whole earth technical is pleased to announce its first online reading group session, taking place on Saturday, May 10th, beginning at 11:00 AM (ET).
This gathering initiates a series of discussions dedicated to exploring the intersections of technology, aesthetics, and forms of making.
For our first session, we will read and discuss Gilbert Simondon’s On Techno-Aesthetics, grounding our conversation around the following prompt:
In On Techno-Aesthetics, Gilbert Simondon proposes that aesthetic experience emerges not from the expression of a pre-formed self, but through the sensorimotor engagement of body, tool, and material. Dexterity—the practiced intelligence of making—appears as a promissory site of thought irreducible to language or introspection. This resonates with Bernard Stiegler’s claim that technics is not external to human existence but is its very condition: “man is nothing without his instruments” (Technics and Time).
If technics and embodied action precede the formation of subjectivity, then perhaps the artist’s activity in the studio is not the expression of identity but the cultivation of relation: between hand and hammer, brush and canvas, circuit and code. Here, the artist ceases to function as the sovereign bearer of meaning and becomes a mediator of dynamic material processes—a site where technical, environmental, and cognitive forces are relayed and transformed.
In a cultural moment where artistic practice often demands confession, identity narration, or historical accounting, Simondon’s techno-aesthetics reminds us to rediscover a more primordial mode of sense-making: the joy and thought of dexterity. This is not a retreat into sensation alone, but an epistemology of making: a cognitive event distributed across hands, tools, and resistant materials. In this mode, the work of art is no longer the transmission of inner states but the manifestation of technical becomings—a negotiation among forces rather than a reflection of the artist’s self-image.
A LINK TO THE TEXT CAN BE FOUND HERE
All are welcome, but space is limited.
RSVP HERE TO RESERVE YOUR SPOT
Participants are encouraged to read the text in advance and come prepared to explore how dexterity, technical engagement, and material intelligence might offer alternative pathways for contemporary artistic practice.
Date: Saturday, May 10th
Time: 11:00 AM Eastern Time (open-ended)
Format: Online (Zoom link to be provided)
We look forward to building this space of shared inquiry together.