Interfaces (for) Diffracting Technobodies: A Science-Humanities-Design Perspective for an Algorithmic Somatechnics

Abstract

In response to some current examples of experimental interface design in times of the COVID-19 pandemic – corona data dashboards, a contact tracking app, and an art intervention of distance design in public space – this article brings perspectives and insights from multiple disciplinary fields, several concepts, and a set of arguments together for a ‘more comprehensive understanding’ (Repko and Szostak 2021) of how these cases of design build (on) an algorithmic somatechnics. We argue that this type of understanding perhaps deserves its own naming for which we propose the bracket of the ‘creative humanities’ (Bleeker, Verhoeff, and Werning 2020) – a field that borrows productively from science, humanities, and design. Specifically, we aim to develop such an interdisciplinary perspective to respond to and specify the popular understanding, often reproduced in scholarship, of how technobodies are simultaneously created by and co-creating algorithmic media. We do this by bringing the perspective of diffractive reading to these media with the help of interface theory in order to diagnose that this understanding of the coming-into-being and functioning of technobodies is founded on an interpretation that positions agency on the side of either the social or on the side of the technical, or in their inter-relation. To this interpretation we respond with a diffractive interface approach to traverse this socio-technical constellation and think with the specificity of computation. We focus on the interface as an apparatus within and beyond which the technobody as datum is a locus of an ontological dynamicity that can have un-easy agential effects. Conceptualising the body as a somatechnical datum that may have un-easy effects is particularly relevant in our (post-)pandemic era that requires designs for distance that can afford maximum space for agency, mobility, and presence, yet confronts us with unattainable clarity and security.