ABSTRACT

Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of technical individuation, this chapter examines how the coupling between disparate systems (biological and technological) produces phase changes, which are the key to ontogenesis. Starting from JND (2010-2013), a sensory installation conceived by the author in the studio-lab of the Hexagram Centre for Research Creation in Media Arts and Technology, it inquires into the spatio-temporal scales that are at work in the evolution of technical objects used in art making. The chapter shows that the entanglement of human and responsive technological platforms has the potential to produce destabilizing breaks or gaps in an individual’s self-conscious access to processes of individuation, leading to unpredictable transformations that momentarily blur the boundaries between the living and the non-living.