: /

Tratando de concretar lo que más me ha llamado la atención de esta instalación-experimento. Me hizo recordar un par de fragmentos de “Postphenomenology and Technoscience” de Don Ihde. Primero:

This recognition, that science is essentially tied to its technologies, often has been belated, particularly in the philosophy of science. In my narrative, however, I highlight precisely this connection, and in all that follows I trace a number of variables of interaction. First, I take as one such variable human embodiment. It is my contention that all science, or technoscience, is produced by humans and either directly or indirectly implies bodily action, perception, and praxis.  Second, I also forefront the role of technologies or instruments in the roles of scientific knowledge production. Third, I show that since the twentieth century, we have entered what could be called a second scientific revolution as radical in its impact upon scientific knowledge as that of early modernity and produced precisely by what can now be called postmodern instrumentation embodied in contemporary imaging technologies.

Y segundo:

Returning to the image illustrations, in each case the new image produces a perceivable, “readable” result. The emission patterns, with intensities and shapes, are now translated by the instrument into bodily perceivable images, perceived and “read” by the observer-scientist. What I am calling translation is a technological transformation of a phenomenon into a readable image. This is one analog to a hermeneutic process, except in this case it is a material hermeneutic process, not one limited to textual or linguistic phenomena. Second, because it is perceivable—usually in science’s favored visualist modes—it also is available to the gestalt capacities of human vision, which can “see at a glance” the patterns displayed. In this sense, it is a phenomenological hermeneutic. So rather than leaving embodiment, the new imaging produces for embodied observers a new way of bringing close something that is both spatially and perceptually “distant.”

Tratando de resumir (el argumento es más complejo), los avances científicos están directamente relacionados con los avances en las tecnologías que permiten comprobar los modelos, teorías e hipótesis. Y existen una serie de tecnologías cuya función es la de hacer perceptibles, asequibles, los datos registrados durante una prueba, un experimento, etc. Muchas de ellas, descaradamente visuales.

De modo que capturar los movimientos de un moho a través de electrodos y convertirlos en sonido es una forma de hacer perceptibles los datos. Lo curioso ocurre entonces, cuando se asignan las frecuencias a un modelo psicológico y se trasladan los resultados a emociones expresadas por un robot. Quiero decir, la imperiosa necesidad (obsesión) de visualizar la información, aunque sea una aproximación de una aproximación. Inexacto hasta la ficción, pero visible.