March 3, 2021: keynote lecture at Conference ‘Digital Cultures’, FernUniversität in Hagen (Moderation: Selin Gerlek, Hagen/Munich).
How to conceptualize the new materiality that digital technologies bring about? Now that information technologies are merging with our physical environment, human-machine interactions can no longer be understood as “use,” but rather as immersion, telepresence, fusion, augmentation, or robotization. In this keynote lecture, I will bring together and expand insights from Postphenomenology and New Materialism to analyze the implications of this new, digital materiality.
Postphenomenology has approached the technological “means” as a “medium,” an active “in-between,” connecting human beings and the world. New technologies, though, have developed from “means” into a technological “milieu,” and sometimes even into an interactive technohuman “morph.” These new configurations bring new forms of mediated intentionality – with triangular, lemniscatic, and chiasmic structures – and add a dimension of intertechnicality to the intercorporality of social relations.
Peter-Paul Verbeek 