama, Denmark.

Mobile phone cameras, exercise pamphlets and dress-up animal costumes shape museum visits. The three very different mobile, mediating technologies play a central role when visitors relate to a museum exhibition. When these mobile, mediating technologies link visitors and the exhibition, they simultaneously create their own distorted version of the exhibition and conjure three very different versions of the visitor.

Actor network theory (ANT) and related post-Ant studies invorm the analysis of ethnographic fieldwork carried out at a museum of natural history. The analyses show how mobile, mediating technologies, visitors and exhibition are intertwined during museum visits. This leads to an understanding of the museum visit as consisting of multipe, mediated modes of visiting.

Each technology mediates a mode of visiting and as visitors shift between mediated modes of visiting, they shift between multiple exhibition realities.

The Prince and the Wolf contains the transcript of a debate which took place on 5th February 2008 at the London School of Economics (LSE) between the prominent French sociologist, anthropologist, and philosopher Bruno Latour and the Cairo-based American philosopher Graham Harman. The occasion for the debate was the impending publication of Harman’s book, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics. During the discussion, Latour (the ‘Prince’) compared the professional philosophers who have pursued him over the years to a pack of wolves. The Prince and the Wolf is the story of what happens when the wolf catches up with the prince. Latour and Harman engage in brisk and witty conversation about questions that go to the heart of both metaphysics and research methodology: What are objects? How do they interact? And best how to study them?

In a posthumous essay published in 1988, Michel Foucault offered a historical overview of various 'operations' used since classical antiquity and through Christendom by individuals hoping to transform their bodies and minds to enhance their existence. He dubbed these practices 'technologies of the self'. Three decades later, as Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have grown in complexity and power, and our relations with them become more intimate, it is inevitable to ask whether and how they are affecting human self-understanding. This paper compares two approaches that address the former question by re-interpreting and expanding Foucault's concept; one is framed by postphenomenology and media theory, the other stems from an informational (constructio-nist) view. The two interpretations have points in common, but their analyses arrive at fundamentally distinct conclusions. While the former argues digital simulations are merely expanding and fragmenting but not radically altering human ontologies, the latter shows ICTs are deeply transforming how humans present themselves to themselves.

Biorąc pod uwagę zwiększone wykorzystanie technologii multimedialnych
w muzeach, istnieje silna potrzeba lepszego zrozumienia, w jaki sposób innowacje
technologiczne wspierają misję muzeum i kształtują doświadczenia
zwiedzających. Jak możemy poszerzyć perspektywę badań sposobów
używania technologii w muzeach oraz wzajemnego wpływu środowiska
technologicznego i sektora dziedzictwa kulturowego? Ram konceptualnych
dostarczyć może postfenomenologia – współczesny nurt filozofii
technologii skoncentrowany przede wszystkim na doświadczeniach technologicznych. W artykule chciałabym przedstawić założenia modelu badaniatechnologicznych doświadczeń zwiedzających oraz wstępne wyniki badań opartych na tym modelu. Materiałem, którym się posłużę, będą badania doświadczenia ekranów multimedialnych w Muzeum Fryderyka Chopina w Warszawie, które przeprowadziłam w 2020 roku.

UPDATE: A preprint, not proofed and not correctly paginated version is attached.
"This is an Accepted Manuscript of book chapters published by Routledge in Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places, in 2018, available online: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315106267 OR https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315106267

This collection of essays explores the history, implications, and usefulness of phenomenology for the study of real and virtual places. While the influence of phenomenology on architecture and urban design has been widely acknowledged, its effect on the design of virtual places and environments has yet to be exposed to critical reflection. These essays from philosophers, cultural geographers, designers, architects, and archaeologists advance the connection between phenomenology and the study of place. The book features historical interpretations on this topic, as well as context-specific and place-centric applications that will appeal to a wide range of scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The ultimate aim of this book is to provide more helpful and precise definitions of phenomenology that shed light on its growth as a philosophical framework and on its development in other disciplines concerned with the experience of place.

