In “Machinic Rhetorics and the Influential Movements of Robots,” Miles C. Coleman (2018) introduces the concept of “machinic rhetoric” to describe how machines can act as rhetorical agents rather than simply functioning as neutral tools. One important idea in the article is the “hidden layer” between humans and machines. We can see what a machine produces, but we often cannot see all of the processes that produce its output. This hidden process can make a machine appear to have its own knowledge, character, or authority. Coleman uses examples from both historical and contemporary technologies to show how machines can become persuasive partly because they appear to act on their own. When the mechanisms behind a machine are difficult to see, users may attribute meaning and authority to the machine itself. In this sense, the machine is not only communicating information; its apparent autonomy and the way it presents information can also influence how people understand and trust it (Coleman, 2018).
I am interested in a similar “hidden layer” between the material machine and the meaning that people experience through it. I see an interesting parallel between Coleman’s machinic rhetoric and magic performance. In a magic show, the audience can see the magician performing an action, but they are not supposed to see the mechanism behind the trick. A magician friend told me that successful magic is not only about the physical trick. The lines, timing, attention, and story are also important because they guide the audience toward a particular interpretation of what is happening. The audience may begin to believe that something meaningful or impossible is happening, even though the mechanism is actually hidden. This makes me wonder how much of an experience comes from the material mechanism itself, and how much comes from performance, imagination, subjective belief, and rhetoric. This question is particularly relevant to my installation, where I want to use magic and ritual to obscure the mechanical and computational processes behind physiological data. The visitor may feel that the machine is discovering something about them, while the system is actually interpreting bodily signals through computational models. Coleman helps me think about this not simply as an interaction with technology, but as a process in which material mechanisms, forms of presentation, and epistemic authority are transformed into an experience of belief and trust. I want to explore this transformation further as I develop the project.
This week, I have been thinking more about how the ideas from this reading could become an actual experience rather than simply a theoretical concept in my project. I am especially interested in how the installation can create uncertainty about whether the machine is really “reading” something about the visitor or whether that feeling is being produced through performance and ritual. Next week, I plan to focus more on the form of the installation and determine how I want the interaction to be presented. I am currently considering using eye-tracking as part of the interaction, so I will investigate the skills, technical possibilities, and flexibility of available eye-tracking systems. I also want to learn more about how to use and design with this technology before deciding whether it should become part of the final installation.
Reference:
Coleman, M. C. (2018). Machinic rhetorics and the influential movements of robots. Review of Communication, 18(4), 336–351. https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2018.1517417