Shifting Immediations: Fields of Experience across Media Art and Design

This paper explores the concept of fields of experience as a way to engage with the conditions of emergence of what we might call sentience. As a process of fielding, sensation and processes of sense-making are of an emergent and entangled quality in the overall ecology of experience. We specifically wish to emphasize the dynamics of the closely interrelated conditions for sensing and sense-making – what we conceptualize as ‘shifting immedations’ - and its affective politics.
Rather than transgression, ‘shifting’ foregrounds the sometimes almost imperceptible reorientations of fields of experience that are lived immediately as tendencies and vectors for change (feeling the non-sensuous). In particular, we wish to zoom in on specific practices and technologies that might modulate and reorient such experiential fields. We do so by analyzing two cases that emphasize the emergent relations between digital and interactive technologies and their fielding potential; BERMUDA is an interactive installation that attempts to relay affective intensity into tendencies for collective action, whereas the interventions of etcetera emphasize time-sensitive modulations of experience. Exploring these
cases, we ask how experiential fields and shifting immediations might allow us to think and act towards new forms of engaging in a politics of sentience beyond the human subject.