Distributed Perception

"What is perception? A presentation, as Husserl said? A bodily shaping, as Merleau-Ponty defined it? Or the mere illusion of reality, as Derrida affirmed? Neither, Lushetich and Campbell answer. Delocalising perception from the scene of the human world, they show, through this extraordinary set of essays, that perception does not focus on objects but navigates between thresholds. Trans-materiality, trans-temporality, natural artificiality or biological mechanisms are currently deconstructing the deconstruction of presence itself. A major achievement."---Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, London

"Distributed Perception arrives just in time. Confusion is at a fever pitch about the technological qualities of perception and how natural and machine intelligence are inextricable from its cuts and continuities. This diverse collection provides multifaceted perspectives on what is at stake, what we know, what we don't know and what may have been forgotten."---Benjamin Bratton, University of California San Diego

"Distributed Perception is a truly imaginative and novel intervention into media studies of perception. A collection of some of the most innovative thinkers in digital media studies, the book creatively avoids reductive discourses concerning planetary scale computing and the denaturalization of human perception to ask a new set of questions. At stake in these many accounts is a fundamental investigation about how we produce and "feel" difference-in scales, in species, in social systems--and ultimately how we hope to construct our relationship to others and the world in the future."---Orit Halpern, Concordia University, Montreal