Medical images are an intriguing test case for image theory. As the products of advanced technologies, they are highly artificial, yet somehow indisputably real. Medical images, it seems, are neither transparent nor opaque in the terms of mainstream image theory. They exemplify, rather, what have come to be known as operative images. Drawing on the case of magnetic resonance imaging, this chapter contributes to the current efforts to rethink images in active terms. To this end, it draws on the thought of the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose work is a rich resource for conceptualizing the active roles of images in knowledge and being. While Simondon is primarily known for his theories of individuation and technology, he also makes a significant contribution to the theory of images, setting it off on an altogether new path. As Simondon sees it, a machine is a being that operates. This implies that to firmly grasp technology in its entanglement with humans and nature, we need to consider technical objects in their operational functioning, and not as things or artifacts with fixed characteristics. Likewise, when he turns to images, the originality of Simondon’s theory lies in his operational approach: images, too, are beings that operate. Simondon’s theories of machines and images are deeply informed by his theory of individuation, which accords to machines and images a non-trivial role as adaptive mediators between humans and the world. Moreover, approaching machines and images as adaptive mediators’ in Simondon’s sense of the term serves to bring out the image value of technical objects, and—just as importantly—the technicity of images. The first part of this chapter explores the theoretical alignment of machines and images in Simondon’s thinking. The second part probes more deeply into these theoretical connections by focusing on how machines and images relate to their environment. I proceed to relate Simondon’s ideas about machines/images and their environment to the example of MRI, more specifically to the image-acquisition process. Approaching image acquisition as a more-than-technical process, I call attention to the operational and transductive dynamic that is playing out already at this stage—a mediate process that provides conditions for visibility and intelligibility even before there are any images (in the more conventional sense) to look at.In this way, I hope to show that Simondon’s ideas about images and/as machines mark a new and remarkably promising direction for image theory, one pivoting around the insight that images are active powers for reality.

Heidegger, Marcuse, and Ellul warned against the rise of a technological mass culture. Philosophy of technology has since turned away from such dystopic views, promoting instead the view that we shape technologies just as technologies shape us. Yet the rise of Big Data has exceeded our worst fears about Big Brother, leading us to again question whether technologies are empowering us or enslaving us. Rather than engage in endless debates about whether technologies are making us better or making us worse, Dr. Nolen Gertz investigates what we think " better " and " worse " mean, and what role this thinking has played in the creation of our technological world. This investigation is carried out by using Nietzsche's philosophy of nihilism in order to explore the ways in which our values mediate how we design technologies and how we use technologies. Dr Gertz will investigate our technological practices—practices ranging from Netflix and Chill to Fitbit and Move to Twitter and Rage—and reveal how our nihilism and our technologies have become intertwined, creating a world of techno-hypnosis, data-driven activity, pleasure economics, herd networking, and orgies of clicking.

This thesis conceptually investigates the relationship between human existence and the technical object, and thereby relates questions faced within the philosophy of technology to the field of philosophical anthropology. This conceptual work will be taken up in a twofold manner. Firstly, I detail how the Western philosophical tradition has tended to distance its own practice and thinking from the technical, and how it, relatedly, has hierarchically subjugated technics from what essentially defines us as human beings. This will involve a genealogical investigation of the figure of the philosopher and the technician, which will detail how and why these figures have been antagonistic and oppositional from the start. The argument being that this relationship constitutes a genuine hindrance for thinking of existence as originarily technical within the confines of traditional philosophical inquiry and its various schools of thought. Secondly, I conceptually investigate and phenomenologically describe the relationship between human existence and technics by way of an engagement with, first and foremost, the early and late thought of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the work of the French palaeoanthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan and the thought of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. The thesis sets out to question, in this regard, whether or not tool-user and tool, the human and the technical object are originarily prosthetically coupled, and hence if, so to speak, the inventor is also invented with what it invents. Its argument being, in this connection, that the invention of the human is technics. The central thesis of Heidegger’s later philosophy of technology that the essence of technics is by no means anything technical will thus be called into question.

Don Ihde and Lambros Malafouris (Philosophy and Technology 32:195–214, 2019) have argued that “we are homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.” The emphasis falls on the idea that the things that we create, use, rely on—that is, those things with which we engage—have a recursive effect on human existence. We make things, but we also make arrangements, many of which are long-standing, material, social, normative, economic, institutional, and/or political, and many of which are supported by various technologies, including AI, more and more. Critical theorists, such as Habermas, have argued that we need a “depth” or critical hermeneutics (one that combines hermeneutical understanding with scientific explanation) to provide a full account of this kind of recursivity. For Habermas, the explanatory aspect of critical hermeneutics has been modeled on neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian theories. We propose a new critical hermeneutical approach that uses the...

