The Phenomenology of Technology: A Search Into the Experience of Technology and Machines

This paper discusses strategies for breaking conventional semiotic systems of signs and symbols towards machines and technologies, and considers alternative modes for interactive technologies and common technological objects. My research explores the use of semiotic analysis conventionally applied to machines, and questions whether this system of signs adequately describes the engagements and interactions between biological and mechanical beings. This body of work brings focus to these relationships by highlighting my works that use digital and interactive technologies to explore modes of relational feedback. The primary focus is to create an interaction with the materiality of an ever increasing digitalizing, mechanizing and animating (Here I am using the definition of animating to imply a giving life to, to enliven, and to impart motion or activity onto.) of our modern landscape. This research is driven by the premise that recognizing and exposing the modes and areas of interactivity breaks existing conditioned semiotics towards objects by allowing the agency of objects, their ability to effect change in the world based on input, to be made visible. My inquiry into the relationships between humans and objects focuses on interactive artworks as modes for recognizing a social exchange, one that is less about the qualities of the object or subject, and instead how both contribute to an event or exchange between each other. With virtually all the technologies we will encounter on any given day being designed to interact with a human at some level, this is a point of discussion I feel we should have with our creations, both technological and artistic.