The author’s artistic practice evolves around the notions of a human, technology, and human relation to her environment and the world when both human and the environment are artificially modified. In this paper the author investigates specifically the relationship between a human and her environment through presenting three recent art works: A Unit, Evidence and Appendix. These three works share similar notions on human as an organism compiled of complex network of connections, and reference Gregory Bateson’s argument that organism + environment is the unit of survival (Bateson 1978 [1969]). However, in the described example cases the situation is intervened by artificially constructed and modified components.

The author proposes that these kinds of speculative approaches that are allowed in art & design, and which offer us new potential scenarios about the future, also help us collectively share, evaluate and construct the desired futures.

One approach by which responsive architecture may become a part of our lives as static architecture has is to adapt it in such a way that only our peripheral awareness is stimulated. But for this architecture to function properly, it needs to communicate with its users. Can this be achieved without demanding the full attention of the user? What could be the strategies for such architecture to inform the users unconsciously and to obtain the input necessary to perform properly? Is such architecture still deterministic, or would this kind of interpretational architecture lead to non-determinism and the emancipation of the user from the will of the architect?

Whilst there has been an active re-engagement of bodily movement with the affective, and with the interoceptive and exteroceptive sensory processes like proprioception and touch, there is often no explicit address on how these might relate to body locomotion or mobility in hybrid environments. Clearly, conventional notion of the body as a perspectival centre becomes problematic and inadequate in the heterogeneous environments, where elements could be fragmented, folded and translated. Reconfigurable body-environ relationships sidestep any fixity of how the body is situated, what borders personal and extra-personal space, and how the environ is constituted. Mobility in such multiplicities would demand certain flexibility or re-adaptation in the body-brain processes that manage the flow between actions and information.

Indeed, we know the body has a certain capacity for plasticity. The body’s different modes of sensing and path structuring of the environ are susceptible to re-modulation through the demand of new forms of actions. Sensory information from different modalities facilitates the body’s variability in its functions. The body fine tunes its strategies for coordination and motion planning in relation to the changing conditions in the environment through a re-rationing of sensorimotor functions and developing new concepts. This capacity for reconfiguration of bodily functions increase the body’s possibilities for actions. Strategies on how the body could manage the heterogeneous environments through re-regulating its model of sensing-actions-concepts will be explored in the paper.

‘The End of Things’ explores a set of technologies and processes being developed by i-DAT that offer strategies for understanding these trans-scalar shifts. Framed as ‘Operating Systems’ they embrace social, biological, architectural and ecological data harvesting and manifestation. These OS’s recognise a cultural shift where suddenly a rose by any other name is less significant than the complex temporal.