Meanwhile/Becoming is a practice-led research project that includes a written thesis and a final exhibition of work investigating methods of creating photographs that do not conform to the Cartesian perspective prevalent in photographs taken with a standard format camera. The research explores the opportunity of examining a visual space other than that offered by the standard single lens reflex camera through manipulation of the pinhole camera.

The photographic series that constitutes Meanwhile/Becoming uses processes that produce what the research describes as a reinterpretation of phenomenology, postphenomenology and posthumanism through photographic practice; where the photographs are expressive of the what and how humans see and the lived experience of the situated perspectives of a specific space. The research question reflects and critiques this position asking, if multiple viewpoints are presented within a single photograph, does the resulting photograph incorporate the human experience of, relation to and presence in, the world? Once expressed within this framework, the research questions if these multiple viewpoints more closely represent the physiology of how humans see.

The concept of the meanwhile is taken as the timespace between events, examining the “meanwhile” through the landscape of the domestic garden. “Becoming” refers to “the movement between events”, an interval between events that allows the processes of creativity and change through differentiation and duration, identified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2004) and Henri Bergson (1911).

Together, my practice and thesis interrogate the restricted boundaries of the Cartesian model of constructed visual space through the apparatus of a unique purpose-built multiple pinhole camera. This apparatus mediates between me and the world, enabling me to develop a new method of making photographs that considers space/place and how we respond to it both physically and perceptually.

It seems paradoxical that the name of the new geologic age might be the Anthropocene while converging NBIC technologies are advancing to the point where some transhumanists are predicting that humanity will potentially be evolving into a new post-human species in the next 50-100 years. New technologies, such as 3D printing of body parts and genetic engineering, bring about both exciting and potentially disturbing future scenarios. Transhumanists and bioconservatives bring opposing views to this human enhancement debate. However, they both start from a dualistic point of view, keeping the subject and object separate. The philosophical field of postphenomenology is an effective approach for pragmatically and empirically grounding the human enhancement debate, providing tools such as embodied technological relations, the non-neutrality of technology, enabling and constraining aspects of all technologies, and the false dream of a perfectly transparent technology. There is a certain amount of irony in referring to the current geologic age as the Anthropocene. The rhetoric from transhumanists suggests that we are nearing a point with converging technologies where we will be able to greatly transform our species. Though humans have used technology to enhance and modify themselves throughout much of our history (i.e., tattoos, piercings, false teeth, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs, etc.), recent advances in Nano, Biological, and Informational technologies, as well as the Cognitive sciences, collectively referred to as NBIC, create the ability to eradicate many diseases, dramatically increase the human lifespan, and allow us to choose the genetic make-up of our children, culminating in the possibility of transcending, or evolving, beyond what it means to be human. For the transhumanists (Bostrom; Kurzweil; Moravec; More), the notion of becoming something other-than-human is considered to be a positive development that should be embraced. Transhumanists propose that our survival as humans depends upon advancing ourselves as best we can, and there is no reason we should remain subject to limited and faulty bodies if alternatives exist. Counter to this Glimpse vol. 19 80 argument, the bioconservatives (Fukuyama; Habermas; Sandel) feel that transhumanism threatens the very essence of what it means to be human, even going so far as to call it the most dangerous idea in the world (Fukuyama, " Transhumanism "). Bioconservatives strongly advocate for regulations against unrestricted use of NBIC technologies. Both sides are acting in the best interest of their notion of humanity. This paper will explore the concept of human enhancement through the lens of postphenomenology to analyze how new technologies mediate our lifeworld experience. Personally, I vacillate between excitement and concern over the benefits and drawbacks for the profound capacities promised by these technologies. Typically, technology happens in incremental steps, a gradual progression, albeit with an occasionally disruptive invention such as the printing press coming along. However, NBIC advancements now appear to be following more of a Kurzweilian exponential growth model, making it more difficult to dismiss some of the transhumanist claims (Kurzweil). Take for instance the recent 3D printed human ear experiment, where the printed ear was attached to a mouse and began to develop (Kang et al.). Will we soon get to the point where we can print a repaired version of our heart and then have it implanted into us? Or, will we be able to take a " pill " with nanobots that are programmed to clean the plaque from our veins, transfer minute amounts of chemo directly to cancerous cells, or even potentially repair internal damage? What happens if/when we reach the ultimate transhumanist goal of being able to upload our minds and memories to a computer? Could we then transfer them to a 3D printed version of our younger selves, thereby creating the opportunity for a fresh, biological reset, a kind of technological sip from the metaphorical fountain of youth? These new human enhancement technologies challenge us to try and make sense of what it means to be human. Postphenomenology, a philosophy based in pragmatism, is well suited to take a grounded look at human enhancement issues. Integrating postphenomenology into the human enhancement debate can address shortcomings from both transhumanists and bioconservatives and will improve our ability to understand key issues. BACKGROUND

