Immediation as process and practice of signaletic mattering

Abstract

How is perception a constitutive force in interactive media environments and how does it effect its cultural and social conditions? This question provides the ground for a conceptual and practical development of the term immediation. Immediation describes the immediacy of esthetic sensation and locates the event of immediated experience in everyday life. It highlights the immediacy with which digital processes enhance or delimit perception and affect through directly shaping experience. The immersive and interactive media environment Panoscope—a 360° hemispheric and fully immersive projection space—offers ways for developing two main aspects of immediation: (1) immediation underlining the creative role of perception as neither subjective nor objective but relational, embodied, and located in everyday life and (2) the reconsideration of the digital not as pure abstraction but a relational process immanent to perception. By unfolding the concept of digital or signaletic mattering, the coemergence of material conditions and processes of thinking will be emphasized.

Keywords

• digital media
• immersion
• interaction
• signal
• embodiment
• vision
• esthetics
• ecology