Introduction

Perception is an action, a handling, a behaviour; things, objects, and milieus are relays of force – waves of energy-matter grasped on the move and recognised in and through their orientations and nascent directions, rather than through fixed properties (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1968; Lingis 1996). For example, ‘space’ is a percipient’s – human, animal, or machinic – composite sum of the ‘data’ gathered by the senses or sensors. ‘Space’ is as much a visual arrangement as it is a temporal sequencing. For humans, animals, and the newer generation of robots – all of whom perceive space by moving through it three-dimensionally – movement through space continually reveals new objects while concealing others. ‘Space’ is here a changing relationship of visibility, scale, enclosure, and openness, which engages the percipient’s exteroceptive senses or modes of detection such as sight and hearing, or visual and aural detection, and, in the case of humans and animals, interoceptive senses such as the vestibular sense and proprioception. For all existents, organic and machinic, perception-as-action is structured around selection, classification, and interpretation. Selection is a process of ‘mapping’ or determining the perceptual coordinates – the difference between figure and ground, relevant and irrelevant. Classification groups stimuli into categories, furnishing the ‘map’ with typical or recurrent patterns and a range of likely variations. Interpretation evaluates incoming patterns by comparing them to the existing categories or the percipient’s repository of past perceptions.