Can phenomenological approaches to experience allow me to attend to not just the human experience but also the
material discursive forces that are a part of the shifting, moving network of agents at work in a phenomenon? Focusing on
the material structures of experience means not asking what materiality is, but rather asking what it is doing in the context
of an intra-active phenomena. In this article, I consider what possibilities for data gathering and analysis are opened if I think
the Husserlian concept of encounters with the world within a feminist new materialist framework, and find the tensions
provocative.

Because climate change can be seen as the blind spot of contemporary philosophy of technology, while the destructive side effects of technological progress are no longer deniable, this article reflects on the role of technologies in the constitution of the (post)Anthropocene world. Our first hypothesis is that humanity is not the primary agent involved in world-production, but concrete technologies. Our second hypothesis is that technological inventions at an ontic level have an ontological impact and constitutes world. As we object to classical philosophers of technology like Ihde and Heidegger, we will sketch the progressive contribution of our conceptuality to understand the role of technology in the Anthropocene world. Our third hypothesis is that technology has emancipatory potential and in this respect, can inaugurate a post-Anthropocene World. We consider these three hypotheses to develop a philosophical account of the ontology of technology beyond an abstract and deterministic understanding. This concept enables us to philosophically reflect on the role of technology in the Anthropocene World in general, and its contribution to the transition to the post-Anthropocene World in particular.

As part of the Special Section: Technology & Pandemic, this article examines the experience of teaching and learning via Zoom. I examine how technologies mediate the learning process with the postphenomenological notions of embodiment and hermeneutic relations. This section serves as a basis for understanding the transformation of that process into online learning. The next section is named "the Zoom-bie"-a combination of the words Zoom and zombie. The figure of the Zoom-bie provides me a way to critically review the new practices experienced in the spring semester of 2020. After analyzing the variations of the learning process with a fresh look at embodiment and hermeneutic relations, the last section titled "the digital classroom" examines this transformation from an alternative point-of-view, that of the classroom as a technology-saturated background.

Il saggio ricostruisce le diverse accezioni e stratificazioni teoriche della tecnica in Husserl con particolare riferimento alle "Ricerche logiche" - dove la tecnica assume centralità come 'Kunstlehre' logica - e nella "Crisi delle scienze europee", dove evolve nel problema della tecnicizzazione del sapere scientifico. In entrambi i casi, ad essere in gioco è il senso stesso del rapporto tra essere umano e mondo-della-vita circostante.

Computer-generated aesthetic artefacts and the technology employed to create them have brought serious challenges for art scholarship. How should they be understood, described and categorised in relation to non-computational artworks, and how current technological developments are affecting aesthetic practices and our understanding of art in the Information Age are two of the most pressing questions in this field. To address them, this dissertation proposes a scientifically-informed conceptual inquiry and historical account of the relation between computational technology and art. The analysis here presented is based on insights provided by contemporary philosophy of technology and philosophy of information. These styles of analysis give access to a broader understanding of information and communication technologies (and computational technology in particular) that mitigates some of the epistemic shortcomings of media studies and critical theory. This dissertation shows computers are the ultimate modelling machines; tools that allow us design, represent, interact with, and objectify entities and experiences that need not exist in concrete (Modern or “Newtonian”) reality, but merely as . It shows computational aesthetic objects may be better described as simulations: as dynamic, persistent, technically mediated renderings of a source system at different levels of abstraction (granularities). But also that they may also be regarded and analysed as complex informational systems: as patterns, programs, or interfaces which, upon being interpreted, not merely convey but generate new factual information. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that regarding computational technology and computational aesthetic objects as systems illuminates their complexities and shows why monolithic and overarching characterisations of either of them are unlikely to provide valuable knowledge in the long run. While only explicit on certain sections, the underlying argument advanced by this dissertation is that art scholars should care to develop a more robust computational literacy, as well as to question certain (Romantic) prejudices concerning the relationship between art, science, and technology.

