Christopher Loughnane

This paper rethinks the classic biosemiotic model of the Umwelt, an organism’s lived, perceptual world arising via the functional circle of the body and the environment, by proposing a triadic Umwelt model in which technics, alongside body and environment, forms a foundational element of human evolution and perceptual experience. Drawing on the primary ethology of Jakob von Uexküll, and the later work on technical and human evolution by Ernst Kapp, Ernst Cassirer, and Gilbert Simondon, it explores how humans and technical objects have coevolved in ways that shape perception, cognition, and cultural expression. Uexküll’s biosemiotic Umwelt theory is modified through a number of historical contributions to the philosophy of technology that are still of great importance today, including Kapp’s organ-projection model and Cassirer’s view of technics as a symbolic form that mediates how humans relate to the external world and one another. Simondon’s theory of individuation further reveals how technologies are not static instruments but evolving entities that shape and are shaped by human environments. In a world increasingly structured by digital and algorithmic systems, this article argues that technics is a constitutive element of how humans understand and inhabit different environments, whether physical or virtual. This shift carries various ethical implications, particularly as digital infrastructures mould, influence and even govern human perception, agency, and autonomy. By modifying the Umwelt through viewing technics as a fundamental component of its structure, this article proposes a framework for digital ethics rooted in relational, embodied, and coevolutionary understandings of human-technical entanglement.

In this thesis I describe an ethological approach to the study of information which moves from the traditional ethological binary of body + environment in creating a subjective world, called an Umwelt, to include a third element, technics. In moving from a dyadic to a triadic relationship, I show the fundamental interconnectedness of these three elements of being inthe- world in the specific grounding context of information and demonstrate how we form and interact with new environments through media, computing and digital technologies, thereby creating meaningful spaces for interactions and information sharing. I begin with an introductory discussion regarding ethology and information. I then examine the nature of our interconnected dwelling in environments through the ethological lens of Jacob von Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and the cognate fields of cybernetics, biosemiotics and cybersemiotics which he greatly influenced. I use this ethological lens in order to further explore ideas of space, place and dwelling in thinkers such as Heidegger, Westling and Ingold, whose notion of the ‘meshwork’ (2015) I repurpose for thinking through digital connection. I discuss phenomenological engagement, body development, bodily performance, and the body’s integration with technology through the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Nancy among others. From there I move to technical development, evolution and environments through the philosophical ideas of Ernst Kapp, Ernst Cassirer and Gilbert Simondon. Simondon in particular is of great importance when considering the interlinking of technical and human environments in terms of information studies and digital information environments. This is followed by an exploration of four thematic theoretical lenses: entanglement, rhizome, interface and diffraction through which to bring together and frame the previous research. Finally, I close the main thesis argument with a multimodal media phenomenological account of first-person research in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab in order to demonstrate the use of an ethological approach to the study of information, media and computing technologies. Through this research, including photography and text, I demonstrate the phenomenological use of historic technologies to step outside of the reticulated meshwork of technology use and bodily integration, to slow down and listen to the body in strange multimodal mediatic encounters in order to demonstrate how these technologies are integrated within the horizon of experience which is our subjective world. I end with a conclusion that focuses on the ethics of information, technologies, media and being-with.

This paper presents excerpts of tangible, sensual research at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab (MAL), framed within a reflection of bodily and mental experiences and a discussion of media haptics and ethological theory. It is a joining of my physico-technical experiences and the application of an ethology of media to a perceptual, sensual-semiotic analysis. My starting point is the ethological Umwelt (Uexküll 2010), an organismic subjective, perceptual world that traditionally is denoted by a dyadic structure of body plus environment connected in a data-information functional circle. I expand this definition to a non-hierarchical triadic structure of body plus environment plus technics. My intention at the MAL was to study myself through historical computing technologies, through encounters with those technologies, to use these encounters to think through ethological concepts, to reflect on how my Umwelt is formed, shaped and moulded through computing technologies from a practical, phenomenological standpoint.