Sensing the ‘Contemporary Condition’: The Chronopolitics of Sensor-Media

Abstract

Ubiquitous and pervasive micro-technologies of sensing have become one of the dominant yet vastly under-researched media of knowledge production. This article discusses the relevance of conceptualizing sensor-technologies as media. Beyond their technical affordances sensor-media act as agents of implementing and activating a more-than-human sensorium within contemporary technoecological assemblages. They actively participate in a comprehensive re-articulation and problematization of what it means ‘to sense’ under current technological conditions. Media-saturated responsive environments operate on their own terms and, for the larger part, on a micro-temporal scale that remains inaccessible to human sense perception. The aim of the article is to delineate the onto-epistemological challenges posed by sensor-media under conditions of intensified global computation, technological interconnectedness, and the ontogenesis of technoecological milieus, their respective temporalities and (an)aesthetics of experienced time.