During the second half of the twentieth century, several philosophers of technology argued that their predecessors had reflected too abstractly and pessimistically on technology. In the view of these critics, one should study technologies empirically in order to fully understand them. They developed several strategies to empirically inform the philosophy of technology and called their new approach the empirical turn. However, they provide insufficient indications of what exactly is meant by empirical study in their work. This leads to the critical question of what counts as an empirically informed philosophy of technology in the empirical turn. In order to answer this question, we first elaborate on the problems that the empirical turn philosophers tried to address; secondly, we sketch their solutions, and, thirdly, we critically discuss their conceptions of empirical study. Our critical analysis of the empirical turn contributes to new efforts to engage in an empirically informed philosophy of technology.

This article contributes to the ongoing attempts to develop an operational basis for understanding images. To this end, it considers a selection of contemporary approaches that, each in their own way, grant centrality to the operational aspects of images. The new line of research into the agency and efficacy of images is highly promising, breaking new ground by putting image theory on an altogether new track. More work needs to be done, however, when it comes to articulating what is meant by the term “operation” in this context. Addressing this need, the article probes the literature on operative images, discussing and comparing different approaches to operative images along four lines: from the perspective of art (section 1), from the perspective of new media production and use (section 2), from the perspective of media archaeology aspiring to become exact science (section 3), and from the perspective of visual studies (section 4).

For over twenty years, French digital studies have seen the virtual, as a philosophical concept, prevail. My work postulates that although the above concept is philosophical in origin, it fails to be relevant at grasping the nature of the digital phenomenon, philosophically. A need therefore exists for new concepts; ones more apt at penetrating the philosophical complexity of the digital phenomenon. I have suggested introducing the concept of ontophany, whose etymology merges the dimensions of being (ontos) and of appearance (phaïnô). We wish to examine the hereto unidentified technicality of the manifestation process through the prism of the contemporary digital field. Not only to the following theoretical propositions seek to contribute, philosophically, to Internet Studies and to a better understanding the Digital Age, they also hope to give rise to a broader deliberation on technology and perception, as they relate to an approach I would characterize as a historical phenomenology of technology. According to this approach, technology is no longer a body of objects isolated from their subject; technical nature becomes an intrinsic aspect of subjectivity (among others) which varies in relation to its historical context. The techno-transcendental phenomenology put forth hereafter seeks to render the overall transcendental technical nature of appearance, as historically determined by an era’s technical culture, more perceptible.

Don Ihde has published two new volumes, which together form a good introduction
to his style of philosophy. Whereas the first volume presents the different aspects of
Ihde’s distinctive postphenomenological philosophy of technology and is also
meant as introductory, the second volume goes more deeply into some of those
aspects, a choice that causes some repetition across the two volumes. Ihde writes
easily, but the seeming ease and theoretical unpretentiousness should not mislead
the reader, since Ihde definitely takes stances, without, however, engaging in
extensive dialogue with other positions. Yet, this lack of debate that the reader may
experience does not hinder the fact that Ihde’s way of thinking first and foremost
opens intellectual doors to others. One should also keep in mind that these two slim
volumes extend the long list of books and publications by Ihde, and that Ihde’s
position has stabilized or is—in the Husserlian sense—more or less sedimented
within a certain circle of philosophers of technology and/or science. Nonetheless,
we will also concentrate on those places where Ihde opens doors to the thoughts or
ways of thinking of others and where he—maybe unwittingly—enters into dialogue
with thinkers he does not mention.

Wer an eine Phänomenologie des Lachens denkt, denkt wohl zuerst an Henri Bergson und Helmuth Plessner. Bergsons Essay Das Lachen (1900) und Plessners Studie Lachen und Weinen (1941) gelten als Klassiker und sind vermutlich die am meisten gelesenen philosophischen Abhandlungen über das Lachen. Aber was hat die Tradition der Phänomenologie diesbezüglich sonst noch zu bieten? Der folgende Artikel bietet einen Überblick über phänomenologische Theorien des Lachens, wobei sowohl die vor- als auch die nachphänomenologische Tradition bzw. das Umfeld der Phänomenologie mit berücksichtigt wird. Wie bei vielen randständigen Themen in der Philosophie, so trifft auch auf das Lachen zu: Ist einmal die Aufmerksamkeit darauf gerichtet, so bietet das philosophische Feld mehr, als man zunächst für möglich hielt.