Knowledge and experience

Today human being’s experience evolves in a complex combination of biological and social systems, in which algorithmic systems play an important role. Data images of one’s body now influence how the body feels and are the result of a multidimensional reality in which social, bio- logical and algorithmic reality all partake. The sense of sleeping, medical data of sleep patterns, and the sense of awakening in a specific social environment all merge.

Witnessing raises questions of truth and trust. ‘I witnessed it’ is a statement that inscribes the body in the process. That is why, a few decades ago, the camera image was seen as having a certain truth, because a person would have had to be physically present—to be a witness—to have been able to film it. This brings up questions around knowledge and the body and how to approach what is understood to be knowledge. The classical hard empirical approach is that knowledge is only true knowledge when it is experienced through sense organs, but in the present context, the rela- tionship with knowledge formations is immensely mediated through multiple layers of intervention in merging realities (interview Hazra 2008).

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