Sensing the

World
New Media Writing
 1. An agency or means of 2. The intervening substance 3. A person claiming to be in contact with the
doing something through which impressions spirits of the dead and communicating
”using the latest are conveyed to the senses between the dead and the living.
Medium thinking
technology as a medium or a force acts on objects “the medium told me that David Bowie
for job creation” at a distance. said I was rad.”
• A means by which "speech needs a physical
something is medium to be heard; in
communicated or space, then, no one can
expressed hear you scream”
“American sign • A pervading or
language is the enveloping substance;
medium of the substance in which
instruction" an organism
• Anything commonly lives; esp. one in which
agreed as a token of microorganisms, cells,
value and used in etc., are cultured. In
transactions in a extended use: one's
trading system; environment, conditions
currency of life, or usual social
“cigarettes are the setting.
medium of exchange "grow bacteria in a
in prisons” nutrient-rich medium”
A Quiet Place, 2018
Bird Box, 2018
Gravity, 2012
A Quiet Place, 2018
Bird Box, 2018
Gravity, 2012
Gabrys / pritchard

“Sensing practices refer to the ways in which sensing and

practice emerge, take hold and form attachments
across environmental, material, political and aesthetic
concerns, subjects and milieus” (394).
Gabrys / pritchard
“Sensors do not merely capture environmental data, but
rather they are involved in collaborative sensing
practices for parsing environments and
environmental problems, as well as organizing
approaches for how to take action and generate political
responses through particular forms of environmental
citizenship” (396).
Latour

“How do we make ourselves actually sensitive” (315)?

 “There are many things to which we try to render
ourselves sensitive. To capture that activity, I will use the
Latour

word aesthetic—in the original Greek sense of aisthesis—

perception, or making oneself sensitive to something. I
will make no distinction between making oneself sensitive
for scientific purposes and making oneself sensitive
through various formats associated with the arts” (315).
 “If we remember the etymological sense of an aesthetic as
Latour

making sensitive, how does a specific medium render

us sensitive to things as they come to us? Things can
come to you, but if you don’t render yourself sensitive to
them, you just don’t get it” (319).
Phyphox
The Architecture of Radio
Latour

“It gets modified, mobilized, or moved—and you are then

moved by the thing you move, which is the most
interesting relation we have with the world” (321).
Latour

“Disease of the Dutch”

hendren

“Instead of posing ‘solutions’ to ‘problems,’ interrogative

and estranging tools ask whether we are asking the
right questions in the first place” (62).
 “we understand ‘technology’ more appropriately as
hendren

‘techne’—as articulation of new and possible applied

knowledge that is animated by disruptive questions:
questions of ethics, or equality, or otherwise invisible
conditions of contemporary existence” (62-63).
hendren

“I’d like to see more of what you might call tools for
estrangement” (59).
 “It’s a very difficult question of producing the right kind of
Latour

communication to register on the already-insensitive, to

produce the right register in which make an
address” (323).
The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889
Oil on canvas, 28.7 in ×  36 1⁄4 in