ENGL 4010: Sensitizing Practices Slide Deck (SP23)

Sensitizing
Practices
New Media Writing

Gabrys And Pritchard
Sensing practices refer to the ways in which sensing
and practice emerge, take hold and form
attachments across environmental, material, political
and aesthetic concerns, subjects and milieus (394).

Gabrys And Pritchard
Sensors do not merely capture environmental data,
but rather they are involved in collaborative sensing
practices for parsing environments and environmental
problems, as well as organizing approaches for how to
take action and generate political responses through
particular forms of environmental citizenship (395-396).

Gabrys And Pritchard
This common world is not so much a place where
entities agree to show up, but rather is a milieu among
a diversity of milieus that is actively made
through shared inhabitations and experiences
(396).

Gabrys And Pritchard
Citizen sensing also constitutes
a set of sensing practices that is
meant to enable and empower
people to sense for political
effect (394).

How do we make ourselves actually sensitive
Latour
(315)?
To capture that activity, I will use the word
aesthetic—in the original Greek sense of
aisthesis—perception, or making oneself
sensitive to something (315).

If we remember the etymological sense of
Latour
aesthetic as making sense, how does a specific
medium render us sensitive to things as they
come to us? Things can come to you, but if you
don’t render yourself sensitive to them, you just
don’t get it (319).

How do we make ourselves sensible not to matters of
Latour
fact as they are fictionalized in the subject-object
scenario, but rather to matters of concern? Matters of
concern are still material. It's not so much their
factuality or materiality that should interest us, but our
concern with them. How can art and science
sensitize us to these concerns (319)?

“Tipping Away” Illustrations by Max Gather for New York Times Magazine.

Latour
It’s a very difficult question of producing the right kind of communication to
register on the already-insensitive, to produce the right register in which to
make an address (323).

Giant Golden Orb-weaver, Nephila pilipes
[T]he Japanese orb-weaver Oclonoba
sybotides changes the structure of its
own web when it is hungry. It adds
spiral decorations that increase the
tension along the spokes, improving the
web’s ability to transmit the weaker
vibrations transmitted by smaller prey […]
To capture such morsels, the spider
expands the range of its sense by
changing the nature of its web.
But here’s the truly important part:
Watanabe found that a well-fed spider will
also go after small flies if it is placed onto
a tense web built by a hungry spider. The
spider has effectively outsourced the
decision about which prey two attach to its
web […] The web, then, is not just an
extension of a spider’s senses but an
extension of its cognition. In a very
real way, the spider things with its
web. Tuning the silk is like tuning its
own mind.
—Ed Yong, An Immense World

Phyphox
iNaturalist
The Architecture of Radio
Merlin Bird ID

Latour
It gets modified, mobilized, or moved—and you are then
moved by the thing you move, which is the most
interesting relation we have with the world (321).

Sensitizing
Practices
New Media Writing