THE THINKING ACTOR

In this chapter I will analyse and theoretically contextualize the findings of the case studies. When describing the Galactic Hacker Party I realized that most people deal with technology as ‘thinking actors’. The conveying of trust and the enactment of technological identities accumulated in the concept of the ‘thinking actor’. The specific thinking of the ‘thinking actor’ refers to a process I labelled “the clash between intention and realization”, which creates situations that have to be resolved. It is not a ‘general thinking about’, it is a thinking that informs subsequent actions and it operates on physical, cognitive and emotional levels. Because we were making things in both events that we had never seen before, the clash between intention and realization was even more profound. Below, I will first address this clash between intention and realization.

In the descriptions of the 0+Ball I devoted a great deal of attention to how to collaborate between different practices, disciplines and political perspectives in the variety of mediated and natural presences. Therefore, in the second section of this chapter I will specifically address these collaborations and elaborate upon the notion of incommensurability. As the producer of both events it was not only the clash between intention and realization, but also the orchestration of the collaboration between different actors that was the focus of my attention. In the final section I will formulate what I discovered concerning natural, mediated and witnessed presence as such.