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191 conclusIon People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect. But actually, from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. Doctor Who, in the episode “Blink” for whItehead, deleuze, and serres, time cannot be reduced to a sequence of compartmentalized occasions set out on a line, nor can reality be thought of as made up of inert artifacts or objects. Likewise, the process of interacting with technology can only be thought of as a set of relational events, where each present moment draws into itself aspects of the past and future. As already mentioned, the event, for Whitehead and Deleuze, extends into a future beyond itself and a past it is beyond. In essence, the turbulent and complex event is a process of hybridization, as it is made up of many processes, some of which have occurred in the past, some of which are occurring in the present and some of which set the conditions for the future.1 The concept of the event, when considered in relation to the digital encounter, privileges processes rather than things, which are merely the outcome of these processes. It is not the aesthetic artifact that we are interested in, but rather the process of the digital encounter that provides the condition for aesthetics, in which all actants exist within a constant state of change. In terms of digital aesthetics, our thinking needs to shift from privileging an aesthetic artifact or atechnical architecture to privileging techno-aesthetic processes, a shift that is only possible when we begin to grapple with questions of time, becomings , and extension. As Whitehead states, each happening is a factor in every other happening.2 Every event, whether this is a software-event, an interface-event, or a user-event, is a factor in every other event. As such, our sensory processes, on the one hand, constitute our experience of aesthetics in the interactive event as we see an image on the screen, or hear audio through speakers. But experience is also constituted, on the other hand, by our physical processes, as we move our body in response to images, walk around an installation space, or strap on a sensor belt. 192 Conclusion And it is in these physical processes that our relationship to a technological system is brought to bear on aesthetics, altering the way we move in, and subsequently experience, the world. We have seen that processes of interaction produce experiences of time. As we encounter new modes of communication and informationmanagement systems, such as vast networks and databases, our modes of thought and our modes of practice undergo significant change. As Jean Francois Lyotard pointed out in 1979, the new modes of interaction that may be brought about by the ubiquity of technology bring with them new ways of thinking.3 Transplanting Lyotard’s thought to the contemporary condition of technology, we see that the new modes of practice that are now ubiquitous in the digital age necessitate that we operate within a temporal regime that is radically different from the classical linear-sequential model of time. This is because our experience of the aesthetic and interactive digital encounter prompts us to both think and feel in specific multi-temporal passages. As Whitehead points out, our conscious experience of time is a product of our consciousness’s being in time. As I have explained, for Whitehead our consciousness is brought into being by the events that occur in reality. Therefore, it is the processes and relationships of these events and the conditions for becoming that they produce that are important to our analysis of process aesthetics , rather than any focus on an a priori consciousness. Temporal events prompt our consciousness into being, not the other way around. Thus temporal events prompt us to experience time a certain way. When we think of interaction with the digital as the extension of events, the participant cannot be thought of as a self-bounded and timeless subject. I have instead tried to reposition the “subject” as a molecular becoming, rather than a molar being. As Deleuze and Guattari write at the outset of A Thousand Plateaus, “The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd.”4 Following Deleuze and Guattari, and the larger framework worked up by citing Whitehead’s philosophy of actual entities, Simondon’s transduction , and Fuller and Mackenzie’s more recent...

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